Economic crunch: Yuguda absolves Tinubu, heaps blames on Buhari
Former Governor of Bauchi State, Isa Yuguda has absolved the administration of president Bola Ahmed Tinubu saying that it is not responsible for the current economic woes the country is witnessing.
Yuguda who spoke on the 25 years of democracy and how the administration can wriggle from the surfeit challenges it met on ground accused former president Muhammadu Buhari of bequeathing a comatose country to Tinubu.
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“We all had the experience of going through this number of years with different experiences. We thank God that we are sitting here to look at the postmortem of what went on.
“For everything that we have in life, there is a beginning. We are very much aware that the Tinubu administration came from the base, the base is winning the election and he inherited a government that is from his party.
“But Nigerians should be aware of the challenges that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration had. And of course, nobody needs to be told that things were really bad when it comes to all the issues that have to do with the economy of Nigeria.
” So, Tinubu took an economy that is comatose and he has to start from there. The removal of subsidies, of course, was one of the strategies to get the economy back on track. The real-time effect of the removal even though people do not know what aspect of that subsidy was removed, does not necessarily impact the lives of Nigerians.
“But given what Nigeria is, a lot of domino effects were seen cropping up all over the country given increasing prices of food and transportation cost. Anywhere you go, because of fuel subsidy removal, the story is that I am tripling my prices because the pump price of petrol has doubled or tripled. Not only that, but because of the nature of the economy that was inherited.
“The foreign exchange market as we inherited from both the formal banking system either from the Central Bank of Nigeria or the operators and also the informal market as reflected by the Bureau De Change and others that are being operated underground, which we are not aware of also have their shakeups and the value of naira started nose-diving on a free-fall, and up till now, I believe we have not even stabilized.
“But certainly, these are all borne out of the problems created as a result of the team that managed our economy before Tinubu came into government. The team did not do a good job. So, on coming in, you can see the difficult decisions that ordinarily a president should take to do his job properly, making tough decisions, which is what he went into and he did that at his best.
“Of course, hard decisions normally come with some difficult times for people but we have to manage it because if you don’t cure the wound, there is no how you can get a complete recovery. So, in the process of cleaning the wound and fixing it and making it better, all of us in the country must fill in the difficulties and pains.
“Since that time, we have known that there is a need to exercise patience because we are taught in our faith both the Bible and the Quran that in times of difficulty, we should be patient, especially if we have a leader who is visionary and knows precisely what to do to get his country’s men and women on the right track towards developing the economy and developing the nation itself,” he said
