The African Democratic Congress has rejected President Bola Tinubu’s Democracy Day address as a campaign speech in the guise of a presidential statement, saying that after three years of the Tinubu administration and eleven years of APC rule, Nigerians had exhausted their patience for future promises and were entitled to a reckoning with past performance rather than another catalogue of intentions.
ADC National Publicity Secretary Bolaji Abdullahi said the party had carefully reviewed the address and found it long on assurances and short on accountability, describing it as the kind of speech appropriate for a candidate seeking a first mandate rather than a leader entering a fourth year in office who should be able to point to a record.
He said the APC had come to power in 2015 on promises to tackle insecurity, revive the economy, create jobs, reduce poverty, and strengthen institutions, and that eleven years later those same themes continued to dominate government speeches while the actual conditions facing Nigerians had worsened. He said millions of Nigerians were living through one of the most severe cost-of-living crises in recent memory, with food prices at punishing levels, transportation costs soaring, small businesses collapsing under rising operating expenses, and families making painful sacrifices simply to maintain a minimum standard of living.
Abdullahi said the Democracy Day occasion should have been used to account for what eleven years of APC stewardship had delivered, to explain why public confidence in government continued to decline, and to present evidence rather than projections. Instead, he said, citizens heard once again that prosperity was around the corner, that reforms would soon bear fruit, that jobs were coming, and that security was improving, formulations that he said amounted to an implicit acknowledgement that none of those things had yet materialized.
The ADC also condemned the National Assembly for proceeding on recess on Democracy Day, describing the decision as a display of historical tone-deafness that revealed the legislature’s disconnection from the symbolic weight of the occasion. He said the day that marked Nigeria’s democratic heritage was precisely the moment when elected representatives should be in session demonstrating accountability to the citizens who sent them, and that shutting down the house of democracy on democracy day was a message no APC-led legislature should have been comfortable sending.
