Former Lagos State Governor and All Progressives Congress (APC) national leader, Bola Tinubu, declared on Thursday in Lagos that the APC would send the Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, into retirement at the elections on Saturday for the good of Nigeria. Tinubu said this in a statement by his Media Officer, Tunde Rahman.
“This election is more than a contest between two men, President Muhammadu Buhari and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, for that one exalted chair. Look, I have made no attempts to hide my friendship with Atiku. We are friends before this election and hopefully we will be friends after Feb. 16 when he goes into retirement. For the good of Nigeria and even the good of Atiku himself, we will do well to send him into retirement on Saturday. 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,” Tinubu declared in the statement.
Tinubu said there was not much good that could be found in the policies and programmes announced by the PDP. “Atiku’s answers to our economic challenges are 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. 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,” he said.
The APC chief also said the objective of the ruling party was to remake Nigeria into a great nation. “Our vision is the opposite of theirs, Unlike the PDP, we, the APC, are anchored to the proposition that every Nigerian is entitled to equal access and sufficient economic opportunity so that he may use his talents, skills and committed exertion to carve for himself and his loved ones the decent and good life every human being seeks. The ordinary person is not to be shortchanged of the fair dividends of his honest sweat and diligent labour simply because he may be poor or because the powerful and wealthy want more.”
Tinubu continued: “Because of the APC’s concerns for the struggles of the average person, we launched beneficial social welfare programmes such as the school feeding programme, Trader-Moni and N-Power. As such, we have made progress caring for our most needy and vulnerable through these and other innovative and unprecedented policies. These programmes are of the type all great nations do for their citizens.”
He went on to say that the APC was not satisfied by what had been accomplished, saying that what had been done was the opening phase of a more ambitious undertaking. “We have just begun to fight poverty and reform this economy on the scale required. Though we have helped millions, several millions more are needed to end poverty’s stranglehold on their lives. We must expand the scope and reach of our social welfare programmes to encompass those other people who have been denied access to the productive economy through no fault of their own. Additionally, we must put idle hands to work to build a modern infrastructure that will energise agricultural output in rural areas and foster labour-intensive industrialisation in our growing cities.”