T-Pain, Atiku, Ameachi: My stand, by Joachim OLUMBA

Former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar recently coined and introduced to the Nigeria political lexicon, T-pain in his description of the present President of the country, Alhaji BA Tinubu. This resonates aptly and is in sync with the terrible hardships visited on Nigerians by the Tinubu administration.

A former governor of Rivers State and former Minister of Transportation under the equally clueless President Muhammadu Buhari administration, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi recently dragged out youths of the country, expressing utter disappointment that they have not taken over the streets of Nigeria in response to the dire situation of unprecedented hardships confronting nearly everyone in the country.

My own take is that both Atiku Abubakar and Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi should not be taken seriously until they adopt the obvious necessary step of leading the grossly misgoverned and suffering Nigerians from the front lines. If they are true leaders, who Nigerians should look up to, they must rise up and hit the streets of Nigeria for us to queue behind them to demand an end to our collective suffering; an end to fiscal irresponsibility and unaccountability; an end to bad governance.

They should never expect us to trust them as our genuine leaders who care about us when they are only talking about our terrible conditions from the confines of their respective beautiful empires. They must come out to the streets to talk tough about us and our terrible plights before we will believe that they are truly concerned about us, and we can then join our voices and energies with theirs to give this heartless government the treatment it deserves from the over 150 million Nigerians who are trapped in the web of agonizing poverty and suffering.

Former President Buhari, incumbent President Tinubu and others flooded the streets to castigate and de-market the then President Goodluck Jonathan. Except Atiku Abubakar, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and co. embark on the same route, we’ll regard all their recent rantings as mere rhetoric.