Alleged Corruption: Atiku mocks Presidency’s China comparison, warns it cuts both ways

Reacting through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku argued that a presidential spokesman who reaches for China as a benchmark for judging him ends up setting a standard his own principal cannot survive.“It takes a peculiar kind of unintelligence for a spokesman to set out to drag an opponent before a hypothetical Chinese court, only to end up dragging his own principal into the dock,” he said.

Extending the logic further, Atiku suggested that Chinese standards of accountability would equally implicate the administration on unrelated fronts — from a national budget he described as riddled with padding and questionable appropriations, to unresolved allegations against a senior presidential aide over the alleged creation of a fake government agency, to what he called the gap between the government’s “Renewed Hope” promise and the hardship many Nigerians report facing.