By Laraba MUREY
Leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has warned President Bola Tinubu to be more worried about the people’s anger than a political coalition.
Adebayo, the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, noted that the president is politically savvy enough to know that the coalition is not his problem.
“He knows the people in the coalition. They are all friends. There’s hardly anybody in the coalition who you cannot find 10,000 pictures of them with the president. They are all together.
“The real thing that the president should worry about is the resentment of the people and the problems that people are facing in reality. It is not the coalition that has been putting pictures and billboards all over,” he said.
He blamed President Tinubu for focusing on 2027, abandoning governance and failure to give good governance to Nigeria.
He noted that what Nigerians have under Tinubu is not administration but presidency.
“If we are to be fair to the Tinubu government, we should talk about the Tinubu presidency, not the Tinubu administration, because there’s no administration going on.
“What you have is an imperial majesty in the presidency. Their eyes are not to the ground. Do not call them an administration. Just call them the presidency, because they took a note of office that you are not the president, and they created a group who are in the state house. Beyond that, they have not been able to create an administration,” Adebayo stated.
He also noted the President Tinubu and his team of economic experts have not been able to give Nigerians a workable budget for two years running.
He said the president had presented two annual budgets to Nigerians but lamented that the last one was far worse than the first one. He stressed that neither of the two budgets has been able to get a grip of anything.
“They have not been able to write a single good budget. They are reaching two budgets now and the only difference is that the one that came after is worse than the one before. They are not able to get a grip of anything. They are not doing well with employment. They need to know that the tool for dealing with poverty is employment,” he stated.
He also picked holes in the much celebrated students loan programme, stressing that all that the Tinubu administration needed to have done to give education access to an average Nigerian without seeking for loan was to bring the cost of education down.
“I don’t agree with them on their student loan, because all you need to do is bring the cost of education down, and an average person will be able to go to school without needing a loan.
“But even with the loan, they are not able to administer it properly. So anything they touch. The Tinubu Presidency is not a government. It may be a political movement that has now found itself in power. They can now decide to continue to strengthen themselves politically by capturing more governors, more senators and more political parties to join them, but they are not just in government. However, they can also decide to say, let’s sit down; let us stop this and administer the economy,” he said.
He stressed that an administration is only political to the extent of being politically sensitive while making decisions.
He lamented that the Tinubu administration so far has not even shown any signal that it is prepared to address the people’s problems.
