By Adebisi Adeyemi Lagos
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Thursday told the Minister of
Information, Alhaji Mohammed, that he cannot censor the media to
downplay the failures of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led incompetent
Federal government.
The party said APC’s attempt to gag the media is pathetic, as no amount
of censorship or bandying of false figures would stop Nigerians from
reflecting on the real state of affairs in our country today.
PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, in a statement on
Thursday, described as scandalous that the Federal Government is
attempting to slander the media and sway it with cooked-up figures,
forgetting that media practitioners are also Nigerians, who are direct
witnesses and victims of the woes of the APC misrule.
Nigerians were shocked to watch the Minister of Information attempting
to censor the media and sell unverifiable statistics to the media when a
TV Continental (TVC) team visited his office on Tuesday.
We hope the minister saw the faces of his audience as he was reeling out
his faulty statistics.
Nigerians know that the APC has failed and that the Buhari-led
Presidency is directly responsible for the collapse of our economy,
which was thriving under the PDP.
They know that the torrents started buffeting the nation from May 29,
2015 and no amount of propaganda and futile efforts to censor the media
by the APC will change the facts.
While we note the minister’s snap that the media should contextualize
their reporting, we ask; how else should the media contextualize the
sudden collapse of the economy with the naira tumbling from N197/I USD
in 2015 when PDP handed over power, to N360-N400/1USD, without placing
the blame at the door steps of President Muhammadu Buhari and his
dysfunctional APC?
How else should the media contextualize the fact that under the Buhari
Government, over 8 million Nigerians lost their jobs between 2016 to
2017; 16 million were unemployed, 18 million more were underemployed,
while another 27.44 million refused to work in 2016 for various reasons
related to frustration in the polity?
How should the media contextualize the soaring costs of food, the rise
in inflation rate from the N13.7% in May 2015 to the current 15.37%; the
rise in fuel price from N86.50 under the PDP to N300-N400 per liter
under the APC; the escalating of our foreign debt to $15.2bn,
representing a 40% increase under President Buhari’s three years in
office in addition to the pile-up of domestic debt which has scared away
many contractors off their sites?
How would the APC want the media to contextualize the slaughtering of
Nigerians in various parts of the country by marauders while its Federal
Government refused to take any concrete steps to bring the perpetrators
to book?
Sadly, instead of the APC to be sober and remorseful for its failures
and seek help from well-meaning Nigerians, it is busy reeling out false
indices while monitoring phone calls of journalists and other Nigerians
under the guise of fight against hate speech.
In all, the facts speak for themselves, the APC has wrecked our nation
and its resort to propaganda and false indices will not help as
Nigerians are now rallied with the repositioned PDP, ahead of the 2019
general elections, to rescue and return the prosperous days when our
citizens once held their heads tall among other citizens of the world.
