Tinubu, APC breeding corruption, says PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its national leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, of breeding corruption, stating that governors in the opposition party have been subjecting people in their states to harsh economic realities.

Reacting to a statement in which Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the national publicity secretary of APC, referred to the president as the “enemy of Nigeria”, PDP maintained that  the record of Jonathan is unprecedented in the history of the country.

“Corruption, this corruption, a regular sing song of the APC, a party that has deliberately grown forgetful of the fact that corruption walks on four in the states under its control and that in its topmost leadership,” said Olisa Metuh, spokesman of PDP in a statement.

“In the Emperor of Bourdilion lies the pantheon of corruption. The people of Ekiti grew wiser and shook off a regime of internal colonialism, of high taxation, of outrageous contract pricing and of the overlordship of greed of few over their commonwealth.

“Nigerians know where the moth of corruption is being bred. Impunity and failure as a desperate effusion of noise, fury and falsehood which are the unmasked trademark of the Nigerian equivalent of the ancient ‘Athenian thirty tyrants’ who would not mind the nation on its knees in quest for power.”

Metuh added that APC is working towards using violence to destabilise the country’s democracy because the recent loss of election in Ekiti has made it less popular to achieve meaningful results in the 2015 election.

“The APC is trading in its best merchandise – falsehood, deceit, blackmail, sheer pernicious propaganda. This political party, the APC is the centrifuge of violence in Nigeria, and like the ‘thirty tyrants’ in the ancient Athen, is desperately looking for excuses to truncate democracy and ruin our collective destiny…” he said.

“No doubt the APC is afraid and bitter that its prematurely celebrated electoral fortunes, its vaunted popularity to win the 2015 election is being gradually smashed to its face as mere illusion. It lost Ekiti to popular votes and is afraid that in Osun where its divisive ideology has created an acrimonious division in its educational system amidst non performance in other sectors, it will also fall, hence must heap the blame on President Jonathan. The APC is clearly looking for grounds for fancied violence and subsequent truncation of democracy. ”

“On the contrary, the Freedom of Information Act meant to arm every Nigerian in fight against corruption, which Lagos, the APC flagship is refusing to domesticate till today, was in the cooler for nearly a decade until President Jonathan dusted it and passed same into law. In speech, in action and in body language, President Jonathan has left nobody in doubt of his principled stand on the rule of law and transparency and only in the narrow world of mischief of the APC does this matter less.

“In the past three years, the Jonathan administration has squarely tackled massive infrastructural development with thousands of kilometers of federal roads and bridges either constructed, reconstructed or rehabilitated while the long forgotten rail system is now steaming back to life with modern coaches even as expansion of network is on-going. Various measures for air safety also took centre stage with the vast expansion and rehabilitation of facilities at all federal airports in a gale of efforts that changed the face of the nation’s aviation industry in less three years.”

Calling upon Nigerians to commend Jonathan for a credible electoral system, PDP expressed dissatisfaction with conduct of council elections in Lagos, Ogun, Osun and Edo States.

APC: Jonathan is Nigeria’s no. 1 enemy

APC had on Wednesday described Jonathan as Nigeria’s number one enemy for “his propensity to perpetrate impunity, abuse federal institutions and tolerate corruption”.

Mohammed said that under the watch of the President, “Nigeria has been thrown into unprecedented crisis that is manifesting in the opposition strongholds of Rivers, Edo, Adamawa and Nasawara states and elsewhere across the country.”

The party said: ”As we write, there are contrived crises in Rivers and Edo, where a handful of lawmakers with the backing of higher authorities have been terrorizing the Houses of Assembly in their States and defying court orders at will, with the ultimate prize for the renegades being the states’ chief executives; and there is crisis in Adamawa, where an impeachment plot has been undoubtedly instigated and hatched by higher authorities, despite tepid denials, and soldiers have been deployed to cage in very high state officials.

”In Ekiti, several billions of Naira was allegedly scooped from a massive political war chest to subvert democracy, induce voters and upturn all known political theories to such an extent that all that anyone seeking to be elected now has to do is to dole out stolen public funds
to a people already rendered comatose and impoverished by runaway corruption, glaring incompetence and sheer cluelessness that are the hall marks of the Jonathan Administration.

”Under President Jonathan, there is no longer the need to make any electoral promises or carry out people-oriented and quality of life projects. Just distribute bags of rice, expired or not, to a people already famished by a clueless federal government, and tuck in a few naira notes into the pockets of electorates who have been deliberately impoverished. This is a clear subversion of democracy.

”With such huge funds now being allegedly channeled to Osun to thwart the will of the people ahead of the 9 Aug. governorship election, in an attempt to repeat the Ekiti ‘experiment’ which the PDP-led federal government deemed to have been a ‘success’, it is now clear the
Jonathan Administration will not pull any punches in subverting democracy ahead of the 2015 general elections.

”It is also clear now what happened to the 20-billion-dollar oil money that went missing, as well as the reason behind the massive oil subsidy fraud, the Malabo multi-billion dollar fraud, the pension scam, and finally why the President, whose body language does not
abhor corruption, has redefined stealing as anything but corruption.

“The party said as far as President Jonathan is concerned, all that matters is his re-election. While he pursues that goal with vigour, the over 200 missing girls in Borno can stay where they are being kept by their abductors for over three months now; and the daily carnage in the North-east as well as Kaduna, Nasarawa and Benue can continue, even though over 12,000 people have been killed and 8,000 maimed. Once the President continues to play his dangerous politics of re-election, which involves using state resources and national institutions to muscle and muzzle the opposition; the press and ordinary citizens, all is well in the eyes of his purposeless party.

“Unfortunately, in the midst of all the shenanigans, Nigerians are more divided than ever along ethnic and religious lines, no thanks to a President who is so obsessed with power that he will not hesitate to cash in on the nation’s fault lines, abuse federal institutions, compromise once credible public commentators to shamelessly mortgage their integrity on the altar of greed, and disregard even the Electoral Act by kick-starting electioneering campaign before the starting gun is fired.

”In view of this, we are now alerting the good people of Nigeria that President Jonathan’s re-election at all costs is a clear and present danger to Nigeria, her people and indeed her democracy.

”Unless Nigerians speak out and unless the instigated harassment of the media by security agencies is halted, so the Fourth Estate of the Realm can continue to perform its constitutional duties unhindered, Nigerians should gear up for more dangerous days ahead, which will
include the stripping of the citizenry of their constitutionally-guaranteed basic rights, more egregious abuse of national institutions, perpetration of more acts of corruption as well as the muscling and muzzling of the opposition, even as the people will continue to be impoverished.

”On our part, as the country’s main opposition party, we pledge to be unrelenting in speaking the truth to power, irrespective of whether or not it makes the federal government uncomfortable, in the overall interest of our nation.”