A political activist and former Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Timi Frank, on Sunday, accused President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) of deepening poverty in Nigeria.
Frank was reacting to a report by The Economist Magazine that Nigerians had become the poorest citizens of a country in the whole world, under President Muhammadu Buhari’s first term in office.
The activist said the gradual extermination of Nigerians through poverty is an incontrovertible fact that the present government had refused to acknowledge.
“The reality on our streets speaks to that of a failed country. But the agony and irony of this precarious situation is that President Buhari and his boot lickers continue to deny the reality which their actions and inactions have foisted on the people,” he lamented.
He added that: “President Buhari has failed to recognize that a democracy is not a military government. He has failed to realize that you cannot run a multi-ethnic and pluralistic society on the principle of command and control which has been his hallmark.”
Frank further lamented that while the world had since given up on Nigeria as a failed state, President Buhari was destroying it further with his archaic and centrist disposition.
“It is not that there are not enough courageous and patriotic men in the corridors of power today but in an attempt to escape the unmitigated poverty that the reign of President Buhari has foisted upon Nigerians, they have been forced to toe along.
“They have acquiesced like men whose consciences have been singed with a hot iron. Their major preoccupation is scrambling for the partition of the economic soul of the country to gratify their unbridled avarice and lust for ephemeral material gains.
“How can President Buhari be in charge of the Executive, do the work of the Legislature and run the Judiciary? Buhari’s command and control style of governance did not work when he was Head of a military junta, it has not worked in the last four years, it is not working now and it will never work.
“We can no longer afford to let the IMF, World Bank, China, development partners and donor agencies to bail us out of this deadly economic quagmire.
“This is the time to arise and take back our country if peradventure we can stop the drift and make life bearable for the over 90 million Nigerians now living in abject poverty and hopelessness.
“Many are perishing and those that are fortunate to be alive daily contend with harsh and unimaginable livelihoods. Unemployment pervades the land. Incomes are declining. Healthcare is unaffordable. We still lack basic amenities.
“We are confronted by bandits and kidnappers on our bad roads, killed in our villages by insurgents. Except we speak up, we may all likewise perish,” he lamented.
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