THE NEWS NIGERIA
Dr. Bukola Saraki, a former President of the Senate, in this interview, spoke on why Nigerians should vote for Atiku Abubakar, Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party.
What is Atiku Abubakar’s path to victory, and what are his chances and that of PDP?
First, I strongly believe that the 2023 election is a referendum on the performance of the APC government and the party and I believe that a country like ours, a very progressive country with a lot of progressive individuals would never reward failure.
The question that Nigerians must ask is: Has this government and party failed or done well in the last seven years plus?
And let’s take the indices one by one because I want to stay on issues and move away from sentiments. In 2015, their promise to Nigerians was that we would fight insecurity, we would improve the economy, would create jobs for the youths – those were the major issues.
In 2015, if you can remember very clearly, issues of insecurity were limited to the North-east. Since then, till today, we’ve seen insecurity in the North-west – farmers cannot go to their farms, people are being killed and kidnapped; we’ve seen herdsmen and farmers clash in the North-central and we’ve seen the highest level of oil theft in the South-south – and we’ve seen kidnapping. So, on the issue of security, they have not performed, they have failed.
Let’s take the economy, and again, I will take them one by one and I would challenge you, because you are all well- knowledgeable on these issues; let’s take inflation – the inflation level today is about 16 per cent which was never like this in the time of PDP in the single digit. You have the highest number of Nigerians below the poverty line at 133 million; it was not like that. Unemployment under PDP was about six per cent to seven per cent; today it is 33 per cent; youth unemployment about 40 per cent. Foreign Direct Investment if we are lucky may be just about $2 billion compared to $8 billion to $9 billion.
These are facts we cannot run away from; on the economy as well, the exchange rate was N200, the official rate was probably N195, and the parallel market N230 – today official about N450 and the black market N735. It’s never been like this. And these are facts.
When you take all these issues, they have failed and as they’ve failed as a political party, we cannot reward failure. So, I don’t even think that the race should be about APC; they’ve had an opportunity to make Nigerians’ lives better but they have not.
The question now goes as you’ve all asked – who next? Some would say oh, do we want to go back to PDP? Let’s talk about that back to PDP- the PDP days.
The PDP days as I said, we had insecurity limited to just one part of the country. In the PDP days we are talking about, we had GDP growth of about six per cent to seven per cent. Now, we are seeing GDP growth of about two per cent, less than the population growth.
