Former Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Political Affairs, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has called on citizens to demand that the government tackle insecurity and hardship ravaging the nation.
Baba-Ahmed said President Tinubu’s administration, in two years, has failed to address the hardship Nigerians face daily since he took over the nation’s governance.
Naija News reports that Baba-Ahmed stated that the government, in two years, have continued to issue press releases that showed it was out of touch with the realities of Nigerians.
In his column on Tuesday, he urged Nigerians to raise their voices against the government.
“This administration has roughly two years to go. Nigerians aggrieved by its performance have a number of options. We could demand that it address the current state of insecurity with more vigour and imagination, or we could write it off and continue to live with killers, kidnappers, and rising levels of mutual distrust until 2027, when we will again decide on our future.
“While we are at it, we can raise our voices to draw attention to the crippling cost of living, the tragic escalation in the number of desperately poor citizens, and the need to end the litany of statistics and press releases that merely reinforce the perception that this administration is out of touch with Nigeria’s realities,” he said.
The former spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) noted that Tinubu could decide to continue his poor governance and rely on electoral manipulation to secure victory in 2027.
“This APC administration is, in many ways, an offshoot of Buhari’s administration, despite Tinubu’s inaugural speech bravado.
“This APC administration will play the regional card and insist that it must serve for eight years so that every southerner feels properly Nigerian. It is attracting defectors like flies to an open sewer, starving other parties of the strength to mount a serious challenge in 2027.
“It will amass even greater fortunes being in power and knowing the weight of money in deciding electoral outcomes. It will enlist mobilizers who will split or manufacture votes, just as the clergy did in 2023. It will spend hundreds of billions to induce voters who have starved for four years, voters who will collect morsels and a few hundred naira because that may be all they ever get in eight years of this democracy.
“It will carve up the country, deepen fault lines, and weaken the bonds needed to begin healing a nation that has paid for its democracy with its cohesion, the blood of its citizens, and the future of its youth,” he stated.