Ex-Presidential Candidate Tags Tinubu ‘Civilian Dictator’

A former presidential candidate of the African Renaissance Party, Alhaji Yahaya Ndu, has voiced strong criticism against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu‘s economic policies, labelling them as “thoughtless” and harmful to the economic stability of Nigeria.

In an interview with PUNCH, Ndu accused the current administration of driving numerous Nigerians into extreme poverty through these policies.

Further intensifying his critique, Ndu characterized President Tinubu’s leadership style as a “civilian dictatorship,” underscoring a significant discontent with the governance approach in the country.

He advocated for a mass participatory method to tackle the nation’s challenges, stressing that democracy should extend beyond the electoral process to include active citizen engagement.

Highlighting a notable disconnection between the government and the populace, Ndu pointed out that the combined votes secured by Tinubu, along with other major candidates like Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar, and Rabi’u Kwankwaso in the recent elections did not even constitute 20 percent of Nigeria’s total population.

Ndu said, “People said that President Tinubu is just in power a little over a year and that he should be given the opportunity to turn things around, but when they said this thing, I got worried because we are supposed to be practising party democracy and his party has been in power since 2015. The President was the leader of APC. So many of the top functionaries of the party were nominated by him or tutored by him.

“For instance, the current Chief of Staff was then Speaker of the House of Representatives and so on. In any case, when he came on board, he said he was coming to continue from where Buhari stopped. The point I was trying to make is that it is dishonest to say that he just met the trouble, and he is trying to fix it because he has always been part of the team led by Buhari since 2015.”

Ndu explained that party democracy means that you are collectively responsible for the actions of your party, insisting that the President’s henchmen should better stop pulling the wool over the eyes of Nigerians by saying he just came on board because he has always been there.

He further stated, “In any case, I am not even surprised that he is not able to handle the situation because shortly before the election I stated in a press conference that it is either he does not have the solutions or that he is not patriotic. If he had the solutions all along he would have given the solutions to his party to implement even before coming to be President and if he didn’t have the solutions that meant he didn’t have them, if he had them and he refused to put them on board for his party to implement, that means he was not patriotic. You don’t get the solution simply because you became President.

“In any case, even during the electioneering campaign to become President he consistently refused to answer any question. Remember even when he went to Chatham House, when questions were put to him, he delegated others around him like Nasir el-Rufai to answer the questions for him. During rallies when he was supposed to address people on his programmes he was holding broom and dancing.

“So, I am not surprised that things are getting worse under him, but I am not blaming him as a person, I am blaming all of us for agreeing to be so fooled, not just by him but by the whole polity we are operating. If you put all the votes that Tinubu had in the election, whether rigged or unrigged, together and add that one of Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar and Rabi’u Kwankwaso, they don’t come up to 20 per cent of the population of the people of Nigeria; and if you said as for those who voted, it is still an extremely negligible percentage. Democracy is supposed to be about mass participation.

“The solution to our problems can be found in a mass participatory approach, in other words, if we are trying to involve programmes for technological advancement, you must create a system that will outsource all our engineers, all our technologists whether at home or in diaspora to contribute together, to collate and marshall out what should be our technological advancement blueprint, likewise for health. Our medical doctors, our pharmacists, and all those in the health industry should put their heads together. Thank God for information technology; they don’t need to leave their bases to be able to reason together.

“This is the process we need to undertake to move this country forward. Nobody should pretend to be more Nigerian than the other. And nobody has any monopoly on knowledge. When all of us come together and work as one that is only when we can move this country forward.”

On fuel subsidy, Ndu stated that the removal of subsidies on Premium Motor Spirit was the worst decision of the Tinubu administration.

He said, “To start with, even if it was supposed to be the best decision, it was removed in the most wrong possible way.

“You remember that he removed the fuel subsidy even before he had a cabinet during his swearing-in that more than anything is the most eloquent, graphic explanation that this was a civilian dictatorship, and if I were in his position, if I think that the best decision is to remove the fuel subsidy the most common thing or the basics thing my administration would have done is to, first of all, encourage all those young boys and girls who are operating what our country prefers to call illegal refineries who we send our Air Force, soldiers and Navy to destroy their refineries; my administration will encourage them, regulate their products, make sure that they don’t pollute the environment, help them to get the crude oil at the cheapest possible price and suffocate everywhere with properly refined oil; incidentally information reaching us now says that Libya, as of this moment is selling one litre of PMS at N52.

“If Libya, an African nation can be selling PMS at N52 a litre and we are selling our own officially at more than a thousand naira a litre, something is wrong with us.

“Everybody knows that it was a terrible decision, even he and his administration have realized that it was a terrible decision and that is why they are now talking about CNG, which if they realised that they were doing something terrible would have come before the removal of subsidies the way it was done.”