The presidential candidate of the Allied People’s Movement (APM), Engr Seyi Makinde, has described the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign flag-off in Kaduna on Saturday, as a “carnival of deceit, recycled lies and brazen political fraud.”
Makinde in a statement by the Director of Strategic Communications of Makinde-Daura Presidential Campaign Organisation (MDPCO), Richard Ihediwa, said it was a “desperate attempt to sell repackage failed promises and fresh illusions to the North, a region battered by insecurity, crushed by hardship and betrayed by President Tinubu’s government which is now on its fours begging for re-election.”
He condemned President Bola Tinubu’s attempt to blame poverty in Nigeria on the opposition, describing it was an evasion of responsibility from a failed president who he alleged, plunged Nigeria into an unprecedented economic crisis that she now competes alongside Afghanistan in the axis of failed nations.
The APM candidate noted that President Tinubu had promised young Nigerians “a better tomorrow,” whereas his mismanagement of the economy threw them into joblessness, desperation and disillusionment.
“Some of them who made bold to protest against hunger in August 2024 including minors, were hauled from the streets of Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Gombe among others states to Abuja, cramped into detention and charged for treason,” he stated.
The Oyo State governor also described the APC rally as “comedy of absurd”, noting that Tinubu who claimed to have defeated insecurity in the North, resorted to the commissioning the partially constructed 88 km stretch of the Abuja -Kaduna High way inside the stadium during the rally instead of visiting the site.
“It is either the president was afraid of insecurity or fears the boiling volcano of popular anger against his failed government,” Makinde said.
He reminded the president that “a section is not the entire Abuja–Kaduna–Kano Expressway,” and that commissioning ceremony is not substitute for full delivery.
“President Tinubu cannot claim the whole when he is commissioning a part. He cannot turn an inherited project into personal glory,” the APM candidate added.
He also condemned the alleged number of security personnel deployed to the rally venue, stated that a government confident of its popularity does not need to turn a campaign rally into a security operation.
According to him, President Tinubu did not offer the North and Nigerians no convincing reasons they should vote for him in next year’s presidential election other than his declaration of “prosperity, continuity and progress.”
