Former Director General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), Osita Okechukwu has said the economic policies of President Bola Tinubu were aimed at addressing faulty foundations for the nation to maximize its financial potential.
A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Okechukwu admitted that citizens have faced hardship due to the President’s economic policies. He, however, asked for patience as the policies would birth the required results.
In an interview with News Central on Monday, he stated that the country’s economic challenges could be traced back to the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) by the Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida administration.
“Let me start by acknowledging that there is hardship in the country, Mr. President, as well as me, that there is hardship in the country. On his plan, he had marshalled out plan. Luckily, some are coming to fruition. The rain did not stop beating us today. It started in 1986 when Nigeria adopted the Structural Adjustment Program, whose mantra was that the government had no business business.
“But when we inherited all those back years, what President Tinubu did was that he looked into the subsidy and said between 2005 and 2023, we have got over $70 billion. And he said, how do we save that fund so that we can plough it into critical infrastructure, both physical and social? And he designed his parameters, one of which is the diversification of the economy, the issue of encouraging electric vehicles, the CNG, Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, to lessen the dependence on PMS or premium motor spirit,” he said.
