Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday received criticism over his warning that revolution is imminent due to hunger and hardship in the country.
Dismissing the alarm as a product of outdated thinking, the Presidency and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) said Atiku is out of touch with reality.
“Atiku and his party are stuck in the past, fixated on doomsday scenarios and revolutionary rhetoric,” the Presidency said in a statement by the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga.
He said while the country is making progress under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration, it is curious that what Atiku can decipher is imaginary gloom.
Onanuga added: “Talk is cheap. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and his handlers are clearly out of touch with the positive developments unfolding in our country.
“Their claim that hunger is ravaging Nigeria, and their comparison of our situation to the unrest in France before the 1789 Revolution or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, is grossly misleading.”
Also berating Atiku for making a reckless statement, APC National Publicity Secretary Felix Morka, said only the former vice president sees hopelessness where every Nigerian sees hope.
Atiku, 2023 presidential candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the arrowhead of the opposition coalition that adopted the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as platform, alleged that the Tinubu administration has not made an impact in two years.
He said if the PDP government under which Atiku served had laid a good foundation and avoided corruption, the country would have been a better place.
Atiku, who alerted the country to an impending revolution, decried the increasing spate of hunger among the underprivileged poor and downtrodden.
He said in a statement by his spokesman, Paul Ibe, that while the primary objective of any government is the security and welfare of the citizens, the masses are progressively wallowing in misery and poverty under the administration.
Although the former vice president did not elaborate on the kind of revolution that is looming, he warned that the situation engenders an increasingly progressive propensity for criminalities, including high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice.
He recalled that the most violent socio-political eruptions and revolutions all over the world had often been powered by pervasive hunger and unbearable material conditions, especially the paradox of squalor amid plenty.
Atiku, who called for ‘national reflection,’ alluded to the French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Arab Spring in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable frustration set himself ablaze, leading to violent socio-political eruptions in Tunisia, Middle-East and North Africa.
He added: “Back home in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to argue that even the “ENDSARS” protest was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the part of the government.”
Atiku lamented that two years after assuming power, there are no signs that the government is capable of addressing the severe hunger staring the poor in the face.
He said: “Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence.
“There is no government worth its salt that does not place priority on the welfare and security of the people.”
