A member of the Northern Elders Forum, NEF, Prof Usman Yusuf said the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu has turned to hopelessness.

Yusuf, a former Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) stated this in an interview Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.

According to him, rather than inject the Nigerian people with some hope capsules, the Tinubu administration has made Nigerians more hopeless in the last one year.

He said, “People have lost hope. It pains me to see our people lining up to collect cups of palliatives. Renewed Hope has turned into hopelessness. People have lost hope.

“The last one year has been a year of nothing but deception, destitution and hopelessness.

“From next week, they will start telling us their propaganda. What have they done to benefit the ordinary people? In a span of one year, they have brought millions of people back into multidimensional poverty, they have pushed millions more children out of school because their parents cannot pay their school fees.”

Yusuf described the economic management team of the President as “tax collectors” rather than “economists”.

“The economic team, to me, looks more like tax collectors than economists. Taxation does not grow economy; only production does,” he said.

Recall that President Tinubu campaigned on the mantra of the ‘Renewed Hope.’

The President was sworn-in on May 29, 2023 after a keenly contest election in the February 2023.

Since inception, the President Tinubu administration has introduced some reforms such as petrol subsidy removal and the unification of the foreign exchange windows.