The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has criticised Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, for describing the country under the APC-led administration of President Muhammadu Buhari as a near failed and divided country.
The APC in a statement issued on Sunday said that the former president lacks the moral justifications to lament the country’s growing political and social decadence since his administration also contributed greatly to the problems.
“It is baffling that the same political actors that midwifed and institutionalised the national rot, corruption, impunity and eroding of our value systems are the same characters posing as voices on the way forward in our national life. How ironic!
“Former President Olusegun Obasanjo could start with telling us where the electricity is despite the $16billion he spent on the power sector,” the party fired, calling on the former president and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, to account for the privatisation of Nigeria’s assets allegedly sold to friends of the PDP-led administration.”
The statement is in reaction to Mr Obasanjo’s comments at a consultative dialogue attended by various socio-cultural groups, on Friday, on the need for the country to jettison its ethnic and religious sentiments to actualise a united and progressive Nigeria.
At the meeting, the former president said that the country has become a shadow of her former self, losing her economic, political, and social standings in the league of nations.
“Today, Nigeria is fast drifting to a failed and badly divided state; economically our country is becoming a basket case and poverty capital of the world, and socially, we are firming up as an unwholesome and insecure country,” Obasanjo said.
However, the APC dismissed the ex-president’s familiar concerns as a mere extension of his “skewed letters, spew empty, hypocritical, tongue-in-cheek and two-faced economic magic models in line with their Dubai meeting strategies” which cannot compete with President Muhammadu Buhari’s alleged “verifiable projects and people-centered interventions that is uplifting Nigerians.”
Despite the evidence of violence and election malpractices recorded by both foreign and local observer groups in the country’s recent elections, the APC deputy national spokesperson, Yekini Nabena, while reeling out the achievements of the Mr Buhari-led administration, insisted that “votes are beginning to count as our elections improve steadily.”