By Ogochukwu Isioma
The Tinubu Media Support Group (TMSG) has said that there is nothing in the recent interview of the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 election, Peter Obi, that showed he could have done better than President Bola Tinubu in handling the economy as he claimed.
In a statement signed by its Chairman, Emeka Nwankpa and Secretary, Dapo Okubanjo, TMSG described Obi’s position in the interview on Arise TV as sheer bluster full of hot air.
TMSG said: “We watched Mr Peter Obi’s recent interview on Arise TV’s Prime Time and also read the transcripts of his assessment of President Bola Tinubu’s handling of the national economy and other sundry political issues, and what came across was nothing but sheer bluster filled with hot air.
“As usual, he threw around ‘productivity’, the same buzzword he used during his ill-fated political campaign when he argued that he could have made the country more productive in two years.
“He spoke as if productivity was a button on a switchboard he could punch to drive change automatically and deliberately ignored the fact of what the Tinubu administration has been doing to drive positive political and economic changes.
“We wonder what Obi could have done differently, for instance, with the National Tax reform bills which have been at the National Assembly since October 2024 and which took more than a year of consultation and brainstorming by a Presidential Committee set up in August 2023 to shape.
“If Nigeria were not a democracy like Obi now says as part of his new communication strategy, we dare say that President Tinubu would have started implementing the tax reforms, which were designed to boost productivity, within a few months of assuming office.
“But only people who understand the fundamentals of democracy will appreciate the process the Tinubu tax reforms have been going through since at least August 2023.
“And talking about productivity, it is a statement of fact that Nigeria has in the last 22 months witnessed a major boost in daily crude production and also recorded N17bn of investments in the oil sector as a result of reforms instituted by new policy directives of the Tinubu administration.”
TMSG also spoke on Peter Obi’s other claims, including his assertion that he would have fixed Primary Healthcare Centers nationwide in two years.
“In addition, we were taken aback by Obi’s brag that he would have fixed Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs) and primary schools in two years if he were president.
“This is laughable, especially coming from a man who was Anambra governor for 8 years, yet it just emerged that a local government as prominent as Onitsha South only had a public hospital in 2025, courtesy of Governor Charles Soludo.
“Besides, it is surprising that a former governor does not know that PHCs and primary schools are largely the responsibilities of state and local governments, with the federal government only saddled with playing a secondary or supportive role and indeed, the Tinubu administration has been living up to its responsibilities to PHCs.
“And as usual, there was no way a Peter Obi interview would have ended without exaggeration and outright lie as he falsely claimed that Tinubu met a debt of N17 trillion but took it to N170 trillion.
“Only a barefaced, fake news merchant seeking political validation would make such a wild claim, especially as the Debt Management Office (DMO) recently put the entire public debt as of May 2023 at N87 trillion, so we wonder where Obi got his own figures from. Also, the current public debt profile is nowhere near his claim of N170 trillion.
“How could he also have suggested that the cost of debt servicing was increasing without him immediately being fact-checked by his interviewers?
“All Nigerians, aside from those bent on playing politics, should know, by now, that the debt service ratio has been reduced from 96% in 2023 to about 68%.
“So we were not under any illusion that the former Anambra state governor would never see any good in what the Tinubu administration is doing but what he said in that TV interview did not show he could have done better than the incumbent President in two years,” the group added.
