BEING THE PRESS TEXT OF THE AFRICAN ACTION CONGRESS, IN COMMEMORATION OF THE 61ST INDEPENDENCE ANNIVERSARY, ON OCTOBER 4, 2021 AT 13A, ISAAC JOHN STREET, IKEJA LAGOS
Good day ladies and gentlemen of the Press.
It is our pleasure at the African Action Congress (AAC) to welcome you to this auspicious Press conference that is being organized to espouse some of the issues bedevilling our country, Nigeria, to assess the state of the country, the socio-political conditions of the mass of our people, to criticize as necessary and to proffer solutions as a fore-sighted political party armed with revolutionary ideas.
We are gathered here today, not as accidents of history but as conscious elements positioned by past and current realities that are due to the ubiquitous failure of government, which has led the Nigerian state to a total collapse.
But as nature abhors vacuum, the burden to right the wrongs in our socio-political and economic sphere have rested on us. This burden, we have carried with pride for the last 3 years as a political party.
There are no milder words to put the state of the nation, other than disarray, confusion, cannibalistic, reeking incompetence of the highest order and backwardness. Since flag independence in 1960, the everyday Nigerian whose interests we protect and aspirations we push, at the African Action Congress have been shut out of governance. Despite the 22 years of uninterrupted civil rule, the average Nigerian cannot boast of any dividends of the much-touted democracy. He has been left to cater for himself in all forms of human survival. Recent of all the darts thrown at him, is the sermon that he should find a way to defend himself against violent attacks by different types of terrorists the government has found comfortable names for- ‘’bandits’’, ‘’killer herdsmen’’ and ‘’unknown gunmen’’.
To score the Buhari regime on its failure to fulfil any of its promises to the mass of our people would be a waste of productive time. We shall require another measurement scale for it. In 2015 and again in 2019, the APC campaigned on three pillars – security, anti-corruption, and economy; the Buhari regime has failed woefully on all three.
SECURITY
Insecurity has been “democratized” and become so pervasive that there is no greater testimony of the large-scale insecurity in the land than the robbery of the Chief of Staff to the President within the Aso Villa presidential precincts and the recent invasion, killing of two officers and abduction of another officer inside the nation’s premier military training institution, the Nigerian Defence Academy. The Buhari regime is a god with clay feet which is incapable of protecting itself and its officials from the insecurity it has wrought on the nation. If it is so incompetent in protecting its high-ranking officials, how can it protect the ordinary citizens? Can one give what he doesn’t have!
It is so unfortunate that there has not been any progressive realization of the safe and conducive space for all. Rather, Nigeria has retrogressed under the Buhari regime and it is now the 3rd most terrorized country in the world.
Placing the Nigerian space on a map today, the Buhari regime cannot boast of 10 percent where it has total control of and can assert sovereignty. We now have a horrible situation whereby terrorists now do humanitarian works like international NGOs, impose taxes on citizens and even declare a Governor for the people.
ANTI-CORRUPTION
The Buhari regime came in 2015 huffing and puffing about fighting corruption and mouthing slogans such as “if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria”. Rather than kill corruption, it has pampered the corrupt. The regime continues to deodorize its officials engaged in corruption and abuse of office. The APC membership card is now effectively a “get-out-of-jail-card” for corrupt officials. People standing trial for corruption, simply move into the party and their sins are forgiven as stated by its former chairman, Adams Oshiomhole. There is no better example of this than the current Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva who had all his property earlier seized via court order, some of which he deposed in an affidavit were not his, returned to him by the EFCC when he became the arrowhead of the party’s rigging machine in Bayelsa state. The regime has bungled every corruption case instituted and has failed to achieve a conviction in the rash of corruption trials it instituted on coming to power in 2015.
ECONOMY
There is no sector where the regime’s abysmal failure and incompetence is most glaring than the economy. To pose the question which the current Minister of Works posed to the other pair of the two left legs we call “major” political parties in Nigeria, the PDP during the 2015 elections “are your lives better today than they were 5 year ago?” the resounding answer is a loud NO!
Unlike Midas, everything Buhari and his regime touches simply turns to dust. The first economic recession Nigeria witnessed was in 1984 during his short-lived brutal regime. In his second coming to power, Nigeria has suffered two other economic recessions, one in 2016 and another in 2020. He has the uncanny ability to turn success to failure and prosperity to poverty.
The economy under Buhari has been characterized by widespread poverty, galloping inflation and unsustainable debt overhang.
In 2020, an additional seven million Nigerians were plunged into what the World Bank described as multi-dimensional poverty by the Buhari regime bringing the number of Nigerians who wallow in multidimensional poverty to 98 million people or almost 50% of our total population. The multidimensional poverty index measures not just poverty by income, but also by access to health, education and living conditions such as sanitation, portable water, electricity, and housing.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its figures show that 40% or 83 million Nigerians live in poverty in 2020. Even if we take the NBS figures, the number of Nigerians living in poverty exceed the total populations of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius and Eswatini (Swaziland) put together.
The Buhari regime has made a song and dance about cash transfers to tackle poverty but what Nigerians need is not hand out to party cronies. What is required is an enabling environment and sound policy directives which allow Nigerians to unleash their creative abilities to create wealth. As the bible teaches, what we need are fishers not handing over fishes to us.
The extreme poverty in the country has been exacerbated by galloping inflation and chronic unemployment.
Inflation in Nigeria continues to rise at an alarming rate. As at Q2 2021, it stands at over 17% fueled by rising food prices and considering that about 50% of Nigerians’ disposable income is spent on food (compared to less than 10% in UK, US and Canada), this is a double whammy for Nigerians. Insecurity has ensured that farmers in both the north and south cannot go to their farms due to threat of banditry, kidnapping or clashes with itinerant herders. The hare-brained policy of shutting land borders for over a year ostensibly to curb small arms trafficking only succeeded in pushing up prices of goods and encouraging smuggling and corruption at the borders. To make matters worse, the president came out to admit that the policy had not succeeded in curbing the inflow of arms as more arms had come in during the border closure than previously. All these coupled with the free fall of the naira due to a monetary policy based on cronyism and patronage has brought untold hardship on Nigerians. How does one define incompetence if not this!
In Q2, 2015 when the Buhari regime came into power, unemployment was less than 10%, by the end of 2020, Buhari had worsened it to over 33% and rising. Youth unemployment is about 50% thus providing a ready army for terrorists and other criminal enterprises.
In our 2019 campaign policy document, we proposed an ambitious programme to boost disposable income, engage the youths in productive activities and embark on massive public works to ameliorate our infrastructure deficit as well as provide employment. Some said our plan to raise the minimum wage to N100,000.00 will cause inflation; now with a paltry N30,000.00 minimum wage we still have rising inflation occasioned by Buhari’s incompetence.
Nowhere is Buhari’s mismanagement of the economy more obvious and disturbing than in the unsustainable debt into which he continues to plunge the country. The regime met a debt profile of $10.72 billion in 2015 and has ballooned this $33.35 billion! Today, 97% of our revenue is used to service debt (that is, pay interest), no nation develops this way.
DEMOCRATIC SPACE and HUMAN RIGHTS
It is the position of the African Action Congress that the democratic space in the last 22 years and most especially under the Buhari Regime has suffered major setbacks and the civic platforms that should breathe life to people’s participation in governance have continue to shrink. To mention a few is the deregistration of political parties that, according the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), failed to meet the conditions to remain registered. Despite a previous court order to the contrary, the INEC continue in its undemocratic defiance to people’s participation.
We maintain that this is inimical to what the likes of the Late Gani Fawehinmi fought for, i.e- the multi-party system. Nigerians will not succumb to the binary choice pressure from the two sides of an evil coin- APC and PDP. Political parties and the participation in them must be based on ideology and they must not be reduced to ‘’special purpose vehicles’’ for ‘’winning’’ elections.
Furthermore, as glaring as an albino in daylight are the abuse of power, gross attacks on human rights, viz a viz, rights to freedom of expression, of association, to hold thoughts, beliefs and conscience, flagrant disobedience to court orders, laced with irritating impunity.
The human rights record of the Buhari regime is such that should worry any rational human being. If anything, the regime has always topped rankings when it concerns poor performance of institutions that should protect rights of citizens. The Police is atop in this aspect.
There is no gainsaying that the unpopular regime is afraid of any gathering of the people. From trying to attack social media, to the ban of Twitter, the draconian broadcasting codes, asking Civil Society organizations and NGOs to pay tax, the regime keeps sinking the country and it is preventing any engagement whatsoever and wherever that is geared towards saving what’s left of the country. But for the conscious efforts, laced with sweat and blood of the young people of this country sometime in October 2020, during the global protests tagged #EndSARS, we may by now be queuing at Aso Villa to receive permits to sneeze.
NATIONAL QUESTION
One of the biggest debates today in the country is the question of nationhood, whether to break into bits, maintain the status quo, however unfortunate or to restructure.
We maintain that these agitations, especially from the rank and file have more economic inclinations than political. We are clear on the fact that asides the nepotistic stature of President Buhari, what have continued to fuel the agitation for secession from different quarters are crippling poverty, economic backwardness, perennial social turmoil in the midst of vast human and material resources. Anyone who is not analyzing this issue within these contexts would be doing a half work.
The common man would not mind the height, stature, religion, body language or mother tongue of the occupier (intended meaning) of Aso Villa, if there was fair access to the dividends of our commonwealth- quality and affordable education, proper healthcare, good infrastructure, a thriving business environment and adequate security in all forms. If the Yoruba farmer could go to farm and be assured of the safety of himself and the works of his hands, the Igbo trader to his business with the assurance of prosperity and the Hausa with other ethnic nationalities within the space could be afforded a thriving and safe environment that welcomes development, no one would admire the call for the break-up of such union. What is unfortunate is that the reverse is the case as of today. And rather than address the underlying issues, the unpopular Buhari regime has resorted to violent harassment of the protesters who are exercising, of all rights, their rights to freedom of expression.
Our position in the African Action Congress is that self-determination is a right. Even the Christian Bible posits that ‘’Can two walk together except they agree?’’, let alone 200 tribes. The people in the Nigerian space must come together to discuss how they want to live and be governed. The AAC believes that the unity of Nigeria is negotiable and must be negotiated within the ambits of the law that affords equity, fairness and social justice. We are of the belief that you do not command peace into the air by some declaration in Abuja. Where there is no justice, peace is definitely going to be missing.
THE WAY FORWARD AS A PEOPLE
The AAC posits that its manifesto forms the instrument with which it shall mobilize all Nigerians in the struggle for political power towards peace and prosperity. The Manifesto code-named SPICERHEAT is detailed on the way out of this quagmire we have found ourselves as a people.
However, we are making the following immediate demands.
- Immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners- Omoyele Sowore, Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Adeyemo (Sunday Igboho), and all #EndSARS protesters who are still unjustly languishing in detention centres across the country. We hope the regime will toe the path of civility, reason and logic to release these persons before the 20th of October, 2021 which marks the anniversary of the killing of peaceful protesters which is now known as the Lekki Massacre.
- An immediate stop to the executive harassment of striking doctors. Their demands should rather be met.
- Immediate halt to borrowing, until a serious and independent audit of the earlier received loans is done.
- The trashing of the accidented Electoral Act 2021 (amended) that gives allowance for fraud and hijack of the electoral space by money-bags. For an Act that allows full electronic transmission of results.
- That President Muhammadu Buhari should resign with immediate effect as he has shown gross incompetence and cluelessness as it concerns piloting the affairs of the country. For the creation of an interim national government to midwife a brand new constitution that will usher in credible elections.
Also, a call for a national conference of Nigerians drawn from all ethnic nationalities, religious and cultural orientations, gender classifications and age differentiation, towards establishing a progressive, socially just, economically equitable, and ecologically sustainable society, is imminent at this time. We shall continue to be part of such discussions and shall provide leadership at all times.
We call on members of the public, home and abroad to join the African Action Congressonly ideologically clear formidable opposition party in the country.
Thank you.
Solidarity.
Signed:
Femi Adeyeye
National Publicity Secretary
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