The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has tackled President Muhammadu Buhari’s News Year speech as a script with excuses and empty promises.

In his New Year broadcast, the president in the morning of Friday, January 1, 2021, vowed to re-energise and re-organise the nation’s security apparatus with a view to bringing to an end insurgency and other violent crimes in the country. 

Buhari also assured Nigerians that Nigeria will survive and thrive in spite of the ongoing socio-economic challenges facing the country.

But the PDP in a statement by its spokesperson, Kola Ologbondiyan said the president’s speech confirmed that the country’s leadership is weak.

While calling on “compatriots to come together and salvage the country”, Ologbondiyan said instead of addressing pressing issues and proffering solutions, Buhari regurgitated a “script full of lame excuses and empty promises that address nothing”

He said, “As a President, President Buhari has not demonstrated the capacity to play his own part, as he claimed, having failed to find a solution for the security and economic challenges that pervade our nation under his incompetent and lethargic watch.

“The myriads of lame excuses in Mr. President’s address again underlines our national misfortune of weak leadership that is unable to resolutely confront and vanquish bandits, terrorists, kidnappers and vandals who are now holding our nation hostage, ravaging our communities, kidnapping and beheading our compatriots without restrain.

“The least Nigerians expected from Mr. President, in the New Year, was a decisive will to tackle our security challenges by reviewing his parade and heeding the demands by Nigerians to rejig our nation s security.

“The situation at hand requires more than an armchair commander in chief who only dwells on excuses for manifest failures. President Muhammadu Buhari’s New Year address only points to the fact that our nation is in dire need of leadership that is willing, able and ready to engage from the fronts.”

The opposition party also tackled Buhari, saying he failed to articulate a definite economic recovery blueprint.

Ologbondiyan said, “Mr. President had the opportunity to redeem his administration by taking steps that will address high costs of food, education and housing deficit; address the high price of fuel, multiple taxes and tariffs that bear pressure on businesses and families as well as how to enhance national productivity and grow our Gross Domestic Produce (GDP).

“In the same vein, our party finds it lamentable that President Buhari, in his reference to the demonstration by our youths, did not make any decisive pronouncement to end the on-going persecution of EndSARS protesters or order a Presidential inquest into the reported Lekki killing.”

The party, however, urged Nigerians to use the new year to reinforce their bond of unity and continue to work together to rescue the country from misrule.