The growing criticisms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration’s economic policies by members of his own party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is an indication that the reforms embarked upon by the government have not started bearing the expected fruits, but the President doesn’t appear ready to tinker with them. ONYEDIKA AGBEDO writes.

Although President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had forewarned Nigerians that the starting point of his administration would not be rosy, as he is going to take tough decisions aimed at revamping the economy, majority of the citizens did not envisage the magnitude of the economic hardship they are experiencing today. The realities on ground are telling on every household, rich or poor, and even members of the President’s party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), who are supposed to join hands with the administration to steer the reforms to success, are strongly raising voices of dissent against the policies of the government.
 
Vice President Kashim Shettima had three days to the inauguration of the Tinubu administration, last year, said the administration might experience a rocky start owing to the number of challenges bedeviling the country, citing oil subsidy and the multiple exchange rates system as challenges the administration would immediately tackle on assumption of office.
 
Shettima, who made the remarks at the 2023 Presidential Inauguration Public Lecture at the National Mosque, Abuja, gave the assurance that “Nigerians will come to pay glowing tributes to Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu” in the long run despite the difficulties that would follow government’s policies on two issues.
 
However, barely a year and five months after the government announced the removal of petrol subsidy and also floated the naira, there appears to be no reprieve in sight and high ranking members of the ruling party are expressing concerns.
 
A former governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, who lost the presidential ticket of the party to Tinubu in 2022, recently expressed frustration with Nigerians for their passive response to the worsening economic situation in the country. Amaechi, in an interview with ABN TV, bemoaned the rising cost of living, which has diminished the purchasing power of millions of Nigerians .
 
The former Minister of Transportation stated that if someone like him was struggling to afford diesel, only God knows how the average Nigerian was coping with the hardship in the country. He emphasised that Nigerians ought to be on the streets protesting against politicians over their handling of the economy by the Tinubu administration.
 
His words:  “I’m angry with the citizens. I have said it several times. You can see a group of people stealing your money, impoverishing you; you cannot buy fuel and anything.
  
“The people should be angry. There should be protests. Somebody said what this government has achieved is that it has made Nigerians to be strong in the sense that Nigerians now trek.”
 
Similarly, Senator Ali Ndume, on Friday, October 11, raised concerns about the rising cost of living in the country and appealed to President Tinubu to reduce the cost of petrol and food items.
    
Ndume, a former Senate Minority Leader, said that fifth columnists were working hard to sabotage the Tinubu administration, imploring the president to reduce fuel and food prices.  He said the astronomical increase in the prices of fuel, food, essential goods and services was becoming unaffordable to average Nigerians and the poor that form the majority. 
 
In a statement, Ndume said the bad elements were trying hard to pitch the people against the administration of Tinubu by pushing for harsh reforms and bad policies instead of controlling inflation and exchange rate that are making life unbearable for Nigerians .
  
He said those who are bent on making the President look bad would stop at nothing in inflicting pains on Nigerians through the “so-called reforms until things get out of hand and the blame will be on President Tinubu.
 
“I’m appealing to him to resist these bad people who want to pitch the people against his administration. The hardship these people are inflicting on Nigerians is becoming unbearable. I’m currently in Borno, and I know what I’m talking about. People are really suffering, hungry, frustrated and angry.
 
“In Borno State, many families can’t even feed anymore. The untold hardship of these frequent increases in the prices is unimaginable. Farmers cannot even move their farm products anymore because of the high cost of transportation. 
 
“Those who can still do this add the cost of transportation to the prices of food items they sell, and that’s why many people can’t feed again. People can’t travel anymore. To travel by road from Abuja to Maiduguri, for instance, is a fortune. How many of our people can afford that?
 
“I know that President Tinubu means well for Nigerians, and therefore, he should not stay back and allow a few bad advisers to destroy this country. That’s why I’m begging him to do something before it is too late. It is not good to test the patience of Nigerians, and that’s exactly what these bad advisers are doing,” he said. Expectedly, the leadership of the APC came down hard on both critics, especially Amaechi, whom it accused of “inciting anarchy”.
 
The party in a statement signed by its national publicity secretary, Felix Morka, also described the comments by the former Rivers State governor as “insensitive, god-awful and unpatriotic”
 
His words:  “Amaechi’s comments are insensitive, god-awful and unpatriotic, coming from one of Nigeria’s longest serving and highest ranking political freeloaders – a two-term Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly, a two-term Governor, and a two-term Minister of Transport.
 
“For almost all of his adult life, Amaechi has been a leechy dependant on state resources, a voracious beneficiary of official patronage, and a leading participant in the generational devastation of our country’s economy. Attempting to hoodwink Nigerians into his web of false empathy and incitement to violence is hypocritical, provocative and dangerous.
 
“If those in power ‘steal money’, as Amaechi mischievously alleged, how come he cannot afford ‘to buy diesel’ barely two years after ‘stealing’ for over 24 years in power as Speaker, Governor and Minister?

“The only real anger that Amaechi and his fellow tribesmen of naysayers of the likes of Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, must feel is that they are not in the saddle of government today. But that was a decision made by Nigeria’s ultimate political authority – the electorate.”
 
The party urged Nigerians “to dismiss the call to anarchy by Amaechi and his partisan tribesmen and to remain patient and continue to support President Tinubu’s bold effort to transform our country’s economy once and for all.”
 
On Ndume’s comments, the APC, through its National Publicity Director, Bala Ibrahim, advised the former Chief Whip of the Senate to reach President Tinubu privately with his advice instead of criticising government’s policies or actions publicly.
  
“As a senior party member, a legislator and former Chief Whip for that matter, Ndume is an adviser by extension to all the leaders in our party. Therefore, he has ways of reaching out to them in private without necessarily going public. People must take note of their position and the fact that they have followers who will go to an extent to assess them based on what they say or do.

“Many people hold Ndume in high esteem. So, he must always weigh his words for fear of being misquoted or misinterpreted. But I want to believe he is doing so in good faith. Whether the APC is disappointed or will consider any sanction is a decision to be taken by the party,” Mohammed said.
 
Recall that Ndume was in July, this year, removed as Senate Minority Leader for openly criticising the President during a television interview, where he alleged that the Tinubu administration was being run by kakistocrats, which he explained to mean “a government run by the worst, least qualified or most unscrupulous citizens.” He went further to add that the government is populated by kakistocrats and kleptocrats, explaining that the kleptocratic component refers to people “who are in government for what they can make for themselves.”
 
Elder statesman and former presidential candidate, Chief Chekwas Okorie, who acknowledged that Nigerians are hurting over Tinubu’s economic policies and there seems to be no end in sight, told The Guardian that what is playing out in APC signposts the immaturity of the nation’s party system and democracy.
 
Okorie said: “It’s unfortunate because the kind of politics we are practicing in Nigeria, especially the party system that has not really allowed political parties to develop clear-cut ideological leanings, which party members can identify with, not only in APC, but also in most of the other parties.  If parties are ideologically rooted, a person joining a party, especially a person of knowledge ought to know what that party stands for. And if somebody has won an election on the platform of the party to head a country like Nigeria or even a state, his manifesto, programmes and policies will not deviate too far away from the manifesto of the party; because the manifesto of a party is a social contract between the political party and the people and that is what the person is supposed to have marketed before being elected into office. But that is not the case in Nigeria.
 
“So, you see people who belong to the same party expressing divergent views, almost constituting opposition within their own parties. And it makes the entire party system look very awkward and out of variance from what it ought to be.
 
“Having laid that foundation, what it simply means is that while Rotimi Amaechi was in a top position in the APC as a minister, he agreed with everything that the government did even when many people within the party felt that then president, Muhammadu Buhari, was not doing the right things. Buhari’s nepotism was to high heavens. But Amaechi and Ndume seemed comfortable with all of that. Now that they are out of favour, as it were, they are doing the work of the opposition parties, which is really embarrassing to them.  So, this whole thing has not helped the growth of our party system and the growth of our democracy.”
 
On the implications of the development on the polity, especially with regard to the 2027 general election, Okorie noted:  “With what is happening today in Nigeria, I can tell you that several consultations and meetings are ongoing in terms of realignment of political forces.

And I can venture to predict that by the second quarter of next year, the movement will commence. Most of the APC people in the North, who claim that they were the ones who made Tinubu to become president, and that is perhaps what Ndume is representing, are so dissatisfied with their party and the president that they have almost concluded arrangements to leave the APC for the people of the South West from that time I just predicted and I know where they are headed. The same thing is going on in PDP.  All these crises in the PDP, including the most recent one, was orchestrated from inside; it is not a Tinubu plot to destabilise PDP as alleged; that’s not true. It is a PDP plot to meet the constitutional requirement that before you leave your party if you are an elected person there must be factionalisation from the top to the bottom. So, they have now provided the ground for vacating the party without offending the constitutional provision.

“By this time I am talking about, those ones especially again from the North and whoever that will join them from elsewhere will leave PDP and leave it for the emperor who believes he has all the money to fight them naira for naira. They are not going to engage him in that; they will move away. And when he looks around he will realise that he is a general without an army. This is what is going to happen.”
 
Okorie stressed that after the re-alignment of forces materialises by the first quarter of next year, “nothing will be the same again before the end of 2025, politically speaking.”
 
He added: “And if we have the right electoral laws, especially the one that will make transmission of results from the polling unit a mandatory provision and bypass all these collation centres where manipulation of results normally occur, the next government in Nigeria from the Presidency to the National Assembly down to the states will be so balanced in terms of the parties in control of critical machinery of government.”  Will all these make the President to tinker with his policies? It doesn’t seem so.
 
Speaking through his Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, at the APC South-West Zone Assembly at Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos State, earlier this month, the President declared that his focus was not on the 2027 elections but on making Nigeria great for generations.
 
“Mr President has asked me to tell you that he is not thinking of the next election but the next generation. He has asked me to convey his message that he knows he has taken a very tough decision. He sees the light at the end of the tunnel. The time will come when we will all thank him for the decision,” he stated.