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The newly elected Enugu State Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adolphus Udeh has mocked the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over its pledge to rescue Nigeria.
According to Udeh, before rescuing Nigeria, PDP should first account for the uncountable underdevelopment obstacles the party embedded in the system, before its exit from power in 2015.
In a statement in Enugu Sunday, Udeh said he closely observed the PDP convention on Saturday at Eagle Square Abuja where speaker after speaker lampooned the APC and claimed that they wanted to rescue Nigeria.
He blamed the current socio-economic challenges confronting Nigeria under the APC government on PDP’s 16 years of misrule.
“Is it not better PDP starts by first accounting for uncountable underdevelopment obstacles they embedded in the system before their exit in 2015?
” PDP acted like a tenant who wrote favourable contract agreement for itself against Nigeria.
“Take the power sector for instance where the contract agreement between Federal Government and DisCos and GenCos are in favour of the private companies. PDP weaved these skewed contract agreements and nominated those less than efficient companies,” he said.
Udeh noted that in democracy, President Buhari cannot just wake up and cancel the contracts, stressing that it will take time to unbundle the less than transparent clauses in the contract.
“The outcome is gross unemployment and waste of public funds, as the federal government was compelled to invest over N1 trillions to patch up.
“According to IMF, Nigeria loses 29 billion dollars yearly, which is 5.8 per cent of its GDP, due to lack of reliable power supply.
“And listen to the President of African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, who blamed poor electricity value chain sector for the sorry state of our industrial development.”
On why it is taking the federal government led by APC six years to untangle the mess, Udeh explained that democracy has its speed, due process and checks and balances.
He maintained that Mr President cannot wake up one morning and revoke contract agreements no matter how faulty, otherwise, the media would accuse him of dictatorship and blame him for scaring off foreign investors.
He, however, said they were happy that Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, an engineer, has an answer to the intractable problem in the electricity value chain.
Quoted profusely the Power Minister, Udeh said, “It must be clearly stated that within this value chain, some responsibilities are by the Electric Power Sector Reform Act (EPSRA) performed by our private sector partners and other agencies of government.
“These partners are being monitored and sometimes given the needed nudge in the right direction to achieve our objectives. We shall be taking a careful and detailed look at issues of policy, capacity and technical requirement, among other things.
“One very critical concern that we must address in this performance monitoring process is to find out if the terms for granting the licenses were onerous.”
Udeh added that they were not talking of budgeted and abandoned federal roads, hospitals, universities and the celebrated N23 billion unaccounted three Green Field Refineries that the PDP announced in 2010, which could have saved over N5 trillion for Nigeria, had it been completed.
“And this was happening when oil sold at an average of 100 dollars per barrel and Nigeria had over 40 billion dollars in the Excess Crude Account.”
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