The Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) has strongly condemned the administration of President Bola Tinubu, criticizing his performance in his first year in office. Speaking to journalists in Abuja on Tuesday, CUPP spokesperson Comrade Mark Adebayo highlighted the severe challenges facing Nigerians.
Adebayo expressed disappointment that many Nigerians had expected Tinubu to perform better than his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, especially in areas such as the economy, security, education, health, and infrastructure. “Judging by the last one year of another APC government, the group can admit that the country’s situation had not only worsened significantly but was even worsening by the day,” Adebayo said.
He highlighted the immediate impact of Tinubu’s policies, stating, “For the first time in the history of this country, Nigeria was unfortunate to have a president whose first minute in office was marked by unprecedented infliction of unmitigated suffering on the people. It was like an army of occupation had come to town.”
Adebayo elaborated on the economic hardships introduced right from the inauguration: “Even before the new president left the Eagle Square where he was inaugurated, Nigerians had been hit with what can be described as the most cruel economic assault that turned our lives upside-down, made businesses collapse, took food off millions of tables, sent children out of schools in their millions, increased insecurity exponentially, battered lives and scattered marriages irretrievably because the pump prices of fuel were increased by about 600% and the country’s inflation digits tripled instantaneously.”
He continued, “All of these within the first 60 seconds of Tinubu’s presidency and Nigerians are yet to recover from that tragedy till date. His welcome package to Nigerians was that of mass suffering, mass hunger, mass poverty and a government that is absolutely insensitive to the plights of Nigerians.”
Adebayo condemned the sudden removal of fuel subsidies, calling it “thoughtless and wicked.” He stated, “Without any sort of cushioning policy frameworks, the president went off-script and unleashed what amounted to economic terrorism on Nigerians by declaring that subsidy was gone! Gone with the subsidy was our joy, hope, and high expectations of a Tinubu administration that most thought was coming with a new deal of development, prosperity, peace and progress that he passionately campaigned on during the electioneering period. But, everything that he has done since day one in office till date has been in direct opposition to those expectations.”
Criticizing the rationale behind the subsidy removal, Adebayo said, “The arguments for subsidy removal are both dumb and untenable. If some people were stealing the oil subsidy, what a sensible and competent government would have done was to go after the criminals and plug the loopholes. But no! The Tinubu administration decided to engage in collective punishment of the mass of innocent Nigerians for the crimes of an infinitesimal percentage of economic criminal gangs ravaging the country’s resources. Rather than go after those ones, he chose to turn against Nigerians.”
He further lambasted the administration’s economic policies, stating, “There is not a single justification for the subsidy removal in the manner it was done. The desperation of the president to implement the atrocious neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions that seek to perpetually keep Africa backwards was the singular factor in that anti-people action which has reduced our Naira to just a little better than waste paper. It is a shame that the currency of a small neighboring country like the Republic of Bénin is much stronger than Nigeria’s.”
