Nigerians Tired of  Your Empty New Year Promises, PDP Tells APC, FG

By Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja 

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) yesterday said that Nigerians had become disillusioned over alleged failure of the federal government and the All Progressives Congress (APC) to deliver on its promises.

In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, the PDP asked the ruling party not to issue any New Year message to Nigerians since they did not fulfill any of the promises contained in their previous messages since assumption of office.

The party said Nigerians had become overstretched by the litany of woes visited on them in the last two years “by the incompetent and pretentious APC Government,” stressing that it would be the height of callousness for the party and its government to spew another round of propaganda and false hope in the name of new year messages.

“What else would they tell Nigerians apart from inventing new lies and propaganda as they had always done, particularly at the turn of each New Year”, Ologbondiyan queried in the statement.

He added: “Every New Year, since 2016, the APC and its federal government have been reeling out promises which they had no intentions of fulfilling. Now they are warming up to reel out fresh ones in January 2018.

“What is the need of a New Year message from APC Government when it would be replete with propaganda?  What is the need of their yearly assurances when the only thing we see is an arrogant and incompetent government plunging the nation into economic recession and visiting the citizens with the worst forms of hardship?

“What seriousness should any Nigerian attach to a government that takes governance for granted, puts off its Federal Executive Meeting at the slightest whims and blame imaginary invasion of its offices by rats for the inability to meet required statutory functions?

“What else should Nigerians expect from a government that promised massive employments only to render 7.74 million Nigerians jobless between 2016 and September 2017; with combined unemployment and underemployment rate hitting 40.0% as declared by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

“This is the same APC that promised to deliver Naira exchange at N1 to 1USD but ended up wrecking the currency from N160-N170 to a scandalous N350-N400; the same party and its government promised to reduce the price of fuel only for it to rise from where the PDP left it at N86.50 to N300-N400 per litre.

“What do we expect from a government that so devastated the economy in 2017 that Nigerians were forced to turn to Ponzi schemes like the Mavrodi Mundial Movement (MMM) for survival only for an estimated three million of them to lose about N18 billion in the process.

“The APC misrule literarily turned 2017 into a harvest of woes; hunger, disease, violence and deaths while the nation is now being pummeled by ethnic and religious agitations and attendant violence in all parts of the country.

“Also this year, marauders, criminal herders, Badoo cultists and insurgents were on the prowl with several innocent Nigerians as victims.

“Nigerians suffered strange diseases; businesses were shut; hardship and poverty swelled mortality and divorce rates while the APC continues to thrive on propaganda and lies.

“Measured against all key performance indicators, the APC controlled federal government has fallen below the expectations of Nigerians.

“Painfully, instead of channeling the nation’s resources for the good of the citizens, the ‘zero corruption’ federal government is busy providing cover for APC interests who are diverting public funds through padded budgets, multi-billion dollars secret oil subsidy regimes, illegal lifting of crude using unregistered APC fronts, pillaging of Nigeria’s foreign reserves, diverting of funds meant for fight against insurgency and rehabilitation of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the northeast; and attempts to steal $1bn from the Excess Crude Account (ECA).

“Nigerians are very patient people but are tired of APC’s incompetence, lies and endless propaganda. We therefore urge the APC to stop taking Nigerians for granted as the nation eagerly awaits their farewell address come 2019.”