The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has described President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2021 New Year address as empty, directionless, and a confirmation that the nation has become leaderless.
A statement on Friday, January 1, 2021, by the spokesman for the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan, said the President’s speech underscored the urgent need for Nigerians to come together and salvage the nation.
Stating that Nigeria is fast heading to a failed state, the PDP said it was appalling that on New Year Day, all that President Buhari could offer a troubled and frustrated nation was “a regurgitated script full of lame excuses and empty promises that address nothing”.
The main opposition party maintained that President Buhari has not demonstrated the capacity to play his own part, as the President has always claimed.
The party slammed the President for failing to find solution to the security and economic challenges that pervade the nation “under his incompetent and lethargic watch”.
The statement said: “The myriads of lame excuses in Mr. President’s address again underline our national misfortune of a weak leadership that is unable to resolutely confront and vanquish bandits, terrorists, kidnappers and vandals who are now holding our nation hostage, ravaging our communities, kidnapping and beheading our compatriots without restrain.
“The least Nigerians expected from Mr. President, in the New Year, was a decisive will to tackle our security challenges by reviewing his parade and heeding the demands by Nigerians to rejig our nation’s security architecture.
“The situation at hand requires more than an armchair commander in chief who only dwells on excuses for manifest failures. President Buhari’s New Year address only points to the fact that our nation is in dire need of a leadership that is willing, able, and ready to engage from the fronts.
“On the economy, Mr. President failed to articulate a definite economic recovery blueprint. He had no clear strategies to shore up the value of our naira, repay and end our foreign borrowings, revamp our external reserves, give hope to foreign investors, move promises of job creation from the perpetual drawing board, and guarantee food security, health care among others.
“Mr. President had the opportunity to redeem his administration by taking steps that will address high costs of food, education, and housing deficit; address the high price of fuel, multiple taxes and tariffs that bear pressure on businesses and families as well as how to enhance national productivity and grow our Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
“In the same vein, our party finds it lamentable that President Buhari, in his reference to the demonstration by our youths, did not make any decisive pronouncement to end the on-going persecution of EndSARS protesters or order a Presidential inquest into the reported Lekki killing.
“Moreover, the failure by Mr. President to make direct commitment on budgetary provisions exposes a lack of will and direction, and shows that the next two years under the Buhari-led APC administration would leave our nation with forlorn hope.
“Nevertheless our party urges Nigerians not to despair but use the New Year to reinforce their bond of unity and continue to work together in their collective resolve to use opportunities offered by democracy to rescue our nation from misrule.
“The PDP prays that God will give compatriots the perseverance to outlive the pains of APC and President Buhari’s misrule as we work collectively for a new dawn.”
Source: The Nation
