From John Adams, Minna

Former Niger State governor, Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu, has criticized President Muhammadu Buhari over the current economic hardship in the country, noting that the president’s attitude is responsible for the country’s economic woes.

Dr. Aliyu said Nigeria’s economy has in the last six years been plunged into grave danger and weakened by bad policies, poor implementation, wastages and plundering. He was reacting to the recent statistics released by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, which pointed that the country’s inflation rate now stood at 18.7 percent.

In a statement on Friday, the former governor noted that, “unfortunately those in the driver’s seat have been clueless on how to turn the economic wheel around out of the woods.” He said that the country has continued to slide into doldrums, greater pains, penury and uncertainty due to what he called policy summersaults and lack of vision to turn things around for the good of the people.

Dr. Aliyu believed that the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the inability of the government to address the increasing activities of criminal armed bandits and kidnappers in parts of the country, have further worsened an already bad situation.

Related News

According to him, the economic policies put in place by the present administration in the past six years have been inconsequential and of little effect to redress the wobbling economic situations in the country. Worst hit, he said, are states in North Central, North West and North East, “where insurgents and armed bandits have gone haywire, killing and destroying people’s means of livelihoods and economic activities.

While x-raying some of the economic policies of the Buhari’s administration, he pointed out that the federal government’s school feeding programme was a waste of resources, stressing that “without a defined social security programmes for citizens, the federal government’s schools feeding programme was meant to fail from its start.

“What is paramount is for citizens, parents of children to be empowered so that they could confidently take care of their wards at home, rather than giving school pupils rations and fragments of meals during schools hours,” he said.

He recalled that some years ago, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led government had implemented the school feeding programme on pilot scheme, in few states but realised its unworkability and had to jettison it quickly.