A certain Felix Morka, a lawyer, and spokesman for the All Progressives Congress (APC), recently fed the nation a toxic broth apparently brewed by his party. In his response to a tweet by Mr Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 presidential election, Morka spewed arrant and empty cockiness in his imprudent attempt to defend his party and tag Obi a sore loser.

Obi’s ‘sin’ was that he stated the obvious. He told the world via his X handle that the APC has mis-governed the nation in the past nine years. He gave factual evidence to illustrate his claim. He reeled out statistics. I will quote Obi extensively here.

“When Nigeria returned to democratic governance in 1999, it maintained an average GDP growth of about 6.72% for 16 years from 1999-2014. The impressive growth trajectory, unfortunately, was not sustained by the then-new government and our GDP growth collapsed to 2.79% in 2015 and then recession in 2016 with a negative growth of -1.58% and 0.82% in 2017. For the past 9 years, Nigeria’s economy has seen unprecedented retrogression on many fronts. In 2014, just before the inception of a new administration a year later, Nigeria had the biggest economy in Africa with a Gross Domestic Product of $568.5 billion and a GDP Per Capita of about $3200. Our economic indices pointed towards hope and prospects for the future growth of the economy.
“Nine years later, the giant of Africa has retrogressed to the 4th largest economy in Africa. Reports showed our GDP in 2023 stood at $375 billion with a per capita of $1700. In 2024, our estimated GDP declined further to $253 billion with an estimated per capita of $1087. This portrays how our 9 years journey since 2015 has resulted in a sharp decline in our national prosperity.

“Today, poverty is on the increase. Unemployment is rising. Food inflation is skyrocketing. Our foreign and local investors are losing faith in the future growth of our economy and are leaving. Businesses are shutting down. Urgent actions need to be taken to salvage the nation from further collapse and move it from consumption to production…”
Any patriotic Nigerian will easily see the sense and logic in Obi’s submission. It’s not different from what Nigerians know, feel or observe. It tells the Nigerian story of a deeper slide into the abyss of grim and gloom. Morka accused Obi of “inflaming passion and mobilising outrage through false and manipulative narratives.” Really? He supported his insensate and grossly puerile literary punt with statistics that inflame outrage. Does this Morka live in the moon?

The APC ruined the economy. Period! The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, despite being an assembly of pickpockets and apprentice thieves still allowed Nigerians a little luxury and a little pamper. Not so, the APC. The incompetence of Muhammadu Buhari, his obvious unfitness, physically and mentally, and his inability to appoint or attract men and women of verve, knowledge and moral rectitude into his cabinet, a syndrome driven by his proclivity to ethno-religious configurations, coalesced to make his 8 years a wasteful wander in the wilderness for the country. Buhari’s decapitation of the economy was not bit by bit. It was wholesomely colossal; crashing the value of the naira, borrowing wantonly for sharing through monstrously corrupted social investment schemes and other thoughtlessly contrived rogue schemes.

By the time Buhari was quitting the stage, there was no ovation. No confetti, no klieglights. He was a bad actor, a boring boor who has no business with leadership in the 21^st century. Buhari was the face of APC and his government, as we now know it, was a bazaar of looting, a period of the most horrendous heist in the nation’s annals. Buhari’s ruination of the economy has been so eloquently captured by those who should know.

A little playback for Morka. August 15, 2023, Adams Oshiomhole, a former Chairman of the APC and now a Senator was his typical emphatic self when he said that President Bola Tinubu inherited “a terrible economic situation”. He said the Tinubu government “inherited an economy in which our total national revenue was barely enough to service our debt burden.” And this was simply because Buhari borrowed mindlessly and plunged the nation into a dark, winding hole.

And if Morka does not believe Oshiomhole, what about Vice President Kashim Shettima. On May 3, this year, Shettima said what Buhari handed to Tinubu was a “death sentence” while referencing the dire state of the economy, an economy that services external debt with 90 percent of its revenue.

“The year before we took office, Nigeria’s debt service-to-revenue ratio had grown to 111.8%,” Shettima disclosed at a Roundtable in Abuja. Both Oshiomhole and Shettima are top cats of the APC. They publicly admitted that the APC government of Buhari infected the economy with a fatal virus and that Tinubu merely received the corpse of an economy that was once at the commanding height by GDP in Africa. It’s now limping at 4^th position.

So, what did Obi say that is at variance with what Oshiomhole and Shettima, Morka’s party men, said? But such caustic spat is typical of Morka. This is what happens when you send a carpenter to do the job of a mason. Morka’s job as spokesman for APC is basically public relations. He’s to make friends for the party, not enemies; he’s to explain actions and inactions of the party, admit it when the party errs and escalate the triumphs of the APC. He should be reminded that being combative is the lowest point of public communication. You are not in a court of law where effusive oratorical expression may help your argument especially if you have your evidence.

Morka is not helping Tinubu, he’s demarketing him. He should learn temperance and public communication niceties from the Minister of Information, Alhaji Mohammed Idris, who has evinced professionalism since his appointment, making friends for the Tinubu government especially within the media space.

Morka as spokesman for the APC is a disaster. His verbal recklessness places him on the ignoble pedestal of a propagandist, not a public relations man. APC has confirmed that APC ruined the nation’s economy in nine years. This is the summation of Peter Obi’s thesis. It’s an exact reflection of marketplace realities.

Rather than jumping out of the hole every time to attack critics of his party, Morka would serve the party better by helping to tinker strategies that would birth solutions to the multidimensional economic woes. Peter Obi suggested frugality on the part of the government in matters of expenditure. He wants the Tinubu government to indulge less in luxury as it demands of the people. This is a sound advice from the opposition. There is extreme hunger in the land. Morka cannot wish this away. Hunger is not partisan. As it hits APC faithful, so it tears through the ranks of the opposition and those on the borderline with equal velocity. Nigerians want Tinubu and those in power to succeed. But they cannot succeed with people like Morka warding off every opposition and pummeling every critic with his open display of verbal toxicity.

First published in Sunday Sun