Afenifere Mark Down Tinubu On Economic Reforms The Pan-Yoruba sociopolitical organisation, Afenifere, has reacted to the statement credited to President Bola Tinubu that Nigeria would have been bankrupt if he had not ventured on more or less economic reforms.
The President while receiving a delegation of former National Assembly colleagues from the aborted Third Republic, during which he served as a Senator representing Lagos West, revealed, “For 50 years, Nigeria was spending money of generations albeit unborn and servicing the West coast of our subregion with fuel. It was getting difficult to plan for our children’s future.”
“We confronted serious headwinds when I took over, very disputing times. Nigeria would have been bankrupt if we had not taken the actions that we took, and we had to prevent the economy’s collapse.”
But Afenifere in a statement by its Publicity Secretary, Prince Justice Faloye, insisted the economic problems were self-induced because the Tinubu’s administration made fatal mistakes of withdrawing subsidies before letting the Dangote Refinery come into operation as promised in his own manifesto.
The Round Table reveals that the faction of Afenifere loyal to HRH Oba Oladipo Olaitan who took over as leader after the demise of Pa Ayo Adebanjo had always castigated the retrenchment of fuel subsidy and the floating of naira by Tinubu.
The twin-policies were revealed to be responsible for the inflationary spike experienced in recent years.
Afenifere cautioned that this is not about playing politics although saving the nation from “stifling poverty that is wrecking the nation at it seams added to kidnappings, robberies and other economic crimes.”
“The political class must realize that we are sitting on a gunpowder keg that will explode when the poor can’t take it a few longer. A stitch in time saves nine,” the group disclosed.
Faloye in a statement said that Tinubu should “never have floated the Naira when we were at any rate importing fuel that made up one third of our import bill.”
“These two ill-timed policies have cost millions their lives and livelihoods, so inflation rates, and not food prices falling away, is medicine after death caused by criminal negligence of the government,” he reported.
According to Afenifere, the Tinubu administration’s correlation to 50 years of economic contraction “can be traced to when subsidy withdrawal began in the Seventies, which have regressively pushed us into poverty, the worst of which has been witnessed under his administration.”
“The problem has been anti-people economic policies. We are nowhere near El Dorado than we were in 1978 when education subsidies were took away and he has placed our education on student loans.
“Fuel prices and other import costs could fall further if the quantum saved from fuel subsidies is pumped into the forex market as done since January with $8b none the less the ill-timed subsidy crack appears to have killed the lucky goose and we can never precisely regain the positive value of our currency due to economic mismanagement.
“Moreover, we should concentrate on creating authentic wealth and value instead of focusing on indices. Unfortunately, the administration is even so in the dark on how to amend the living standards of Nigerians. Ideologically clueless on how to stimulate our consumer nor producer markets to create wealth.
“For example, houses are the root of the consumer markets, the ultimate good for the consumer. Unfortunately Nigeria has twenty million homeless people, the most in the world, although only 20,000 houses were budgeted for in the 2025 budget, at which rate it will take 1,000 years to resolve our homelessness problem, assuming there is no enlarge in population. The government requires to budget for 20,000 a day like China and India, or at least 10,000 homes, to make some difference,” the statement disclosed.
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Published 3/14/2025