A statement issued by his media office on Monday, Abubakar
said the increasing spate of hunger ravaging the country, largely felt by the
underprivileged and the downtrodden, is deplorable.

The former vice-president said that while any government’s
primary objective is its citizens’ security and welfare, Nigerians are
“progressively wallowing in misery and poverty” under President Bola Tinubu’s
government.

Abubakar said the current situation engenders “progressive
propensity for criminalities” such as high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping,
cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice, among others.

He said most violent socio-political eruptions and
revolutions across the globe were fueled by pervasive hunger and unbearable
material conditions.

Abubakar said the current situation in the country is
unacceptable, noting that the French revolution, the 1917 Russian revolution,
and the Arab Spring, in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable
frustration set himself ablaze and triggered violent socio-political eruptions
from Tunisia to the Middle East and North Africa, should serve as a warning.

“Back home here in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to
argue that even the  ‘ENDSARS’ protest
was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the
part of the government,” Abubakar was quoted as saying.

He said that two years after assuming office, the president
has yet to show that his government is capable of addressing the grim issue of
severe hunger “staring the poor in the face”.

“Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be
undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence
nationwide,” he said.

“There is no government worth its salt that does not  place priority on the welfare and security of
the people.

“Whether the present powers accept it or not, the reality of
our existence is that the poor are increasingly dying of hunger while the
majority of the living poor exists at the mercy of the ill-advised policies of
this government.”

Abubakar added that since reforms are made for citizens,
they should have a human face.