Stop playing ostrich with crippling poverty, Frank tells Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari has been called upon to show commitment to the poor state of the economy which is taking crippling effect on the citizenry.

A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Comrade Timi Frank, who gave the charge, urged President Buhari to free himself from those he called bootlickers in the corridors of power whom he noted  have shielded him from the true picture of the lamentations of Nigerians under his administration.

In a statement issued at the weekend and made available to newsmen in Abuja, the former deputy national publicity secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress, (APC) said the report of the Economist magazine that “Nigerians  have become the poorest citizens of a country in the whole world, under President Muhammadu Buhari’s first term in office,” was a damning verdict on  his administration which his handlers in the Presidency have refused to acknowledge.

The PDP chieftain said: “The reality on our streets speaks to that of a failed country. But the agony and irony of this precarious situation is that General Buhari and his boot lickers continue to deny the reality which their actions and inactions have foisted on the people.

 “General Buhari has failed to recognise that a democracy is not a military government. He has failed to realize that you cannot run a multi-ethnic and pluralistic society on the principle of command and control which has been his hallmark as an unreformed and unrefined General in a democratic dispensation.”

He further  argued that critical  institutions of government and the organised civil society have been silenced to submission,  leaving ordinary Nigerians at the mercy of a ruling party and the Presidency which he claimed listen to no one,  but themselves.

“It is not that there are not enough courageous and patriotic men in the corridors of power today but in an attempt to escape the unmitigated poverty that the reign of General Buhari has foisted upon Nigerians, they have been forced to toe along.

“They have acquiesced like men whose consciences have been singed with a hot iron. Their major preoccupation is scrambling for the partition of the economic soul of the country to gratify their unbridled avarice and lust for ephemeral material gains.

“General Buhari and his minions have Nazified Nigeria. The Nazification is a grand plot by the regime to exterminate Nigerians with poverty, banditry and economic woes now rife across the country.

“How can General Buhari be in charge of the Executive, do the work of the Legislature and  run the Judiciary? General Buhari’s command and control style of governance did not work when he was Head of a military junta, it has not worked in the last four years, it is not working now and it will never work.

“We can no longer afford to let the IMF, World Bank, China, development partners and donor agencies to bail us out of this deadly economic quagmire.

“This is the time to arise and take back our country if peradventure we can stop the drift and make life bearable for the over 90 million Nigerians now living in abject poverty and hopelessness.

“Many are perishing,  those that are fortunate  to be alive daily contend with harsh and unimaginable livelihoods. Unemployment pervades the land. Incomes are declining. Healthcare is unaffordable. We still lack basic amenities.

“We are confronted by bandits and kidnappers on our bad roads, killed in our villages by insurgents. We have been besieged in our own country by a Pharaonic regime.

“Except we speak up, we may all likewise perish. God forbid! I believe that there remains enough good and patriotic men in Nigeria to confront this evil regime and stop the country from sliding irretrievably,” he lamented.