The All Progressives Congress (APC) on Thursday reacted to the indicting comments by governors who are members of the leading opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), saying the governors should stop blaming the federal government for their failures.
The PDP governors, after their two-day meeting in Enugu on Wednesday, accused the APC-led federal government of destroying the country’s economy and institutions built during its 16 years in power.
The governors said they noted the “unprecedented hardship and impoverishment” of the majority of Nigerians, which they said resulted from the mismanagement of the nation’s economy by the APC-led federal government. The governors also raised concern that the minimum wage negotiations were becoming “unduly protracted.”
But reacting, the APC, in a statement on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Barrister Felix Morka, said the governors’ claim on the country’s economic fortune was false, stressing that it was 16 years of misrule that brought Nigeria to its current state.
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The ruling party said the hardship occasioned by the “inevitable corrective policies” of the federal government is temporary and would yield positive results in the near future.
The APC said, “It is a sad irony that PDP governors who congregated to discuss the newly won financial autonomy of local governments, the most remarkable breakthrough in democratic transformation in our country since 1999, ended their meeting pointing their scabby political fingers at the APC government that accomplished a reform that the PDP did not and could not initiate, let alone deliver, in all of its desolate 16 years in government.
“PDP governors are barefaced heirs of a legacy of sleaze and ruin, morally and politically unfit to point fingers. By their statement, it is now obvious that the PDP governors lack understanding of their place and responsibility in our system of government.”
Morka said the governors do not understand the seriousness of the responsibility that they bear as chief executives of their states to justify the resources at their disposal to build and bolster their domestic economies for the good of their people.
“The APC-led administration, through its award-winning Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), His Excellency, Barrister Nyesom Wike, is only now completing and commissioning numerous road projects in the FCT awarded, paid for as far back as 2003 and 2010, but recklessly abandoned by successive PDP administrations.
“Rather, the PDP governors speak and carry on as idle spectators and executive free-loaders while blaming the federal government for everything, including their spectacular failure to accomplish the most elementary service delivery to their people. For example, on record, Delta State, governed by the PDP since 1999, is the highest recipient of federal allocation in the country but is emblematic of the PDP’s acute corruption, misrule, and utter hopelessness, with piles of backlog of unpaid salaries and pensions to hardworking citizens of the state.”
On the minimum wage, the ruling party said the “same PDP governors, many of whom have failed to pay the legal minimum wage to their workers, hurdled together, without any sense of shame, to accuse the President Bola Tinubu-led administration of delay in approving a new minimum wage for workers. These are the same governors that, only a few weeks ago, publicly proclaimed their inability to pay the proposed new minimum wage due to their workers.
“The petroleum subsidy regime and parallel foreign exchange regimes sustained by the PDP for the reckless pillaging of our commonwealth blew a gaping hole in the nation’s economy that the APC government continues to work assiduously to revitalize.
“The enduring dividends of the reforms of President Tinubu’s APC administration are sure as they are imminent. The transient hardship occasioned by inevitable corrective policies will pale into insignificance in comparison to the enduring prosperity they will bring to all Nigerians.”
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