A socio political group known as New Nigeria Initiative (NNI) has said that it is an evil for anyone to ask Nigerians to vote Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as President of Nigeria in the 2019 election.
The group insisted that the suffering which Nigerians are going through now, takes its root from the rot of 16 years of mis-governance of the PDP, with special reference to the period Atiku and Olusegun Obasanjo presided over the affairs of the nation.
Chairman of NNI, Idoko Ainoko, who spoke to news men today, Monday on ‘the state of affairs of the country’ ahead of next year’s general election, stressed that Obasanjo and Atiku caused the problems currently bedeviling the country’s economy.
“Whilst acknowledging the right of the former Vice President to seek political office, it would be sheer evil to ask the people to vote for those who, for 16 years, manipulated all the processes of government and converted same into their own personal pockets.”
The group asked Nigerians to shine their eyes and reject the dark days of the PDP, adding: “by the time the party, PDP, was done after spending 16 continuous years in power, our country was left with degraded infrastructure, poorly motivated and poorly equipped military, a dwindled federal reserve, poor health-care system, abysmal educational system, and epileptic power supply.
“Almost all sectors of the Nigerian architecture were in shambles and the fascinating thing is that those 16 years were the moment when the country made unprecedented record revenue from oil sales.
“Waziri Adio, the Executive Secretary of Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative NEITI, had said Nigeria earned $592 billion from oil and gas sales alone within that period yet the lives of the people were not any better than prior to 1999.
“The figure quoted will definitely be in excess of $600 billion if we consider what accrued in the first quarter of 2015 as well. These are humongous figures that exceeded what we made altogether as a nation in the years preceding 1999 and those years were our golden years.
“Those were the years when our universities were rated higher than many American Universities and when we had railways functioning almost across all geopolitical regions of the country. We had manufacturing industries littered across the country.
“By 2015, we had become a shadow of ourselves as a country. Refineries collapsed, schools and hospitals were operating far below the standard of what is expected of a developing nation.
“Power supply was below 3,000 megawatts, despite claims that over $16b had been expended in the 1999-2015 period on the power sector. We were low on almost all development indices. It was definitely a 16 years of colossal failure.”
