Fashiola Buries PDP.
By Sharon Faliya Cham
On Monday the 12th of November, 2018, the Honourable Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) addressed a media conference where he tabled some achievements of the Buhari administration in the roads and power sectors. On roads alone, the Honourable Minister gave the following facts and figures:
IN THE YEAR 2016: 277 kilometers of roads were constructed anew; 345 kilometers of roads were rehabilitated, and 17, 749 people were employed for the entire road jobs of the year!
IN THE YEAR 2017: 488 roads were constructed anew; 256 roads were rehabilitated, and 31, 227 people got employed for all the road jobs of the year!
AND IN THE YEAR 2018: 497 kilometers of roads were constructed; 284 roads got rehabilitated, and 30, 402 persons got employed for the projects!
Now what? Okay, the big deal is, since Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola gave that breakdown of facts and figures, I never saw or heard any PDP loudmouth contradicting what he said, not even a little. In other words, Fashola’s facts and figures are real and accurate; the projects already executed and those still being executed by the Buhari administration are very visible, and have proven to us one of the reasons the PDP half-heartedly apologized to us!
While they ruled this country for 16 years, they turned Nigeria into a very huge African village without roads, electricity and water, and I wonder what will be the issues the PDP will stand on as their campaign platforms since President Buhari is steadily undoing all the damages and injuries they inflicted on this great country so much that it took the coming of Buhari as President for a road to be built to the village of Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the PDP who was Vice President of this country for eight years during their 16 years of plunderous rule!
You see, the wickedness of the PDP is such that when they see great roads and uninterruptible electricity supply in their favourite places like Dubai, Panama, Paris, and other major world pleasure spots, where they always love to converge to discuss and strategize on how to turn Nigeria into the largest village in the world, they deliberately refuse to replicate here the wonderful infrastructure in those places that always attract them there, but rather they always prefer to cart away what they loot from this great country to those same over-developed places for further enhancement of the over-development of those very places!
The people of those nations must be thanking their stars for never ever having a criminal gang like the PDP to rule and ruin them. Their leaders have always been like President Muhammadu Buhari who never ever believed in stealing public funds to amass crazy wealth at the detriment of the entire nation, but would rather deploy the funds into turning the nation into a pleasant dwelling place where roads are smooth and easy, and electricity hardly blinks!
The PDP rulers would rather loot the country’s finances alongside our moral values thus dragging the entire country into both moral and financial bankruptcy, then buy private jets to be flying out of the country; they then go ahead to procure palatable mansions in choice cities of the world where they invest most of their loot while investing very little here, after which they come around to insult our sensibilities that we should return them to power because they are job creators, which leaves one wondering why they didn’t create those jobs in their 16 years of power such that unemployment stood between 70 to 80% at that time? Where was the jobs creation expertise when all they could do was to sell certain key national assets to themselves, which all ended up dead and then bequeathed upon the country such violent jobs like kidnapping, militancy, armed robberies, advanced fee frauds, youth cultism, baby factories, “Boko Haram”, IPOB and “Fulani Herdsmen”?
For Nigerians to fully comprehend the wickedness and cruelty of the PDP, they should simply remember that South Africa bidded for and hosted the FIFA World Cup of 2010 when the PDP was 11 years in power, and to fulfil the terms and conditions of hosting the FIFA soccer tournament, South Africa constructed brand new roads, airports, railways, stadia, hotels, revamped their electricity sector, overhauled their security sector, and did a whole bunch of other infrastructure that would enhance the beauty of the country as well as make all the tournament’s guests enjoy their stay! And while South Africa did all of that preparation in less than 5 years, the PDP could not even complete the 23 kilometers Abuja metroline rail project, and neither did they construct any new road linking states together nor reconstruct any of the old ones they met!
The brutality of PDP’s wickedness can be also seen when you recall that when they were in power, the nation of Iraq was invaded by some allied forces and the country’s roads, oil installations, refineries, public utilities, homes and other critical infrastructure were destroyed. But while PDP was still in power, the same nation of Iraq was reconstructed with all their roads, oil installations, homes, public utilities and other infrastructure restored, and while all the reconstruction was taking place, the PDP rulers of Nigeria built no new road nor fixed any of the dilapidated public infrastructure that became more dilapidated under their watch, so much that you could be tempted to think Nigeria was the theatre of war and not Iraq!
It was also quite remarkable that while the PDP was in power, small countries like Angola and neighbouring Niger Republic built new petroleum refineries while other bigger oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia (and even some non-oil producing countries) multiplied their petroleum refineries leaving Nigeria as the only oil producing country on earth with four old, dilapidated refineries built in the 1970s and which the PDP deliberately abandoned to further rot away so that they would continue the lucrative business of importation of petroleum products and the equally lucrative business of appropriating billions of naira every year for the so called Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of the refineries which they always end up looting.
The PDP wasn’t (and is still not) ashamed of giving Nigeria the derogatory label of being the only oil producing country in the world that imports petroleum products because of the failure of domestic refining. But then, like prostitutes, all hardened criminals are always never ashamed of their crimes and shameful acts. And that’s why they should never ever be trusted with power again.
Sharon Faliya Cham wrote this piece from Abuja
