Human rights lawyer, Mike Ozekhome SAN, has blamed President Bola Tinubu’s administration for imposing untold hardship, poverty and hunger on Nigerians.
Speaking of Channels Television programme, Politics Today, Ozekhome said the government started on a wrong footing with the removal of fuel subsidy on May 29, 2023.
Ozekhome said the hardship in the country including the volatility in the foreign exchange market is linked to the devastating effect of fuel subsidy removal. He predicted that the exchange rate might reach N4000 to a dollar before the end of the year.
He said: “The truth is that this government started on a very wrong footing by removing subsidies without any attempt to cushion the devastating effect of this removal. Today, transportation fare that was probably N100 or N200 is about N1000 to N1500.
“Some of us who are senior lawyers that God blessed to have some little means, you have to increase the salary of staff, continue the system of cooking for staff to make sure that they eat. In other words, Nigeria has gone back to where we were in 1983 where it was hunger and starvation.
“Remember the Tai Solarin Panel that was set up to standardize the price of food items, we are back there now. The problems of Nigerians now are not even problems of development, how to build a house or buy a car, it is how to eat even if it is two meals a day.
“It is a situation that this government has to do everything about but to me, it is most embarrassing when I see officials of this government blaming the Goodluck Jonathan government that left office in 2015, nearly 10 years ago. It is even ironic that they are blaming their predecessor that they took over from within the same All Progressives Congress (APC) government.
“I think everything has gone wrong and this government needs to go back to the drawing board to know where they missed it and how they got us in this mess. When did the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) become a commercial bank dolling out money? How can the Bureau De Change (BDC) that sits under the tree control our economy and determine how much a dollar should cost?
“Why has the government dollarise the economy that you can even see government officials spending dollars? And the way we are going a dollar is already N1,500, if we are not careful we will be going to a situation where before the end of this year the naira may exchange up to N4000 for a dollar.
“Why Tinubu government is serving Nigerians is not ‘Renewed Hope’ but ‘Renewed Poverty’. We had poverty before the coming of this government but it has been renewed on a higher scale. This government should think outside the box, if possible think without the box and come up with innovations and look at what is going on in Argentina and other countries.
“This government cannot think that mire removal of fuel subsidy was a magical wand we were looking for and I knew it would not work.”
