Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has enjoined the leadership of All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Presidency to seek ways of solving the problems they created for Nigerians instead of focusing on him.
The former Vice President noted that the governing APC “has validated the assumption that the major reason the condition of living has been deplorable under the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration is on account of the fact that the party focuses more on playing petty politics than in actual governance.”
The APC had speculated that the plethora of goodwill messages sent to the former Vice President on the occasion of his 74th birthday anniversary was a precursor to his early campaigns for the 2023 presidential election.
But in a statement through his Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mazi Paul Ibe, Atiku, who was the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) standard-bearer in the 2019 election, said: “It is preposterous that a political party, which has spent the past five and half years launching humongous and unprecedented hardship on Nigerians finds no time to address and apologise to Nigerians for the false promises of change that they made.”
He regretted that the governing party could shamelessly “waste a whole day self-adulating about politicians, who have crossed to join the APC,” noting that neither PDP nor Atiku has initiated discussions with anyone on a 2023 presidential run.
“It is APC, which has busied itself talking about zoning and focusing on rigging the next election. For the avoidance of any shred of doubt, Atiku, like many Nigerians, who are pained by the downward spiral of condition of the country under the APC government, has preoccupied himself with proffering solution to the myriad of problems the APC has visited on the country.
“It is evident that the APC has failed woefully in all the major issues it campaigned against the PDP in 2015 from poverty to insecurity; joblessness and high cost of living; national unity to bad foreign image; human rights abuse to economic recessions – issues which if the APC was a serious political party, should be dispensing its energy in resolving,” he stated.
While decrying the inability of President Buhari and APC to address the pervasive state of insecurity in the country and unite a sharply divided nation, Atiku lamented: “But, rather than do that, the APC is prancing about feeling good that its stock of membership is upping, while the economic profile of the country and its people keeps ebbing.
“Perhaps, we should remind the APC that focusing on Atiku will not improve the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or take the country out of the current recession; it will not create jobs for the youths of Nigeria.
Focusing on Atiku will not solve the problem of inflation and high cost of food items; and neither would it lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty.”
