By Ogochukwu Isioma
The Democratic Front (TDF) has disagreed with what it describes as mere fallacy and inaccurate assertions by the candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 presidential election, Mr Peter Obi in a TV interview in which he claimed that he could have performed better than President Bola Tinubu in handling the economy, if he were President in the last two years.
In a statement signed by the Chairman, Mallam Danjuma Muhammad and Secretary, Chief Wale Adedayo, the group stated that Obi lacks the capacity to do what he claimed during the interview because his posturing was based on unsound arguments and factual inaccuracies.
TDF said: “Obi’s inaccurate narratives at the media interview with Arise TV can best be described as deliberate mischief aimed at misleading the Nigerian public.
“His postulations on boosting national productivity have embarrassingly revealed the paucity of knowledge and shallow understanding with which he was struggling to create relevance for himself. He did nothing but end up boxing the air.
“We believe that even an armchair economist will not assess a country’s productivity without recourse to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as Obi did in that interview with Arise TV.
“It was therefore shocking to see the former Anambra state governor who inordinately covets the presidency insisting on the TV that there is no productivity in the economy under Tinubu, despite the tremendous contributions of critical sectors like Services, Agriculture and Mining to the nation’s GDP which impressively rose by 3.84% in Q4 of 2024.”
Giving insight into what the Tinubu administration is doing in both the education and health sectors, TDF dismissed Obi’s false assertions that he could transform Nigeria’s education and health sectors if had been President in the last two years.
The TDF had said that Obi should be nudged into reality from his world of fantasy to see the exploits that Tinubu has achieved in the education and health sectors. “The education sector has never seen a policy or programme as effective, and pragmatic as the National Educational Loan Fund (NELFUND), the group said.
“The student loan scheme has brought great relief and hope to indigent students of Nigerian universities. The ever-increasing list of beneficiaries of the student loan stands at over 500,000 undergraduates as of March 2025.
“In our view, the NELFUND policy is not only novel but has also been impactful.
“Furthermore, we are taken aback by the appalling ignorance which Obi displayed about the operations of the Primary Healthcare Centres (PHC) in Nigeria.
“In case the Labour Party chieftain does not know, the need to enable local governments to deliver on basic responsibilities like primary healthcare was the prime motive behind Tinubu’s efforts to ensure that they get direct allocation from FAAC.
“This is because the provision of
primary healthcare services are a major responsibility of the local governments, without prejudice to the interventionist efforts of the Federal Government.
“In addition to empowering the local governments through direct access to allocations from the federation account, President Tinubu has also initiated measures to provide free Caesarian Sections to pregnant mothers across the country, reduced the cost of dialysis by 70% for kidney patients, and granted a duty free waiver for the importation of pharmaceutical products to make drugs cheaper for Nigerians.
“Obi’s flip-flop and penchant for double-speak was obvious during the Arise TV interview when he said political alliances brought Nigeria to its present State. Yet, he confirmed that he was going into an alliance with other political figures ahead of 2027.
Also, in one breath, Obi criticized the nation’s external borrowings, but in another, he promised “to channel borrowed funds into critical sectors” if elected President.
“What is clear to many Nigerians is that the critical sectors of the Nigerian economy have been through positive transformation in the last twenty-two months of the Tinubu administration,” it said.
TDF urged Nigerians to remain resolute in their support of the President so that the ongoing efforts by the administration to make the nation better will not be in vain.
