Atiku faults Tinubu’s reforms, says ‘Nigerians dying of pervasive hunger’

Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar says poor Nigerians are dying of “pervasive hunger”.

A statement issued by his media office on Monday, Abubakar said the increasing spate of hunger ravaging the country, largely felt by the underprivileged and the downtrodden, is deplorable.

The former vice-president said that while any government’s primary objective is its citizens’ security and welfare, Nigerians are “progressively wallowing in misery and poverty” under President Bola Tinubu’s government.

Abubakar said the current situation engenders “progressive propensity for criminalities” such as high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice, among others. 

He said most violent socio-political eruptions and revolutions across the globe were fueled by pervasive hunger and unbearable material conditions.

Abubakar said the current situation in the country is unacceptable, noting that the French revolution, the 1917 Russian revolution, and the Arab Spring, in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable frustration set himself ablaze and triggered violent socio-political eruptions from Tunisia to the Middle East and North Africa, should serve as a warning.

“Back home here in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to argue that even the  ‘ENDSARS’ protest was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the part of the government,” Abubakar was quoted as saying.

He said that two years after assuming office, the president has yet to show that his government is capable of addressing the grim issue of severe hunger “staring the poor in the face”.

“Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence nationwide,” he said.

“There is no government worth its salt that does not  place priority on the welfare and security of the people.

“Whether the present powers accept it or not, the reality of our existence is that the poor are increasingly dying of hunger while the majority of the living poor exists at the mercy of the ill-advised policies of this government.”

Abubakar added that since reforms are made for citizens, they should have a human face.