By Chesa Chesa
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) on Thursday took stock of President Bola Tinubu’s two year-old administration and concluded that the bold and unprecedented reforms he introduced have broken the culture of “presidential inertia” in Nigeria’s recent history.
Addressing the press at the party’s headquarters in Abuja, National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Felix Morka, said that past presidents avoided confronting difficult challenges like removal of fuel subsidy, whereas Tinubu took up the gauntlet and tackled the problem instantly.
According to Morka, Tinubu’s predecessors merely postponed he doomsday, even though he tried to exonerate Muhammadu Buhari, describing him as “stop-gap” leader who braced up to save sinking nation from the precipice before handing over to Tinubu.
He said that “our vehicle of state, under the able, capable, safe and steady hands of our Executive Driver, Leader, and President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is on the move.
“Unstoppably and irreversibly – milestone after milestone – on a steady course on the road to our long-desired destination – a place of peace, security and enduring prosperity.
“Our Leader, Mr President, is not the first President of our dear country. But he is the first to break with what had become a stagnating culture of presidential inertia – ‘kick the can down the road for the next President’ – style of leadership and governance.”
He stressed that “in two years of this administration, we made clear that this President has enacted a vision and proclaimed a mission to tackle problems that were created generationally in our country.
“All the presidents who came before this President preferred to simply postpone the doomsday. Because we didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realize that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country.
“We have always known that, and as a matter of fact, there is no president who has come in the last 15, 20 years who didn’t, in fact, remove fuel subsidy. Because when you think back, fuel was not at the point that President Tinubu met it back in 1999. It wasn’t. The way they did it was far, far lower. It was cheaper to buy fuel in 1999 in terms of the local economy than it was at the time that the hurricane hit this country.
“So it means that other presidents were, in fact, taking out subsidy gradually. But let me tell you the difference between this President and the rest of them. Other presidents who intervened in the fuel subsidy regime did so to save a bit of money and to free up some money to get their job done.
“They didn’t do it because they were interested in solving structural problems that beset our economy. They didn’t do that. They simply needed to.
“At the All Progressives Congress, when we say that President Bola Tinubu is the President of progress and has set Nigeria on a road less traveled, we do not mean that this journey, of inter-generational significance, is without delays or bumps along the way.
“It does not mean that our travel plan and road map is set on an immutable course. It does not even mean that the vehicle in which we are traveling is set on cruise control.
“It means that our vehicle is set on a specific and determined course of travel – on a road that puts distance between where we are coming from and where we are going as a country and as a people.
“It is a road filled with renewed hope of infinite possibilities. A road that leads to our long desired destination, a place of more peace, more safety and security and a place of improved and enduring prosperity.”
Reflecting on APC’s governance since 20115 when it took power from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Morka stressed that “you cannot talk about Buhari without talking about the circumstances that Buhari himself stepped into and had to manage. I am the one saying this, and I am not saying this on behalf of the party. In my understanding, Buhari was a stop-gap president.
“He came in to simply hold still a country that was already flipping off the precipice. The fallacies of the PDP is that the economy did better under their watch. It didn’t. The economy we ran was phantom. An economy where contracts were awarded, and security votes were given.
“We saw what happened when Buhari took over with Dasuki’s ONSA, where billions of dollars meant to fight terror were simply shared with everybody. It is merely a question to them. What happened to all the money voted for power? Again, shared out.”
