The spokesperson of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Benson Upah, has said the economic policies of the former presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari are much better than the current administration of President Bola Tinubu.
Mr Upah, who stated this during an interview with Daily Trust Newspaper, said Mr Buhari was accommodating and did everything humanly possible to ensure that life was stable and good.
While blasting the current administration, Mr Upah said Mr Tinubu, did not think of the consequential effects of the fuel subsidy removal.
He also lampooned those asking Nigerians to endure the hardship caused by the policies of the Tinubu administration.
He said, “Those that say we should bear the pains should be jailed or shot. For how long are we supposed to continue like this? This situation has gotten to a point where our yesterday is always better than our today.
“I keep telling people who say Buhari was the worst that they are joking. For us at Labour, we found Buhari very accommodating. He did everything humanly possible to ensure that life was stable and good. When he came in, he gave money to the states to pay the backlog of salaries and pensions, but it was diverted. He made other interventions to avoid the insane increases.
“If you ask those same people now, they will tell you that the Buhari administration was very good. We are talking about less than two years ago. Before Buhari came, it was Jonathan. We said Jonathan had messed up this country, but now look at the indices and compare the exchange rate, the interest rate, the debt. So, we are in a situation where we are progressively getting worse.
“Those people who say we need these pains should be shot, how much of these pains would they bear themselves? They can’t even bear one percent of it. It is because they are isolated from this trauma; that is why they have the effrontery to say that we need the pain. We don’t need these pains.
“We don’t need the president who will come and complain. When this one first came, he said, ‘I asked for this job’. I was impressed by that, but later he said that these problems were caused by his predecessor. When any leader begins to talk like that, that leader has come to the end of the road in terms of ideas”.
