My Naija News - PDP fundraiser to build 10b naira secretariat is obscene, immoral

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PDP fundraiser to build 10b naira secretariat is obscene, immoral - AC

Thursday, 20 November 2008

The Action Congress (AC) has said the recent lavish ceremony organised by the PDP to raise 10 billion naira to build a ‘befitting’ secretariat for the ruling party is obscene and immoral, coming at a time millions of Nigerians are struggling to put food on the table or make ends meet.

In a statement issued in Abuja Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party also said the directive by the PDP to its state governors to raise 50 million each for the secretariat project is a clear endorsement that they are free to loot their states’ treasury.

"When you levy a state governor 50 million naira, far higher than his total salary during his four-year tenure, how else do you expect him to get the money than to dip his hand into the state coffers, not minding the unconvincing argument that they expect the governors to raise the money through their friends and businessmen?

"Even if the so-called friends and businessmen of the governors contribute to the 50 million naira levy, will it be for free? Will they not later be rewarded generously through contracts real or imagined, which in the end will still translate to taking money from the state coffers," the AC said.

It said in the end, Nigerian taxpayers will fund the building of the PDP’s monument to shame and corruption, which is the only name we can think of for the party’s secretariat.

It said the donations in cash and kind by a few super-rich individuals, who have benefited immensely and disproportionately from corrupt PDP administrations, are nothing but a smokescreen for the public funds that will eventually be pumped into building the secretariat.

"We call this double jeopardy: First, the PDP, through its do-nothing federal and state administrations, has pauperised Nigerians by over eight years of misrule and bad governance. Now, the same Nigerians are now being taxed, indirectly, to build a secretariat for the same party that has pushed millions of citizens into near destitution," AC said.

The party wondered why the building of a 12-storey, one-in-town secretariat should be the priority of a ruling party, at a time the entire world is reeling from the effects of an unprecedented financial meltdown.

"Nigeria itself is in dire financial and economic straits, not minding the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil and talk-no-evil stance of its voodoo economists, who have continued to describe the country as an oasis of economic prosperity in a global desert of a crippling financial crunch.

"You do not need a professor of economics to tell you that a country, whose main foreign exchange earner has been reduced to one third of its price a few months ago, is facing a financial crisis.

"But as the PDP has shown, the impending austerity is only for the ordinary Nigerians, not for the ruling party stalwarts and their acolytes. There is no better way to tell Nigerians that the PDP cannot be the vehicle to economic prosperity, political stability and social development," AC said.

The party said it was delighted that the PDP Secretariat project has attracted widespread condemnations from across the country and beyond, and congratulated the PDP for engaging in what will eventually be an act of self immolation.

"We have always known that the PDP, giddy from the effects of the ‘poison’ it has swallowed in form of stolen electoral mandates, will eventually dance itself lame and slide into oblivion, having failed to meet the yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians. This secretariat project is another wrong step in PDP’s dance toward irrelevance," AC said.

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