The All Progressives Congress (APC) says Peter Obi, Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, has nothing to offer Nigerians going by his just-released manifesto.

Bayo Onanuga, the director, media and publicity, APC Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), in a statement on Tuesday, described the document as “empty and vacuous”.

Mr Onanuga alleged that the LP presidential candidate’s manifesto contained “fallacies and false statistics.”

“The document which is titled: ‘It is Possible: Our Pact with Nigerians’ offers nothing refreshing to Nigerians and comes across as total anti-climax.

“The subtitle ‘Action Plan’ was shamelessly parroted from Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s manifesto,” Mr Onanuga said.

He said many of Mr Obi’s followers would have been disappointed that their man failed to offer them anything to be proud of.

This, he said, was after all the bluster and the initial leakage of the document, which contained, strangely, 15 pages of the biographical sketches of Mr Obi and his running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed.

Mr Onanuga said Mr Obi’s document contained no great policy initiatives and options to excite right-thinking Nigerians, adding that the document was silent about how he wanted to achieve his objectives and full of false statistics.

“He claimed China moved 740 million people out of poverty. He understated the achievement and was silent about the period it took the Chinese Communist party to achieve this.

“China moved close to 800 million people out of poverty, and it was achieved in 40 years.

“This makes the present APC government’s plan to move 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years more realistic than Obi’s rhetoric tends to suggest,” Mr Onanuga said.

He said one of the fallacies contained in the document, which Mr Obi had often repeated to his followers, was that Nigeria was a failed state.

“I wonder whether the Labour Party presidential candidate sometimes bothers to check the meaning of a failed state and whether the country he dreams to govern falls into the mould of Yemen or Somalia where institutions of government have lost total control of their societies,” Mr Onanuga said.

He said another fallacy was Mr Obi’s claim that Nigeria recorded modest gains from 1999 to 2015 during Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) years, even when all verifiable evidence pointed to the contrary.

“The Labour Party presidential candidate simplistically diagnosed Nigeria’s problem as elite capture, which is self-indicting as he and his running mate, who he styled a new breed, are members.

“He claims incompetent leadership has divided the nation, playing up religious and ethnic sentiments, another self-indictment,” Mr Onanuga said.

This, he said, was especially because the hallmark of his campaign had been to go from one church to the other, positioning himself as a Christian candidate and inciting the church against the current APC government.

“In fact, the document Obi released is a poor imitation and regurgitation of what the current APC-led administration of President Muhammadu Buhari is doing.

“If anything, the document shows him as a man without honour, credibility and character because he is promising to do all the things he has railed against and de-legitimised in the past.

“We make bold to state that Obi lacks the mental acuity and rigour for the job he is asking Nigerians to entrust to him.

“He is surely not ready and prepared to be the president this great country deserves, and if indeed the Labour Party candidate paid for the wishy-washy document, he should ask for a refund.

“Nigerians are warned to steer clear of Obi and his party, his whole presidential ambition is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he said.

(NAN)