15th August, 2017
A lawmaker, Moshood Oshun, has said the All Progressives Congress (APC) is still cleaning the mess created by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) two years after the party took over.
According to Oshun, in 16 years, the PDP missed the chance to make Nigeria great, saying that the situation got worse during the last five years of the PDP.
Oshun, a member of the Lagos state House of Assembly, said this in reaction to a comment by former President Goodluck Jonathan that his government contained inflation.
Oshun recalled that prior to the emergence of the APC in 2015, various investigations had shown that the government was broke and that the public purse was empty.
According to Oshun, who chairs the public accounts committee for state, it was public knowledge that the federal government was borrowing to pay salaries under Jonathan even when oil sold for over $140 per barrel.
He also recalled how top officials of the Jonathan government “swindled the country while many wallowed in poverty.
“I insist that if Jonathan had returned as president, Nigeria would have been in hell. Whether we like it or not, the first thing that would have happened is the retrenchment of workers at the federal level.
“The government would have claimed the country was broke and pegged its argument on the current international price for oil. I am happy he was humble enough to say his government did not plug all the holes against corruption. Why was that so?”
“Let’s even look at it this way; we can effectively say that what his minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, took out of the till is enough to ground the economy of a country.
“The PDP and Jonathan were only fortunate that Nigerians are very resilient people. We had a president that never knew what was going on under him,” Oshun said.
The lawmaker added that under Jonathan, funds that were meant to fight insurgency were either stolen or mismanaged by former service chiefs.
“We are all in this country and we know how some service chiefs who served under Jonathan returned money to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
“We know how he defended Mrs Alison-Madueke’s use of private jets for official assignments and how much were released to some media houses in the name of campaigns.
“Remember it was not only the opposition that was speaking out at that period. At a time, then Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom state had to raise an alarm over unremitted funds from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation at that period.
“The man talks about economic team; what did the team achieve at a time oil price sold for over $140 per barrel? Even then, the country lived aborrowing.
“Sincerely, I am not saying Jonathan is corrupt, he may not be but he should just do well to stop defending himself because as the president under who these atrocities were committed, the best he could do is apologize to the country,” Oshun argued.
Oshun further argued that the impunity that reigned during the era of Jonathan cannot be quantified. For example, the lawmaker noted that several times, the duo of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Alison-Madueke shunned summons by the National Assembly.
“Even Jonathan defended the ministers against the National Assembly thus abusing the principle of oversight as one of the roles of the legislature,” Oshun said.
Jonathan spoke at the Eagle Square during the national convention of the PDP at the weekend, saying it was wrong to have the impression that the economy would have been in a worse shape if he was reelected.
“Though we didn’t completely plug the loopholes in the fight against corruption, but we did well.
“I learnt that some people said that if the PDP had remained in power beyond 2015, the economy would have been worse. This couldn’t have been the case, because we had a sound economic team in place,” the former president had said.