Tinubu’s reform agenda most credible; Atiku’s own inapplicable, Obi had no policy document: Okupe

Aformer Labour Party (LP) chieftain, Doyin Okupe, has described President Bola Tinubu’s administration’s reform agenda as the most credible compared to other presidential candidates in the 2023 presidential election.

Mr Okupe, a former spokesman for President Goodluck Johnathan, stated this while assessing Mr Tinubu’s administration’s reform agenda.

Mr Okupe said that even though he did not support Mr Tinubu before the 2023 general election or belong to the ruling party, the president’s “reform agenda is the most credible.”

“The Renewed Hope Agenda he (Tinubu) brought is one that can address, and is addressing, the country’s current challenges,” Mr Okupe said.

According to him, the president is meticulously applying the renewed hope agenda.

“Tinubu has a better policy document than any of his two rivals during the 2023 presidential election,” said Mr Okupe, who acknowledged that Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is an “experienced, knowledgeable and thorough-bred politician.”

“I know that for a fact that he also came with a testament that would have been binding on him and Nigerians. But when you put the testament side-by-side with the current reality on ground, it is not applicable,” the politician said.

He stated that Mr Abubakar’s testament, documents and preparations were hinged on some loans, which he thought he could use to sort out some things if elected, stressing they were all theoretical.

Mr Okupe said this was especially so because, by the time President Muhammadu Buhari left office, no international financial institution was ready to lend Nigeria money again.

He said that if such institutions were ready to borrow Nigeria money, Mr Buhari wouldn’t have gone to print money just at the tail end of his administration.

“So the premise Atiku placed his testament on was sinking, and it can’t work,” he said. “As for Peter Obi of the Labour Party, he did not give any document to Nigerians that he was going to work on.”

“In the Labour Party, we didn’t have a document that we could adopt as a policy document for what was going on. All we were saying was that we wanted to take Nigeria from consumption to production; good rhetorics, but it was not grounded either in policy development or principle application.”

Mr Okupe noted that the announcement of fuel subsidy removal by Mr Tinubu on his inauguration day was a mere confirmation of an event that had happened under Buhari’s administration.

“Upon assumption of office, Tinubu addressed the issues in the country’s foreign exchange where some people were feeding fat on our foreign exchange earnings, using their contacts in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN),” he said.

Mr Okupe also noted that Mr Tinubu implemented the student loan and consumer protection programmes, providing loans to low-income earners in a systematic manner.

He recalled that the president paid off some debts that were going to cripple the country’s economy.

“This man (Tinubu) has a systematic, reliable, focused and applicable agenda that can take Nigeria to enviable heights,” he said.