The Presidency, on Sunday, faulted former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who is advocating for gradual reforms rather than President Bola Tinubu’s direct approach.
It said Atiku’s economic ideas would have plunged the country into a worse situation.
“While advocating for gradual reforms may sound appealing, Tinubu took measures that should have been taken decades ago by Alhaji Abubakar and his boss [Olusegun Obasanjo] when they had the opportunity,” the President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Mr Bayo Onanuga, argued in a statement he signed Sunday.
The statement is titled, ‘Our initial response to Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.’
Onanuga was responding to Atiku’s tweet in which he described Tinubu’s reforms as “trial-and-error economic policies,” blaming the President for the “excruciating pain” Nigerians are suffering.
The 2023 presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party also lamented that while he is not the president, his suggestions are “in the interest of Nigerians.”
Upon assuming office in May 2023, Tinubu discontinued the regime of fuel subsidy and unified the foreign exchange.
However, Nigerians have continued to feel the collateral impact of these and other economic reforms, including increased food prices, transport, fuel and other essentials.
In his tweet titled “What We Would Have Done Differently,” Atiku, a former Vice President who served alongside former President Olusegun Obasanjo from 1999 to 2007, outlined his recommendations for addressing issues such as insecurity and easing the effects of subsidy removal on the masses.
But the President, according to PUNCH report, faulted Atiku, saying, “It is easy to pontificate and deride a rival’s programmes even when there are irrefutable indices that the economic reforms yield positives despite the temporary difficulties.”
Onanuga wrote, “First, Alhaji Atiku’s ideas, which lacked details, were rejected by Nigerians in the 2023 poll. If he had won the election, we believe he would have plunged Nigeria into a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism.
“Abubakar lost the election partly because he vowed to sell the NNPC and other assets to his friends. Nigerians have not forgotten this, nor would they be comforted by Atiku’s antecedents when he ran the economy in the first term of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government between 1999 and 2003.
“As vice president, Atiku supervised a questionable privatisation programme. He and his boss demonstrated a lack of faith in our educational system, and both went to establish their universities while they allowed ours to flounder.
“Despite the futile attempt to hoodwink Nigerians again in his statement, it is gratifying that the former Vice President could not repudiate the economic reforms pursued by the Tinubu administration because they are the right things to do.”
The Presidency argued that Atiku’s advocacy for a gradualist approach only showed that he was not in tune with the enormity of problems inherited by President Tinubu.
“It is so easy to paint a flowery to-do list. It is expected of an election loser.
“President Tinubu met a country facing several grave challenges.
“Fuel subsidies were siphoning away enormous resources we could ill afford, and there was criminal arbitrage in the forex market,” the statement read.
It said no leader worth his name would allow dysfunctional fuel subsidies and arbitrage to persist without ending them surgically.
“Alhaji Abubakar calls for empathy and a human face to reforms. We have no problem with this as it resonates well with our administration’s focus.
“President Tinubu has consistently emphasised the need for compassion and protection of the most vulnerable.
“The administration has prioritised social safety nets and targeted support for those affected by recent economic transitions,” the Presidency statement concluded.
Tinubu preventing Nigeria from economic collapse – Think tank
The Independent Media and Policy Initiative has stated that President Bola Tinubu’s reforms are strategically aimed at saving Nigeria from economic collapse.
Nigerians continue to grapple with the ripple effects of the reforms introduced by Tinubu, including the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of Naira.
The policies have since led to a drastic surge in the prices of goods and services, raising the cost of living as petrol pump prices, particularly, soared from less than N200 to over a thousand naira between 2023 and 2024.
Contrary to criticisms in the public space, the think tank said the reforms were essential to prevent Nigeria from continuing on a risky economic trajectory.
In a statement by its Chairman, Dr Niyi Akinsiju, on Sunday, the organisation explained that years of “populist economic policies” had pushed the country to the brink and Nigeria must now change course to avoid further decline.
“We have observed the criticism surrounding President Tinubu’s reforms,” Akinsiju said.
“One of the critics finds the reforms to be a: ‘wreckage of the past 15 months, from which the country is reeling.’ The other viewpoint, an editorial, brands the government as insensitive and strategy-deficient.
“It also sees the government as ‘incompetent to perform its primary duty of delivering welfare and security to the people.’
“These attacks on the ongoing reforms are natural if viewed from the relatively narrow and subjective context of the steep change in the country’s cost of living.
“Yet, the reality of the nation’s macroeconomic situation is that where we are on the economic curve is a consequence of where we came from.
“When the premise and predicates of the nation’s economic trajectory are reviewed and aggregated, the apparent conclusion will be that we are where we are because this affliction of economic malaise at this point is predetermined,” the statement said.
It continued by comparing Nigeria’s economic journey to that of Venezuela, another oil-rich country.
“Like Venezuela, oil has taken Nigeria on an exhilarating but dangerous boom-and-bust ride.
“Again, like Nigeria, decades of poor governance have driven what was once one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries to economic and political ruin,” it said.
“Like Nigeria, whose petroleum price per litre was perhaps the cheapest in Sub-Saharan Africa, Venezuela’s petrol was not just the most affordable globally but often virtually free.
“This led to an estimated 100,000 barrels of petrol worth over $10 billion per year being smuggled across the border to Brazil and Colombia each day, where it could be resold at a profit, a close resemblance of what obtained on Nigeria’s borders with its West African neighbours.
“Like Nigeria, electricity subsidies were also vast, leading to losses and underinvestment.
“In total, subsidies are estimated to have cost over 10 per cent of GDP in some years, accounting for over half of Venezuela’s fiscal deficits.
“Just as Nigeria had historically preferred capital control in addition to operating multiple foreign exchange windows in 2003, Venezuela also imposed capital controls and a byzantine system for foreign currency purchases.
“For the two countries, there were one or more official exchange rates where the governments subsidised dollar purchases and demand vastly outstripped supply, as well as a black market with its free-floating exchange rate determined by market forces,” the statement added.
The policy group noted that it was against this backdrop that the Tinubu administration introduced reforms that were targeted at preventing the country from going the way of Venezuela.
“Fact must be told, it does not serve good public conscience to accuse the President of being unprepared to reform the Nigerian economy.
“The concern should not be about the President’s preparedness but whether we are witnessing possible positive outlooks for the nation’s economic outturns as the reforms are underway.
“Again, we assert a yes to this. We are, indeed, seeing how the structure of the Nigerian economy is changing and conforming to targeted reforms, as the case may be.”
“Overall, the response of macroeconomic indices to the ongoing reforms indicates the propensity of an economy on an upward trajectory and the imminence of an expanding economy with the capacity to produce jobs and concomitant wealth creation,” the IMPI added.
