Following the unveiling of the, The Peoples Democratic Party, Labour Party, the News Nigeria Peoples Party, and experts have faulted the programmes of the ruling All Progressives Congress and its presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, contained in its presidential campaign manifesto.
The APC unveiled its manifesto last Friday but the PDP said the current performance record of the ruling party would determine the outcome of the 2023 general elections.
Speaking with one of our correspondents, the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Debo Ologunagba, said the APC and Tinubu had the voters to contend with given the manner they had been governed in the past seven and a half years.
“What is important in this campaign is that records count. In 2023, Nigerians are going to be interested in records. APC is not known to keep promises and that is why they have been referred to as All Promises Cancelled. The party is in liquidation and they are dying in instalments,” Ologunagba said.
Similarly, the leadership of the Labour Party said it found the audacity of Tinubu to campaign for better lives for Nigerians alarming, when it was obvious he foisted a ruler that made lives unbearable for the people. This is even as the New Nigeria Peoples Party warned that whatever infrastructure the former governor of Lagos State was proposing for the country should not be modelled after the exploitative Lekki-Epe Expressway arrangement.
The National Publicity Secretary of the LP, Abayomi Arabambi said, “That is why the Labour Party is surprised that those who foisted Buhari on Nigerians for the second time instead of burying their heads in shame still want to elongate Buhari’s in office by continuing his anti-people policies.
A financial analyst, Kalu Aja, via his Twitter page (@FinPlanKaluAja1) questioned the Gross Domestic Product growth projection of the APC manifesto, which he described as a tough sell.
He said, “This is the GDP growth projection of Bola Tinubu of the APC; it’s a straight automatic 10 per cent every year from 2023. Mathematically, this is a tough sell; as GDP grows, growth stalls because the denominator grows bigger.
On his part, a political analyst, Jide Ojo, noted that though the manifesto was good on the surface, the question Nigerians should ask, he stressed, was how Tinubu would deliver on the promises if given the mandate.
He said, “How are we sure that there would be no truckload of excuses if he wins and forms a new government?”
A development expert, Aliyu Ilias, said, “Nigerians need to hold these politicians to a particular level (of development). If these politicians do not have a target, it will become a problem for them to achieve it.”
An Associate professor of Economics at Pan-Atlantic University, Dr Olalekan Aworinde, said that although the targets could be achieved, certain things needed to be in place.
“One fundamental thing is that when the Buhari government first came into power, they also promised us all of these. But how many of these were they able to achieve?” he queried.
An expert and Dean of the School of Business and Entrepreneurship, American University of Nigeria, Professor Leo Ukpong said there was doubt that the APC could turn the economy around based on their seven-year record.
“To move an economy forward from the depressed economy that Nigeria is facing is like moving a very big ship and it takes a lot of time. Nigeria’s economy is saddled with too much debt; our debt level is way too high,” he added.
