A Chieftain of the Labour Party, LP, Kenneth Okonkwo, has taken a swipe at President Bola Tinubu, saying he started doing the wrong thing from the day he was sworn in.
Okonkwo made this statement on Tuesday during an interview on Channels Television while analysing Tinubu’s first media chat.
The former Nollywood actor noted that for 19 months, the President has not been able to tell Nigerians what he has been doing.
According to him, democracy is not about talking to the people but about the leaders being interrogated by the people.
“It’s not about you talking to the people but about you being interrogated by the people. The Constitution says the participation of the people in their government shall be ensured. The people participate through their representatives, both from the media, both from any policy you want to do, has to be interrogated by the people.
“Democracy is not just about doing what is good for the people. It is also about doing what the people want,” he said.
The Nollywood star-turned politician, specifically blasted Tinubu for shifting blames on the organisers of palliative distribution exercises, which has caused stampedes resulting to the death of many Nigerians.
The Labour Party chieftain said the stampede was due to the extreme hunger in the land, and not the fault of the organisers, adding that the worth of life in Tinubu’s government is now about N5,000 and some grains of rice.
“The President shifted all the responsibility to the organizers, people who wanted to help people who are hungry. Let me tell you, this stampede happened in the East, West and the North. That means it’s now a general thing that Nigerians from all sectors are hungry and things are hard.
“They did not die in the stampede because they were poor. Poverty exists in every country. They died in the stampede because they were desperately hungry. In other words, they know that if they don’t have that food, they won’t even have anything to fall back in their houses and that is why they had to struggle for N5000 and for grains of rice.
“The worth of life in Tinubu government is now about 5000 Naira and is about grains of rice.”
According to him, the Catholic church had been distributing food palliatives during Yuletide without recording any stampede. He stressed that the hardship in the land made unimaginable number of people to go for the food distribution event.
He added that the people became hopeless on seeing the mammoth crowd, which made them to struggle by all means to be beneficiaries of the gesture.
According to him, the development is a sign of a failed state.
“Look at what happened in Abuja in the Catholic ministry. They’ve been doing that for decades. They’ve been doing that for years. Why is this year’s own different? It is different because people have become desperately hungry.
“But because they were desperate, they did not wish to ever leave there without having anything, having seen that more people came. They knew that some people will leave there without anything, so they had to now struggle to make sure that they are part of the beneficiaries. That is a sign of a filled state. Struggling and dying for the most basic necessity of life, which is food,” Okonkwo lamented.
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