The Presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 general election, Mr Peter Obi, has challenged President Bola Tinubu to disclose the level of bankruptcy that immediate past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari left behind for Nigeria.
Obi made the call in a tweet posted on his verified X (formerly known as Twitter) account on Thursday.
Tinubu had, during a meeting with the Vice-President (Country Programs) of the Islamic Development Bank, Mansur Muhtar, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, last week, said his administration “inherited serious liabilities” when it took over power on May 29.
Tinubu, however, failed to give details of the liabilities his administration inherited from the previous government.
Obi, in a reaction on Thursday, asked the President to reveal to the general public what his administration inherited in the interest of transparency and accountability.
“I just read yesterday, a widely publicized story from the present APC-led Federal Government saying that they inherited a bankrupt nation from their predecessor APC administration. But the story failed to disclose what they inherited which had qualified us for bankruptcy status,” Obi said.
The LP presidential candidate said one major characteristic of responsible governance is transparency and strict accountability, and this demands that the government disclose exactly the degree of deficit they inherited.
“What is inherited should be disclosed to enable the public to know where we are and where we are headed. Recall that the previous APC government made a similar claim in 2015 against the PDP administration that handed over to them without telling the nation what it actually inherited.
“Rather, they took our debt profile from N12.6 trillion in 2015 to N87 trillion in 2023 when they left office without improving on any indices of development: Education, Health, Poverty eradication, and Security. Instead, the condition of the nation on every development index got worse, leading to the present sad state. Nigerians know things are bad, and they experience it daily. What they now want to hear regularly are measurable and verifiable steps to improve the situation,” he said.
Obi said the alarm raised by the government about the bad state of the country’s finances raised questions about the rationale behind some expenditure items in the supplementary budget recently signed into law.
“The present revelation also goes to buttress the argument that I have made since electioneering season that the cost of governance is too high and must be drastically reduced. A bankrupt country should channel every available resource into funding critical development sectors like security, healthcare, education, and eradication of poverty by addressing youth unemployment, not spending in non-essential areas. So, what we expect are measurable and verifiable steps to improve the situation,” he said.
