The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Adewole Adebayo, has faulted the economic policies of the President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
Adebayo, who was a guest on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, said the method of the Tinubu government was not correct. “He (Tinubu) has the right team but what he wants to do is not correct,” he said.
According to the former SDP flag bearer, if he were to be Nigeria’s President, he won’t remove petrol subsidy from day one as President but would have approached the National Assembly to amend the 2023 Appropriation Act to allow subsidy for a while.
“These policies are not good, not because of the party that is announcing them but because they are not suitable to us,” he insisted.
Adebayo disagreed with Tinubu’s methodology but agreed that any of the presidential candidates in the last poll who adopted the policies of the incumbent would have gotten the same results evident in the country at the moment.
“It doesn’t matter whom you put there, this will be the outcome once you adopt these policies,” he said, while identifying the three major issues as cost of governance, the issue of subsidies and forex.
According to him, the reforms of the incumbent come with some benefits such as more income to the government and more income to the foreign exchange but the country was “not structurally prepared for the advertised benefits”
He also postulated that the gains of the policies were lesser to the pains, noting that the Tinubu government should be “less arrogant” to do the right thing to provide succor for suffering Nigerians.
Nigeria is battling rising inflation, food inflation, forex crisis, economic hardship and high cost of living occasioned by the removal of petrol subsidy, attracting protests in parts of the country.