Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has raised alarm over the increasing spate of hunger in the country, warning that “most violent socio-political eruptions and revolutions all over the world had often been powered by pervasive hunger and unbearable material conditions – especially the paradox of squalor amidst plenty in our land.”
Atiku, in a statement by his media aide, Paul Ibe, regretted that the masses of Nigerians are progressively wallowing in misery and poverty under the watch of President Bola Tinubu-led All Progressives Congress (APC) administration.
The former vice president stated that the current situation does not give cause for cheers as “it engenders an increasingly progressive propensity for criminalities in the form of high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice, among others.”
Atiku further warned that the current situation in the country was what gave rise to the French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Arab Spring, “in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable frustration set himself ablaze in a development which occasioned violent socio-political eruptions starting out from Tunisia to engulf the Middle-East and North Africa.
“Back home here in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to argue that even the “ENDSARS” protest was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the part of the government.”
He lamented that two years after assuming office, there are still no manifest signs that the APC government is capable of addressing the grim issue of severe hunger staring the poor in the face.
“Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence nationwide. There is no government worth its salt that does not place priority on the welfare and security of the people,” Atiku said.
He stressed further that since reforms are made for citizens and not the other way round, the reforms of this administration should have a human face.
“Whether the present powers accept it or not, the reality of our existence is that the poor are increasingly dying of hunger while the majority of the living poor exists at the mercy of the ill-advised policies of this government,” Atiku stated.
