By Felix Morka
In yet another histrionic outburst, Governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of destroying the country’s economy and institutions ‘built’ in its 16 years of misrule. The Governors made these statements following their meeting in Enugu on July 17, 2024, over the recent epochal Supreme Court decision that granted financial autonomy to local government councils in the country.
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. They 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.
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 PDP’s acute corruption, misrule and utter hopelessness with piles of backlog of unpaid salaries and pensions to hardworking citizens of the state.
The same PDP Governors, many of who have failed to pay legal minimum wage to their workers, huddled 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.
In a fortuitous NewsFlash at the time of preparing this statement, President Tinubu, Nigeria’s President of Progress, has approved the sum of N70,000 (Seventy Thousand Naira) as the new minimum wage for workers in the country. This outcome is the result of the President’s determined leadership of discussions with leaders of organized labour. This will, no doubt, help to ameliorate the transient economic hardship that our people have had to endure in patriotic contribution to building a stronger and more vibrant economy for our country.
Nigerians do not need to be reminded of the PDP’s inglorious 16 years of odious rule during which the party built nothing that can be remembered or destroyed. The APC-led administration has only saddled itself with fixing the PDP’s mess and institutionalized debilitating corruption of nearly two decades. The APC-led administration, through its award-winning Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), His Excellency, Barr. 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.
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.
*Felix Morka is the National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC)