The National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has admitted that presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, is his friend.
However, in a long statement forwarded to DAILY POST, Tinubu made it clear that he was backing APC’s candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari, to win Saturday’s election.
The former Lagos state Governor also went on to pick holes in Atiku’s economic plans for Nigeria, but praised the achievements of the incumbent government.
“The future is uncertain until we enter it. February 16 is Election Day and on that day Nigeria shall step into its future. How you vote on that day will determine whether we walk into the future in a manner that guides our subsequent steps toward the national greatness that calls to us or will we walk into it backwards as if feebly trying to reinvent the past.
“One road leads to a certain replay of the economic injustices of the past. It is a road well-worn with familiar pitfalls and setbacks built into the very nature of it. The other road provides the truest, brightest chance for us to enter into our hopeful future but only if we are brave enough to believe in our capacity to improve our nation.
“This election is more than a contest between two men, President Muhammadu Buhari and former VP Atiku Abubakar, for that one exalted chair. The election is nothing less than a historic encounter pitting one vision and version of our future against another.
“Since walking backwards has never appeared to me as an efficient or responsible way for a person to proceed, let alone for a nation to surmount the difficult obstacles that nations must overcome, I cannot find much good in the policies and programs announced by the PDP.
Former VP Atiku misappropriated his eight previous years in high office. His occupancy of high office was best characterized by low deeds. Self-enrichment occurred at lightning speed but social welfare moves slower than a dousing snail.
“Just a few weeks ago, Atiku offered his vision of the economy when he said that enriching his friends would be an appropriate objective of any government he led. At best, patronage is a regrettable and necessary reality of politics that should be severely curtailed. But Atiku goes in the opposite direction. He bypasses patronage to brazenly elevate the much greater evil of cronyism from the shadows to make it the central plank of his national economic policy.
“Look, I have made no attempts to hide my friendship with Atiku. We were friends before this election and hopefully we will be friends after February 16 when he goes into retirement. Despite our friendship, I must say the type of enrichment of friends he envisions does not recommend itself to me. It is unjust and impoverishes all but a handful of Nigerians. I want no part of such enrichment for my love of Nigeria and its people is far greater and deeper than my friendship with Atiku. For the good of Nigeria and even the good of Atiku himself, we do well to send him into retirement on Saturday.
“Here I must relate a comment a friend recently made that shows the wide difference between the two parties and their presidential candidates. My friend observed that if you make a deal with President Buhari, you can always be sure of his intention to follow through. Do the same with Atiku, he said, and prepare yourself for disappointment.
Atiku is not alone in his disregard for the common man. Such disregard is the true brand name of the PDP and its powerful, rich allies.
“Several weeks ago during a television interview, Atiku’s Chief Economic Advisor Chike Obi intimated a strong preference to discontinue the social welfare payments the Buhari government established for the poorest of the nation’s poor. Obi’s rationale was that the nation could not afford to offer even this modest safety net. While in Obi’s eyes a nation possessed of the abundant material wealth of Nigeria could ill afford to give its poorest citizens enough naira merely to survive, Obi’s boss was reveling that he would further enrich already wealthy cronies. Obi was completely wrong that the nation does not have sufficient resources while his boss was utterly wrong in how he would use that abundance to fatten the wallets of his friends while leaving the pockets of the masses lean and empty.
“Perhaps, we should also send Obi into retirement along with his boss come February 16. Perhaps together they might manage to discover the place where they might learn compassion for the common man.
“Just this week, Atedo Peterside, a banker prominent in PDP circles, published a bewildering lament professing he could not understand why, even in his latest polls, President Buhari maintained a marked lead over Atiku. In essence, Peterside was griping that the people are not wise enough to make up their own economic minds. They would be better off if they allowed him to substitute his judgment for theirs.
“Peterside’s article was written with the desperate yet arrogant frenzy of those who fear their unjust economic privilege is swiftly unraveling. They fiercely clutch to their position yet the castle they have built in the clouds is crumbling into dust then to vanish into vapor. The clock now tolls midnight on their system economic elitism.
“His answer to our economic challenges was to shrink and restrain government from being the active catalyst toward a diversified economy that assured broadly-shared prosperity through the just allocation of wealth and reward according to sweat and toil put forth by the Nigerian people. He proposed an economy that essentially was a free-for-all. If the past has taught anything, is that such an economic free-for-all is never free for most.
“It is merely a license for the powerful and wealthy to do as they might while the poor and modest endure what they must.
“Like Atiku, this PDP banker advocates an economy that gives free vent to the wealthy. The freedom enjoyed by the wealthy is paid for by a heavy tax on the wages and work of the average person. Essentially, the PDP seeks an economy that provides the welfare of riches to the powerful while telling the average man that there is not enough money to go around to build an economy that will ensure he can take care of his basic needs.
“They seek an unfair, unjust and unequal Nigeria. Their definition of Nigeria is a nation run by the greedy, for the profit of the rich, at the command of the mighty.
Topic: 2019 presidency: Atiku is my friend – Tinubu reveals (Read 7208 times)
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June 15, 2020, 08:22:35 AM