The recently released manifesto of Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Peter Obi offers nothing refreshingly new to Nigerians but “fallacies and false statistics”, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has said.
The Director, Media & Publicity of APC Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), Bayo Onanuga, in a statement on Tuesday, also said Obi’s manifesto is a poor imitation of the programmes of the current APC-led administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Obi had released his 62-page manifesto over the weekend. Tagged ‘It is Possible: Our Pact with Nigerians’, the manifesto was anchored on seven thematic areas: security, production, institutional reforms, the industrial revolution, infrastructural development, human capital development, and robust foreign policy.
However, Onanuga, in the statement, said, “After perusing the document which is very high on graphics and demagogic rhetorics and short on substance, we have come to the conclusion that the document is empty and vacuous.”
“The document which is titled offers nothing refreshing to Nigerians and comes across as total anti-climax. The subtitle ‘Action Plan’ was shamelessly parroted from Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s manifesto.
“As expected, Obi’s document contains fallacies and false statistics.
“Obi claimed China moved 740 million people out of poverty. He understated the achievement and was silent about the period it took the Chinese Communist party to achieve this. China moved close to 800 million people out of poverty and it was achieved in 40 years. This makes the present APC government’s plan to move 100 million of Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years, more realistic than Obi’s rhetoric tends to suggest.
“One of the fallacies contained in the document, which Obi has often repeated to his followers, is that Nigeria is a failed state. We wonder whether the Labour Party candidate sometimes bothers to check the meaning of a failed state and whether the country he dreams to govern falls into the mould of Yemen or Somalia, where institutions of government have lost total control of their societies,” the statement added.
The APC PCC also said Obi’s policy document has exposed him as “ill-prepared for the titanic task of governing a country the size of Nigeria”.
Obi, a former Anambra State governor, with large following by youths, is in the 2023 race for Aso Rock’s top job alongside frontline contenders like APC’s Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Major polls have put Obi ahead of Tinubu and Atiku but the days ahead of the February 25, 2023 presidential election remain heavily pregnant.
