Mr Fani-Kayode says the pain is the only necessary step to take to recover and restore the dwindling economy.
Femi Fani-Kayode, the director, new media for the APC presidential campaign council, has said some Nigerians will feel pain if the party wins the 2023 general elections and begins economic recovery.
While he said the pain will only last a while, Mr Fani-Kayode noted that it is the only necessary step to take to recover and restore the dwindling economy.
Mr Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister, made the comments on Channels TV’s “Politics Today.”
He was reacting to the manifesto released by the APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, and the reactions that followed.
PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Tinubu’s document contains almost the same promises that the 2015 APC manifesto of Change carried.
While some Nigerians have lauded some of the initiatives in the document, others described it as lacking in specifics.
In the manifesto, Mr Tinubu said his government will strive to achieve stability of petroleum product supply by fully deregulating the downstream sector and ensuring that local refinery capacity will meet domestic consumption needs.
He also said he would remove the subsidy in phases.
“… We shall phase out the fuel subsidy yet maintain the underlying social contract between the government and the people.”
According to the 2023 budget proposal, the current administration plans to spend N3.35 trillion on subsidies in the first half of the year.
Mr Kayode, who is in full support of the plan, said the pain that many Nigerians will feel “will be ameliorated to a certain degree.”
“That’s the way forward for what we believe will be the best option,” he said when asked if it was fair to impose such pain on millions of Nigerians. “Fair because the pain is the pathway to great success and bliss. Yes, there will be pain on the road to economic recovery. But there will be ways of managing the pain.”
The APC, he said, is not concerned about the past but the present and the future.
The former minister acknowledged that there “have been challenges in the past that affected many things that have not been handled well.” He, however, said agricultural production and insecurity improved.
APC’s demons migrated to PDP
If the main opposition party, PDP, is voted into power next year, Nigerians will have hell over the next four years because they have failed to fulfil promises – the reason five governors have failed to support Atiku, Mr Fani-Kayode said.
In APC, he explained, northern governors conceded power to the South but in PDP they ripped power and stole it from the South.
He was asked about his past comments where he said the APC was filled with demons and in his response, Mr Fani-Kayode said his views have changed since then.
“The APC of the past is not the APC of today. The demons that were in the APC have relocated to the PDP. It was my view at the time. My views have changed. We saw that the PDP was becoming the monster that we thought the APC was.”
Northern leaders in the APC insisted that power should go to the South. And the new APC knows that too much weight should not be put on religious matters, he added.
As campaign activities intensify in the new week, the APC will need to do a lot more to convince Nigerians on how the pain will be a good one.
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