The Presidency on Sunday, replied presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 election and former vice president Atiku Abubakar afted he accused President Bola Tinubu of “trial-and-error economic policies,” saying he would have done things differently if given the mandate.
Atiku, who lost to Tinubu in the race last year, said yesterday that the current administration is undertaking a “palliative economy”, something his administration would not have done.
The former Adamawa governor said unleashing reforms to determine an appropriate exchange rate, cost-reflective electricity tariff, and petrol price at one and the same time “is certainly an overkill”.
The opposition leader noted that while he had advocated for subsidy removal, his administration would have gone for a gradual removal as was done in other countries like Malaysia (2022) and Indonesia (2022 -2023).
The ex-vice president said his journey of reforms would have benefited from more adequate preparations, more sufficient diagnostic assessment of the country’s conditions, more consultations with key stakeholders and better ideas for the final destination.
He also said his administration would have launched an economic stimulus fund (ESF), with an initial investment capacity of approximately $10 billion to support MSMEs across all economic sectors.
“We would have been guided by my robust reform agenda as encapsulated in ‘My Covenant with Nigerians’, my policy document that sought to, among others, protect our fragile economy against much deeper crisis by preventing business collapse; our document had spelt out policies that were consistent and coherent.
“We would have been more strategic in our response to reform fallout. We would not over-estimate the efficacy of the reform measures or underestimate the potential costs of reforms,” Atiku said.
But reacting, the Special Adviser to President Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, said if he had won the election, Atiku would have plunged Nigeria into a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism.
He also said there was no need for Atiku to speak because his ideas, “which lacked details” were rejected by Nigerians in the 2023 poll.
“Abubakar lost the election partly because he vowed to sell the NNPC and other assets to his friends. Nigerians have not forgotten this, nor would they be comforted by Atiku’s antecedents when he ran the economy in the first term of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government between 1999 and 2003.
“As vice president, Atiku supervised a questionable privatisation programme. He and his boss demonstrated a lack of faith in our educational system, and both went to establish their universities while they allowed ours to flounder.
“Talk is cheap. It is easy to pontificate and deride a rival’s programmes even when there are irrefutable indices that the economic reforms yield positives despite the temporary difficulties,” the Presidency said.
