The former governorship candidate of the Labour Party in Lagos State in the 2023 general elections, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, has lambasted the Tinubu-led administration over what he described as “another empty basket of promises.”
Fielding questions in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, a few hours after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s live broadcast to the nation, Vivour described Tinubu’s call for Nigerians to sheathe their swords as medicine after death.
He posited that the current protest, which has claimed not less than seven lives, would have been prevented had the President listened to cries of Nigerians groaning under the weight of his economic policies.
He said, “They should have taken a page out of what they saw happen in Kenya and not waited for this to get this bad, but just looked and seen that, you know, it’s time to give symbolic and meaningful gestures to Nigerians to know that our leader is with us. That is what empathy is; it’s not just coming and saying I feel, I feel. You feel, now you have to act. What is the action that you are taking? How are Nigerians going to feel that their commonwealth is being managed properly? What are the timelines and number of jobs that will be created? This is what will give Nigerians hope, not just another empty basket of promises.
“I feel that the President had almost a month’s notice before this protest happened, and this gave them ample time to plan strategy and responses to what Nigerians have been calling out for, which is hunger, pervasive hunger in the land, huge unemployment, reduced income, and people just not being able to cope. So, the President did not take advantage of that notice that was given and has now given his speech almost four days into this where lives have been lost and properties have been damaged.
“And even in the speech, you find that they are also victims of their own propaganda. You talk about increasing the amount of oil production to 1.6 billion barrels when it’s barely about 1.2 billion. We talk about people investing in the sector when we know for a fact that most companies are pulling out and investing in other African countries. We talk about CNG production, which sounds good on paper, but we’ve not seen the possible fuelling of these trucks and how it’s going to actually be implemented properly across the country.
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“And one would have hoped that he would have focused that kind of technology or idea on moving food from the rural communities to urban centres, securing the farmlands, and securing farmers to also increase food production—that was another opportunity that was missed, in my opinion.
“But more than anything, I saw a very flaccid attempt at empathy, because empathy is also action, action that will show a broad-based cost-cutting strategy in governance. Because one of the things that is paining Nigerians is they’re in the midst of so much poverty, so much hunger, and they’re reading things about a new private jet that is bought, twenty-one billion being budgeted for one man and his family in a house, extravagant expenses of our commonwealth. That shows that this government is not really connected, understands the travails that Nigerians are going through.”
Vivour maintained that Tinubu’s speech failed to address several burning issues on the ground, saying: “Broadly, I feel that this speech has not addressed the issues that the people have raised. It does nothing for the market woman who is talking about the hunger that she’s persevering through and how much the price of Garri is. He spoke about increasing the minimum wage as an achievement, but that minimum wage can barely buy a bag of rice. The minimum wage under Goodluck Jonathan could buy a bag of rice. So, it’s not just enough to say we have huge revenues; what is the value of that revenue? What is the purchasing power of having that amount of revenue on the common man? And these things have not been addressed. So, I guess we’ll see in the coming days how that’s going to affect the people protesting.”
He lauded the President for condemning ethnic bigotry in the country as he said, “What he did, though, that was positive to an extent, was maybe highlighting—maybe because Alhaji Atiku Abubakar highlighted this fact—that ethnic baiting and bigotry have no place in modern-day Nigeria. He highlighted it, but it’s also very flaccid because this is a government that has its SAs and SSAs retweeting this Lagospedia page regularly.
“If you’re on Twitter, most people associate the Lagospedia page as a branch or an arm of APC because SAs and SSAs are constantly retweeting from it. You have a media aide, Bayo Onanuga, who has come out to say very bigoted statements consistently, and there’s no way that your principal would not be okay with these things, and these things are done consistently. So, now that it has been brought up, I expect to see people being picked up, people being questioned for this kind of instigation and trying to rip our social fabric apart. And this is not just on the APC’s side, but on the other side as well, where you have people—just everybody, no matter what tribe you are from—as long as you are instigating people against each other, you should be brought in for questioning because there are dramatic effects that these things have.”
