Famous Nigerian Catholic priest, Rev Fr Chinenye Oluoma has suggested that Nigerians were obviously too naive to understand President Bola Tinubu’s renewed hope agenda.
Oluoma, who likened hope to anaesthetics, said anesthetics was meant to numb the pain while the real life saving surgery takes place.
In a post on his Facebook page on Sunday, the cleric lamented that naira, the nation’s currency, was strongly resisting every effort to keep it below N1500 naira per dollar under the current government.
Oluoma noted that a loaf of bread that sold for N500 now sells for N1200 naira, while commodity prices have doubled, tripled and quadrupled as the case may be.
According to him, “Hope doesn’t put food on the table, hope doesn’t pay school fees, hope doesn’t pay hospital bills, hope doesn’t pay house rent (which landlords increase indiscriminately and govt ignores infamously); Hope will not create jobs or make electricity supply constant.”
He continued, “The problem here is that successive governments in Nigeria keep administering large doses of anaesthetics to us without carrying out any curative surgery. Maliciously increasing the dosage and frequency once we wake up from the effect of previous dosage.
“At worst, hope is an opium, a psychic drug that makes you feel okay and patient, maybe even comfortable with all the things going wrong.
“It sedates you but doesn’t change your condition. So, Tinubu offered us hope not jobs, not improved earnings, not stable electricity or buoyant economy, he offered us hope and we bought it”.
Speaking further, Oluoma opined that ‘hope’ shouldn’t be what politicians offer its citizens, adding that it should be left for clerics.
He stressed that a government should offer job opportunities, not hope of jobs
“Hope shouldn’t be what politicians offer its citizens, it should be left for clerics like my humble self. A government should offer job opportunities, not hope of jobs.
“A government should offer security, power, housing, affordable health care, education and not hope for these things. Why is Nigeria the place where politicians preach like clergy men and clergy act like politicians?
“While the former offer hope, the latter promise jobs, prosperity and other material well being they are in no position and have no capacity to give. What in God’s blue planet is going on with governance in Nigeria?
“As long as the purchasing power of the poor masses keep nose diving and the prices of basic goods and services keep skyrocketing further beyond their reach, what we have is nothing but ‘Renewed Shege’.
“Each administration will always leave our currency weaker than the previous one, a recurring decimal. One administration shows us Shege, another one comes and renews it and we keep dying gradually in hope. Let the poor citizens of Nigeria breathe, please.”
Nigerians naive to understand Tinubu’s ‘renewed hope’ – Fada Oluoma
