The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has said that the declaration by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, that the nation’s health sector had gone comatose was a confirmation of the failure of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
This is as the party has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to tender an unreserved apology to the entire nation for allowing his administration to allegedly “deceive Nigerians while secretly running an over-bloated and sleazy oil subsidy regime as now exposed by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
The party, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, said the remark by the SGF, who serves as the very engine room of the Buhari administration, further confirmed that “Buhari is running an incompetent administration that thrives only on propaganda and false performance claims while the nation is left in pains, trauma and agony.”
The PDP said that the comments of the SGF “portrayed this government as one that is not in touch with national reality but only administers the nation remotely from the comfort of Aso Villa, while its cronies loot huge budgetary allocations and merely claimed to have released same for the health need of our citizens.”
According to the PDP, “the Buhari administration has only succeeded in reversing all the gains made in the health sector by successive PDP administrations whose robust National Strategic Health Development Plan brought in new technologies and effectively repositioned our health institutions for the good of our people.”
The party explained that its demand for an apology by the President was predicated on last week’s declaration by the NNPC Group Managing Director, Mele Kyari, that the Buhari administration had been running an over-bloated subsidy against national interest.
The PDP, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, said such declaration was a direct vindication of its stand that the “All Progressives Congress (APC)-led administration has been neck deep in serial oil fraud.”
The party said it was appalling that while President Buhari had castigated previous PDP administrations and announced that oil subsidy existed only as a fraud, he had secretly continued to preside over an over-bloated subsidy regime “through which over N14 trillion belonging to Nigerians have been stolen.”
PDP stated: “In Kyari’s words, ‘there are many things wrong with the under-recovery … the under-recovery itself is so over-bloated because we are subsidising the whole of West Africa. That has to stop’. From this, it is clear to all that the Buhari administration had not only been covering sleazy oil subsidy regime but also an under-recovery fraud with an international dimension.”
The PDP further stated that, “it is even more distressing that such monumental racket against our nation had been going on under an administration whose leaders parade as saints while swimming in an ocean of corruption.”
The party charged the Buhari Presidency “to immediately name the West African countries that it claims to be subsidising fuel for and the amount so far spent in such hazy enterprise.”
“This is so because there are already insinuations in the public space that the so-called West African countries could be the private purses of corrupt APC leaders and the cabal in the Buhari Presidency.
“Now that the Managing Director of the NNPC has summoned the courage to make this confession, after our party counseled government officials to stop lying to Nigerians about trillions of naira claimed to have been paid for subsidy, what is expected of the Buhari Presidency is to, without any further delay, apologise to Nigerians, make restitutions and take immediate steps to recover the over N14 trillion siphoned in oil scams under its watch,” the statement added.
The Guardian
