The Action Democratic Party (ADP) has described the New Year message by President Muhammadu Buhari as a Greek Gift.
The party in a statement issued in Lagos on Tuesday by the party’s spokesman, Prince Adelaja Adeoye, said that his party has critically studied the New Year message and that “it is nothing but a ploy to deceive Nigerians again as another election year is around the corner. The party says that Buhari has consistently failed to use every opportunity available to him to redeem his battered image before Nigerians,” he said.
As regards the fuel crisis, he said that Buhari has resorted to cheap blackmail against oil marketers instead of taking responsibility for the lingering fuel scarcity that has inflicted undue pains and hardship on Nigerians. He added that the only thing that the Buhari administration is good at is blame games.
The party went further to say that when Buhari was a Minister for Petroleum in 1974 and military dictator in 1984 before he was forcefully kicked out, that the same blame game was what he employed back then. Buhari has never taken responsibility for any of his failures. “Why is he President, if he cannot solve problems with all the paraphernalia of government at his disposal?” Adelaja asked.
ADP says that despite the close to N20 trillion already budgeted since Buhari’s assumption of office in 2015, no significant infrastructural improvement can be pointed to except the helipad he built for his private use in his home town at Daura, Kastina State. The party said even with reports of huge monies recovered; there have been no signs of reinvestment to improve the lives of the people. Nigerians are poorer under Buhari than any other President that has ever led the country.
The President is promising massive infrastructure in rails, roads and power this new year and the ADP has asked what he has been doing for almost three years, asserting that the probability of having all these projects in an election year is next to zero because of the experience we have had in the past three years of this administration. The party is not optimistic about these plans.
On the issue of Restructuring Nigeria, the party said it is shocked that the President has reduced the agitations for devolution of powers by the federal government to the arguments for the parliamentary system of government. The party says that the President continues to show that he is not abreast of issues in his own country and regards the President’s position that “no structure is perfect” on the issue as vague and a continuous deployment of delay tactics including tactical way of avoiding responsibility.
The party also said that the President gloats about stabilizing the exchange rate at N365 to the dollar and that there has been improvement of the economy but the party wonders how this is something to celebrate. The economy that the President speaks so highly about is the same one that has lost over 7 million jobs since 2015 and the party also wonders the statistics that back the President’s claims other than the data from the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics.
ADP believes that it is capable of presenting a credible candidate who can end the sufferings of all Nigerians in 2019. The party has urged all Nigerians to support them in their bid to make Nigeria work.
