As reactions continue to trail remarks attributed to the All Progressives Congress Presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu on climate change, the Executive Director of the Centre for Reforms and Public Advocacy (CRPA), Ifeanyi Okechukwu, has faulted the APC candidate’s submission.
Addressing the gathering of Northern elders under the auspices of Arewa Joint Committee on Monday, Tinubu had appealed to developed nations to be anxious to provide financial assistance to mitigate challenges thrown up by climate change.
The APC presidential candidate also compared Nigeria’s compliance with global climate change directives to preventing “a church rat from eating poisoned holy communion.”
Okechukwu in a statement issued on Tuesday in Abuja, however, claimed that Tinubu’s submission at the Arewa House on the issue was indicative that he was out of touch with the current ideals of progressive governance.
“For a presidential candidate who claimed to have been warned to stay on his script, it becomes confounding when, even in the short moment that he had to loosen his seat belt, he flew into stormy weather in his response to the issue of climate change.
“It would have been expected that Tinubu used the platform of the prestigious Arewa House, and the question thrown at him to enunciate his concern and empathy for the victims of the flooding that continues to ravage many states of the North and other many other states in the South.
“As we speak, many states in the North and South of the country have fallen to high floods, which are occasioned by Greenhouse effects.
“Whereas, policy experts and politicians in the country are busy thinking about how to make investments that will create water farms or expand the channels of internal waterways, here comes Tinubu so disconnected from the science and facts of climate change, that he sees it as an instrument to blackmail Western countries.
“The challenges that the next president of the country will inherit are enormous and it is dangerous that we hand over the country to a leader whose notion about governance is archaic.”
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