By Omeiza Ajayi, Abuja

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has told President Bola Tinubu to stop blaming President Muhammadu Buhari and his other predecessors for the country’s woes, saying an administration that continues to point at past governments more than three years into its tenure is, by its own conduct, admitting it has run out of ideas.

In a statement issued on Friday by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, the African Democratic Congress ADC presidential candidate said the Nigerian people are no longer interested in who caused the country’s problems, but who will solve them.

Atiku conceded that no serious person disputes that Tinubu inherited a difficult economy but insisted that governance cannot be reduced to a running commentary on the past.

He said, “The constitution did not swear President Tinubu into office to explain history. It swore him into office to change it. Every administration inherits problems. Great leaders are remembered for solving them, not for endlessly rehearsing them.”

He accused the administration of institutionalised fiscal recklessness and what he called one of the greatest appropriation scandals in the country’s history.

The former Vice President’s outburst was triggered by Tinubu’s recent claim that “prosperity is on the horizon” and that the quality of life for Nigerians is improving, a suggestion Atiku dismissed as a fantasy detached from reality.

“Mr President says prosperity is on the horizon. Nigerians are asking, ‘Whose horizon?’ Certainly not that of the market woman whose capital has been wiped out by inflation. Not that of the civil servant whose salary now expires before the month begins,” he said, adding that the president’s optimism also excluded manufacturers battling crushing energy costs, unemployed graduates, farming communities displaced by bandits, and families who have cut back on daily meals just to survive.

He also faulted Tinubu’s comparisons of Nigeria to China, saying the president had missed the point of that country’s economic transformation. “China did not become an economic superpower by complaining about the size of its population. It became prosperous because visionary leadership transformed that population into its greatest economic asset through sustained investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, education, technology, and export-led industrialisation,” he said, insisting that Nigeria’s youthful population was a strategic advantage rather than a burden.

He pledged that an Atiku administration would pursue aggressive investment in manufacturing, modern infrastructure, quality education, skills acquisition, agriculture and export-driven industries to unlock what he described as the country’s enormous productive capacity.

Atiku further criticised as insensitive any suggestion that Nigerians should tolerate present-day hardship because hunger existed in earlier decades. “Nobody ‘elected’ Tinubu to eliminate the hunger of 1940. Nigerians ‘elected’ him to confront the hunger of today. The fact that previous generations endured hardship is not a licence to deepen the suffering of the present generation,” he said.

He maintained that hope could not be manufactured through speeches but must be earned through policies that translate into tangible improvements in people’s lives.

Urging the president to step away from official briefings and choreographed public appearances to engage with everyday realities, Atiku said the Nigeria described by Tinubu simply does not exist outside official rhetoric.