Tunde Daramola, a chieftain of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reverse “unpopular policies that had caused untold hardship to Nigerians” since he assumed office.
He made the observation while speaking on the one-year anniversary of the Bola Tinubu administration in an interview with BusinessDay Sunday.
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Daramola, who was also a former Lagos State chairman of the Action Democratic Congress (ADC), said that there was nothing to cheer in the last one year because life was now unbearable to many Nigerians due to high cost of living.
The PDP chieftain further said that the government of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has not benefited Nigerians and that the citizens were now poorer since the party assumed power in 2015.
He bemoaned the policies of previous APC governments and the incumbent administration of Bola Tinubu, noting that it has been calamitous to the citizens.
“The advent of APC in Nigeria governance is best described as calamitous for the people of the country and it is there is nothing to cheer in the last one year, but pure hardship,” he said.
Millions of Nigerians have been tipped into poverty in recent years despite efforts to tame it by the federal government, which has been controlled by the APC for over eight years now.
“The APC has been in power since May 29, 2015, when Muhammadu Buhari took office after he became the first to oust an incumbent in an election.
Eight years later, he handed over to Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, the country’s commercial capital.
In 2021, Buhari established the Steering Committee of the National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy with the goal of uplifting 100 million Nigerians from poverty within a decade.
Last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said about 133 million Nigerians were suffering from multidimensional poverty.
The World Bank said recently that sluggish growth and rising inflation in Africa’s biggest economy has pushed an additional 24 million Nigerians into poverty in the last five years.
Data from the bank showed that 14.2 million Nigerians have become poor this year.
