Adewole Adebayo, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, at the weekend, picked holes in the All Progressives Congress (APC) students loan scheme, stressing that it’s a long route to a short journey.
According to him, “all that the Tinubu administration needed to have done to give education access to an the average Nigerian, without seeking for loan, was to bring down the cost of education and an average person will be able to go to school without needing a loan. But even with the loan, they are unable to administer it properly.
“The Tinubu Presidency is not a government. It may be a political movement that has now found itself in power. They can decide to continue to strengthen themselves politically by capturing more governors, more senators and more political parties to join them, but they are not just in government”.
This was as Adebayo asked President Bola Tinubu that rather than get worried about a political coalition in 2027, he should be more worried about the people’s anger against his government.
He noted that the president is politically savvy enough to know that the coalition is not his problem.
“He knows the people in the coalition. They are all friends. There’s hardly anybody in the coalition who you cannot find 10,000 pictures of them with the president. They are all together.
“The real thing that the president should worry about is the resentment of the people and the problems that people are facing in reality. It is not the coalition that has been putting pictures and billboards all over the places,” he said.
He added: “If we are to be fair to the Tinubu government, we should talk about the Tinubu presidency, not the Tinubu administration, because there’s no administration going on.
“What you have is an imperial majesty at the presidency. Their eyes are not to the ground. Do not call them an administration.
“Just call them the presidency, because they are just in the state house. Beyond that, they have not been able to create an administration.”
He also lampooned the President and his economic team for being unable to give Nigerians workable budget for two years running.
