African Democratic Congress presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar has issued a sweeping indictment of President Bola Tinubu’s three-year record in office, accusing the administration of governing by propaganda while millions of Nigerians endured rising poverty, collapsing businesses, school abductions, and a widening sense of governmental abandonment.
In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said the administration’s most fitting report card was not its media campaigns or self-congratulatory speeches but the tears of hungry families, the despair of unemployed youths, the collapse of businesses, and the recurring images of schoolchildren abducted by criminals. He accused the government of borrowing approximately 11.9 trillion naira within a nine-month period while directing only 3.1 trillion naira toward capital projects, and questioned where the remainder had gone.
He singled out the concentration of infrastructure contracts on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and the Badagry-Sokoto Highway, both reportedly awarded to a company linked to someone the president had publicly described as his partner in daring, as evidence of a disturbing pattern in which the benefits of government spending flowed toward a privileged circle of politically connected interests.
On security, Atiku described the recent abductions of schoolchildren in Borno and Oyo states as the most accurate report card of the administration after three years, saying no greater symbol of governmental failure existed than classrooms becoming hunting grounds for criminals. He called for special courts to expedite terrorism trials and said the death penalty must be applied to terrorism offences with the political will to enforce it.
He said the ADC would soon unveil a comprehensive policy blueprint offering solutions to the economic, security, institutional, and governance failures he attributed to the APC administration, and made a pledge to assemble accomplished professionals and experienced technocrats to restore merit to governance if elected.
A coalition of civil society organizations comprising Global Rights, BudgIT, CLEEN Foundation, Centre LSD, Amnesty International, and 90 other groups issued a parallel statement citing data from massatrocities.org showing that at least 19,980 people had been killed and no fewer than 12,362 others abducted in incidents of mass atrocities and violent attacks across Nigeria since May 2023. The groups said at least 1,486 security personnel had also been killed in active service during the same period. They called on the federal government to fulfil its constitutional obligation to protect lives, investigate and prosecute perpetrators of mass atrocities, strengthen civilian protection mechanisms, and provide humanitarian support to displaced persons and survivors.
