BY TONY EZIMAKOR

National Publicity Secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Felix Morka, has claimed that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu staked his political future for Nigerians when he opted to implement present policies.

Morka, who addressed journalists in Abuja as the administration marked its second anniversary, agreed that some of the policies of the administration are hurting, but, however, added that they are exactly what the country needed this time to avoid the impending slippery slope to bankruptcy.

He noted that while predecessor presidents to Tinubu opted to postpone the doomsday, preferring the pursuit of populist agenda, Tinubu, on the contrary, chose to address the problem at its roots, especially as concerns fuel subsidy.

“In two years of this administration, we made clear that this president has enacted a vision and proclaimed a mission to tackle problems that were created generationally in our country. All of the difficulties we speak about today didn’t drop from the sky. They were long in coming.

“As I said, all the presidents who came before this president preferred to simply postpone the doomsday. Because we didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realize that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country. We didn’t.

“We’ve always known that, and as a matter of fact, there’s no president who has come in the last 15, 20 years who didn’t, in fact, remove fuel subsidies. Because when you think back, fuel was not at the point that President Tinubu met it back in 1999,” he said.

While noting that all governments since 1999 had at one time or the other removed fuel subsidies, Morka maintained that those administrations were not ready to address the structural problems that sustained the subsidy regime.

“But see, the difference between President Bola Tinubu and the rest of them was that this president, you know, once he was inaugurated, he took an oath and said, you know what, enough. He knew, and we know, that doing what this president has done would likely make him unpopular in the beginning, which we are all witnesses to.

“However, that calculation and the relevance, the significance of that to the electoral prospects of 2027 did not stop him, because he decided to put the strategic best interest of our country over and above his own electoral calculation,” he stated.

Asked to give a time frame when Nigerians would begin to feel the benefit of the reforms being undertaken by the administration, the APC spokesman refused to be aversive, stating instead that the nation has turned the corner.

Giving an analogy of a crawling child, he said that child would eventually get up one day and walk.

He also rejected the suggestion that the party has left governance and embarked on campaigns, imagining that endorsement is not campaigns.

Morka also queried the media on that narrative pointing out that the same question should also be directed to the opposition that is holding coalition talks.