I was interested in seeing good governance. Now we have seen PDP transformed from what we saw as a vanguard for positive change and development into a party of crooks,” moaned a distraught Asiwaju Segun Oni, former Ekiti State PDP governorship candidate in an August 22, 2006 interview with Daily Independent newspaper in one moment of withering grief after co-habiting with the dark spirits in PDP and shortly after his ordination into the vineyard of the Methodist Church in his native Ifaki-Ekiti.
Later, Oni rationalised that he had to resign from PDP because his conscience and religion would not allow him to be associated with a colony of crooks.
Several years later, there is nothing to suggest that PDP’s leopard will ever change its spots.
For PDP, corruption rules its world and knows no bounds when it bares its fangs: it stings the nation as well as rankles its patron, PDP, to foundations. For instance, in the anguish of the sorry state of the party over fraudulent conduct of its leaders, former national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, once disclosed that he left in the coffers of the party N11 billion in fixed deposit and N800m in current account, an amount he said could not be accounted for few months after he left office.
Nwodo also accused party leaders of raising millions of naira for the purpose of building the national headquarters of the party but the money was allegedly diverted by the past leaders.
Speaking at the party’s retreat held in Abuja, Nwodo, who delivered a paper on ‘Party Funding’, had said: “Today, we seem to have lost it. I handed over N11 billion in fixed deposit and N800m in current account when I left as national chairman. After seven months, I don’t see what was done with that money.
“Millions were raised to finish our national headquarters; we don’t seem to have a trace of where all that money went. Our headquarters is yet to be completed. Today we don’t even have a party account.”
Another member of PDP and former Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank product, pleaded and pleaded with her spendthrift colleagues in PDP to save from the surpluses from the oil receipts for future national development, but her appeals fell on deaf ears. Instead, PDP leaders sat in their court of sleaze to share the money.
Then the $2 billion arms deal known as Dasukigate. This is an arms procurement deal that resulted in the embezzlement of $2 billion through the office of the National Security Adviser under the leadership of Colonel Sambo Dasuki (rtd).
Several years later, more details have emerged on how innocent Nigerians were short-changed by PDP leaders, which has led to the current hunger and insecurity that stalk the land. This time, the specific details emerged from no other person than the Number Two man in the administration that spent $16b on electricity in eight years with uncanny dividend in form of reduction from 4,700 mw in 1999 to 3,500mw in 2007.
In a viral tape secretly recorded by Atiku Abubakar’s media aide, Mike Achimugu, the presidential candidate of PDP was heard on tape giving chilling details of how he floated fraudulent companies that could not be traced to anyone but to which proceeds of frauds were deposited to fund his PDP. That is the same man who wants Nigerians to trust him with leadership as president and you want to ask for reasons he wants to lead Nigerians again!
His brother in the Labour Party from the same PDP roots, Peter Obi, was recently exposed in the Pandora Files as investing his state’s money in companies allegedly owned by members of his family.
PDP’s squealers in apparent disdain for Nigerians’ thirst for disciplined and visionary leadership that will make service delivery a corner stone of the nation’s administration, are cleverly brushing aside the sordid past of their leaders in government, but instead hyping a non-existent Tinubu’s health issue as if Atiku Abubakar that hops from the Middle East hospitals beds to the European emergency wards is the only one that has the balm to heal the nation’s economic wounds.
Up till this moment, no one knows anything about PDP’s economic plan other than to sell NNPC and other national assets, as usual, to cronies using their Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV).
According to Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria started borrowing money to pay salaries since October, 2014 under PDP; but Nigeria under Buhari since 2015 now borrows money for investment in capital projects.
Hear CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele on root of the present economic crisis facing the country: “In September 2008 (during the PDP government), Nigeria’s foreign reserves stood at $62 billion. What did we do with $62 billion? At a time the crude oil price was about N120 per barrel, what did the country do?
“What we could have done was to save the money. If we couldn’t save the money, invest it in infrastructure; invest it in industry that would grow productivity and the wealth of our people. But what did we do? The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) at that time went about licensing class ‘A’, class ‘B’, class ‘C’ Bureaux de Change (BDCs).
“To class “A’, the CBN was allocating $1 million per week; to class ‘B’ it was allocating $750,000 per week and to class ‘C’ BDCs, it was allocating $500,000 per week to the extent that between 2005 when the apex bank started selling dollar cash and January 2016, when we stopped it, the CBN had sold dollar cash of up to $66 billion to BDCs.
“In 11 years, CBN allocated $66 billion, averaging S6 billion per year. If this didn’t happen, we would, comfortably, be having well over $90 billion in our reserves account today and we will not be struggling to pay our bills.
“If we had thought of other ways to utilise our reserves in 2008 when it was as high as $62 billion, perhaps certainly, we would not be where we are.”
Coincidentally, most of these BDC outfits that mopped up the CBN vaults were owned by PDP leaders that ruined Nigeria and sent Nigerians to the dustbins for survival. The same characters are today still striving to stage a comeback to continue the rout after turning young Nigerians into drug traffickers, human traffickers, kidnappers, sex workers, ritual killers, Yahoo plus, armed robbers, terrorists, bandits, burglars and pipeline vandals while audacious swindlers in PDP live in affluence.
After spending about N1trn on electricity, PDP leaders reduced power generation in Nigeria from 4,800mw in 1999 to 2,400mw in 2015. But within two years, Buhari has grown generation to 6,700mw.
Now they are on the march to reverse Buhari’s milestones.
Will Nigerians dig their own graves by supporting PDP led by Atiku and his co-travellers? February 25, is the day the nation will choose between salvation in APC’s continuity agenda and dishonourable graves being dug by swindlers to bury Nigerians in penury.
•Wole Olujobi is Deputy Director of Media and Publicity, Ekiti State APC Presidential Election Committee.
