By: Sunday Oyewole Following subtle threat by the Presidency that reports credited to the Interim National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bisi Akande, describing President Goodluck Jonathan as running a ‘kindergarten Presidency’ the APC has asked the President to go to court should he felt slighted.
President Jonathan had while reacting to the report through his Media Adviser, Reuben Abati, reminded Akande about laws guiding libel and defamation of character.
In a statement issued in Accra, Ghana on Monday, APC National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, said the National Chairman was only saying the obvious by the ‘Kindergarten Presidency’ jibe.
Mohammed wondered why a democratically-elected President should be bothered by criticisms since he is neither a monarch nor emperor.
On the Presidency’s claim that there is feud between the APC leaders, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Muhammadu Buhari, the party’s spokesperson, had this to say, “Mr. President, don’t let your lick-spittle aides deceive you. There is absolutely no feud between the two leaders. Waiting for such a feud is like ‘Waiting for Godot’.”
The statement reads further, “In the true character of this presidency, its increasingly irreverent and undignified spokesman failed to respond to the issues raised by Chief Akande, and instead chose to haul abuses at a man who is old enough to be his father.
“Such irresponsible act does no credit to the spokesman or the president he is serving, and Nigerians will definitely not forget such crudity in a hurry.
“Where is the presidency’s response to Chief Akande’s assertion that he has written two letters to the President over the serious challenges facing the country, without getting a response?
“Where is the Presidency’s response to Chief Akande’s assertion that President Jonathan is witch-hunting political opponents? These are the issues that Nigerians are interested in, not how many hours the President sleeps at night because he is supposedly working tirelessly.
“In any case, if indeed this President is working tirelessly, we need to ask who he is working for, because Nigerians have yet to feel the impact of his administration.
“They are also not interested in the fact that the President once served as a deputy governor, governor and Vice President, because the experiences he supposedly garnered from doing so have not impacted positively on his duty as President.
“That’s not a surprise, considering that the President owes his meteoric rise in politics to luck and destiny, nothing else!
“As the presidency was composing its empty response to the serious issues raised by our highly-respected Chairman, the African Development Bank was saying in its annual report (African Economic Outlook), quoted by the local media on Sunday, that the proportion of people (Nigerians) living below the national poverty line has worsened from 65.5 per cent in 1996 to 69.0 per cent in 2010, most of those years under the PDP and the last four under President Jonathan.
“What therefore is there to celebrate in a presidency under which power generation has fallen to 2,500MW? What is there to celebrate in a presidency that has only given Nigerians widespread insecurity, unemployment, dilapidated infrastructure, oil theft and unbridled corruption. Of what use is the touted 6% increase in the GDP when over 40% of our youth are unemployed?, Mohammed queried.”
