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By Kayode Sanni-Arewa

The National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Felix Morka, has condemned too much emphasis on hardship and poverty in the country while neglecting gains the economy has recorded.

This Nigeria news platform understands that Felix Morka said President Bola Tinubu’s policies were the right policies that would put the country on the path of progress and prosperity.

In an interview with Arise News on Thursday, Morka condemned the former presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi‘s comment on poverty and hardship in the country.

He stressed that under successive governments before the APC took over in 2015, Nigeria had the challenge of multi-dimensional poverty.

He pointed out that the President appreciates the challenges. He said over time the gains of the government’s policies would translate into the life of Nigerians.

“The President in his statement was very clear. He did lay out some of the major progress that this administration has attained in the last several months.

“While also acknowledging that there remain challenges to the country, economic challenges, even security challenges at the country. The president is being very balanced and very real with Nigerians. He is not trying to gaslight anyone. He is calling it as it is.

“Now having said that, economics is economics. Economics is not magic.

Macroeconomic gains will in time translate to specific dining table, living room benefits to Nigerians. That is already starting. Now you see, I listened to your previous guest, who was speaking about poverty as though Nigeria has been without poverty since our independence or even before independence.

That is not the case. As of 2012, 2013, 2014, nearly 50% of Nigerians lived in multi-dimensional poverty. I think it is really misleading for anyone, whether it is Mr. Peter Obi or anyone else to come on national television to speak about poverty as though poverty dropped from the sky last night. It didn’t. No one wishes for any citizen to be poor or to live in poverty or to struggle with basic necessities. No one. Not the President, not myself, not any Nigerian, I believe. But unfortunately, that is the human condition.

“Even in some of the wealthiest countries of the world, people struggle and they initiate programs that are aimed to transform the fundamental conditions that create or sustain poverty. That is what this President is doing.

“Now if the richest countries of the world can initiate policies and actually create targets which are monitored over the short, medium and long term for those targets to be achieved, now who says that we mustn’t do that? That once a policy is announced, everything is supposed to completely resolve.

“Now look at the energy sector. We are seeing improvements. Yes, there was that deregulation, that whole removal of subsidy which created initial pain and maybe the pain continues to linger. However, with the reforms that are beginning to now bear fruit, we have local refineries that have been moribund for long periods of time, over decades. But they didn’t function,” he said.

The APC spokesman highlighted the improvement in the energy sector with the coming onstream of Port Harcourt and Warri refineries.

Morka further assured Nigerians that with the refineries coming on stream the high cost of petrol would come down. He said that would also translate to a reduction in the high cost of living.

“Through the significant portion of the PDP administration in this country, these refineries were simply just sitting there. Nothing was going on. Now, it is running. Warri has just started to run. So my point is that the benefits from all of this, in terms of economies of scale, how this then translates to maybe cheaper fuel, we’re already seeing stability.

“This is the first Christmas I know in recent years where we’re not queuing for petrol. That is a benefit. The price has just lowered in the last couple of weeks. That is also a benefit. And over time, competition, when Warri is producing, Port Harcourt is producing, hopefully, Kaduna begins to burn and Dangote is also producing.

“There’s no way that we’re not going to see a progressive decrease in price of petrol to make it easier for people to actually buy fuel and power their machines, whether it’s cars or other forms of machine. But I think that we need to all just take a perspective and understand that these benefits we speak about are beginning to come down in the way it matters,” he added.