Atiku Calls Tinubu The Egypt Nigerians Want To Escape, And He Has A Point

Atiku Abubakar said yesterday that President Bola Tinubu is the Egypt Nigerians are desperate to escape, and I have read that statement three times since morning. The ADC presidential candidate was reacting to the President's comparison of fuel subsidy removal to the Israelites not wanting to return to Egypt, and Atiku did not mince words. He said, "Bola, you are the Egypt Nigerians are desperate to escape. You celebrate the day you made fuel more expensive, then lecture families struggling to pay for food and transport about why they must never go back."

Now, I am not an ADC man and I have my reservations about Atiku himself, but a broken clock is right twice a day. The man has put his finger on something real. In Ibadan here, a bag of rice that sold for 28,000 naira in 2023 is now well over 70,000 naira, and transport fare from Challenge to Bodija has doubled. When a President tells people enduring that kind of hardship that they should be grateful, it comes across as tone deaf. Atiku's proposal for targeted support on locally refined petroleum products with independent auditors tracking every naira is at least a policy, not a proverb.

Some will say Atiku is merely positioning for 2027 and that he had his own chance and did nothing. Fair point. But the messenger's record does not invalidate the message. The insecurity numbers under this administration, the killings and abductions, are not opposition propaganda, they are in the newspapers every week. Atiku also reminded us that Umaru Yar'Adua tackled security challenges without a military background, so the excuse that Buhari was a general does not hold water.

Let us argue this honestly. If you removed the party names and the tribal sentiments, would you not agree that the average Nigerian family is worse off today than four years ago? Or are we so loyal to our political camps that we cannot see what is in front of us?