Tinubu’s speech: ‘Nigeria needs more action than words’

A policy analyst and Professor of Critical Discourse Analysis at Rivers State University, Professor Fred Amadi, has said the tone of President Bola Tinubu’s 64th Independence anniversary message is reassuring, though hamstrung with formulaic expressions.

According to Prof. Amadi, it would have been applauded if the phrase “see light at the end of the tunnel,” a hackneyed speech variant in the second paragraph, had been couched in a more elaborate manner, such as “our reform has grown our foreign reserves from a measly X billion dollars when we assumed office to the present Y billion dollars.”

“The section of the speech on the effort to gain food security is laudable. So is the section on youths’ confabulation,” he said.

“Though the omission to assure that the outcome of such a confab will not suffer the fate of previous confabs casts an ominous shadow on the promise.”

Also, the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre (YEAC-Nigeria) stated that President Bola Tinubu’s Independence Day broadcast proposal for a 30-day National Youth Conference (NYC), if genuinely intended and backed by the political will to implement its outcome—even if it requires constitutional amendments—is a welcome development.

Executive Director of YEAC-Nigeria, Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, said the National Assembly, whose principal officers pledged to eat while youths protest hunger and economic hardship and who have received national honours from Mr President for doing so, ought to commit to the task of amending the 1999 Constitution to accommodate the NYC recommendations even before the conference begins.

Fyneface, who is a policy and public affairs analyst, also urged Mr President to decentralise the gathering, starting at the state and regional levels across the country before holding a national gathering in Abuja.

“The conference should start at the state levels simultaneously within a week and conclude with the recommendations taken to the regional levels in the six geopolitical zones in the country for deeper deliberations and fine-tuning the recommendations from each state in the zone. Then, these should be taken to the national level for delegates from the 36 states in a gathering in Abuja for final harmonisation, publication, and presentation to the National Assembly for enactment into an Act of Parliament and integration into the Constitution for implementation.”

Mr. Fyneface urged the President, whose administration’s policies and programs have meted out some of the worst hardships on youths, families, and households across the country in the 21st century, to uphold the promises contained in his speech that “the government will thoroughly consider and implement the recommendations and outcomes from this forum…” with a view to not abandoning the recommendations on the shelves like previous similar conference reports, including the demands of youth during the #ENDSARS protest in 2020, which have not been holistically implemented to date.