Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria, Osita Okechukwu, has said Nigerians will be making a grave error by returning the opposition Peoples Democratic Party back to power in 2023.
He explained that the PDP cannot be trusted to rescue Nigeria because promoters of the party have an incurable appetite for corruption and a history of mismanaging the economy.
Okechukwu said this in an interview in Abuja, on Sunday.
He was reacting to a rescue plan the PDP said it was putting in place in order to rid Nigeria of the socio-economic woes which it said the All Progressive Congress regime; has plunged the nation into.
He said, “How can Nigerians trust our sister political party, the PDP, given their antecedents riddled with trust deficit? We know that times are hard; I think it is better to allow APC to fix Nigeria. Where does one start from?”
The VON DG who is an Enugu State chieftain of the APC, noted that Nigeria was yet to fully recover from the assault on its economy by the recklessness and corruption which characterized the 16 years the PDP spent in office.
Okechukwu further noted that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was still probing the allegation of a multi-million Naira fraud leveled against the suspended National Chairman of the PDP, Uche Secondus, by a party member, Kassim Afegbua.
He also pointed out that Nigerians cannot forget in a hurry the various financial scandals ranging from the “Halliburton scam to the Dasuki gate scandal. Okechukwu also asked, “can we forget the squandermania of $23 billion Greenfield Refineries – one meant for Lagos, one for Kogi and one for Bayelsa? A golden opportunity cost our economy.
“Recall that on March 19, 2015, Conference of Nigerian Political Parties queried Dr Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, then Minister of Finance thus,
‘May we under the Freedom of Information Act 2011, request for the full disclosure of transactions concerning the three Greenfield refineries and petrochemical plant contract awarded on 13th May 2010 by President Goodluck Jonathan to Chinese State Construction and Engineering Corporation Limited, at $23 billion meant to be located at Bayelsa, Kogi and Lagos States.’
“Secondly, why are they dead on arrival as six years down the line, neither the three Greenfield refineries nor petrochemical plant is under construction. The three Greenfield refineries one understands, on completion were to add 750,000 barrels per day capacity to Nigeria’s refining infrastructure and create over a million jobs.”
“The Greenfield Refineries fiasco happened when our Excess Crude Account had over $40 billion and the China State Construction Corporation even upped their equity to 80 per cent. The unfortunate outcome is that $15 billion is fleeced from our national treasury annually for the importation of refined petroleum products for over a decade.”
