Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Ndudi Elumelu, has pleaded with members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to resolve their differences and work towards rescuing Nigeria.
During the 92nd National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the party at the weekend in Abuja, the lawmaker claimed that Nigerians had lost “hope in the administration of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as corruption and treasury looting have taken centre stage, with the nation being laid bare to terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, and thugs, who have now taken control of territories, marauding highways, razing communities, killing, maiming and kidnapping citizens on a daily basis, with nothing done to salvage the situation.”
He said in six years, the ruling party had “wrecking the once-thriving economy handed over to it by the PDP in 2015.”
Elumelu argued that the most populous black nation had been “turned into the poverty capital of the world, with 33.3 per cent unemployment rate, as over 60 million flourishing businesses are closed down and about 83 million Nigerians now unable to afford their daily meals and other necessities of life.”
The Delta State native deplored Nigeria’s 98th ranking among 107 nations in the Global Hunger Index.
He said the productive sectors “are crippled by corruption, ineptitude and wrong economic policies of the APC administration, which have made the naira tumbled from N167 in 2015 to a disheartening N522 to a United States dollar today.”
According to Elumelu, the current administration has continued to “mortgage the sovereignty and future of the nation with reckless borrowing and accumulated N33.107 trillion debt for which it has nothing to show, but decayed infrastructure and a desolate economy.”
He warned that the proposal to borrow another N5.62 trillion for the 2022 budget would increase Nigeria’s debt stock to N38.7 trillion, with “no clear-cut repayment plan.”
Credit: The Guardian.
