The All Progressives Congress (APC) has dismissed the claims made by Uche Secondus, the National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on insecurity and other issues that border on governance as a desperate attempt to crawl back to the limelight after being sentenced to obscurity at the February 28 presidential election.
While addressing a press conference, in Abuja on Friday. April 26, Secondus had condemned the killing of a Nigerian and a Briton by gunmen in Kaduna State. He had also decried the rate of insecurity in the land, saying Nigerians had never lived in such great fear and trembling for their lives.
“Do we still have a government? The apparent incompetence of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the handling of affairs of governance has continued to take a huge toll on the nation?” he asked.
“The security situation has been such that prominent Nigerian clerics have been raising serious concern on the issue of leadership, even questioning whether we really have a Commander-in-Chief in this country. While the Presidency continues to argue that there exists a government in our country today, what obtains in reality is different.
“The level of bloodletting occasioned by the barrage of criminality across the country can only be happening in a country without government. Things got even worse as the remaining goodwill of the people on this government vanished after it arm-twisted the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) into tampering with the will of the people in the February 23 Presidential and National Assembly Elections…”
However, responding on Channels TV’s Politics Today on Friday night, Lanre Issa-Onilu, APC National Publicity Secretary, described the remarks by Secondus as an attempt by the main opposition party to seek relevance following its defeat at the poll.
“It is just an attempt by the PDP to find a way back to the front page of newspapers and to be relevant in the news,” he said.
“It would have been unnecessary for any response at all to come from us as the ruling party but I suspect that the National Chairman of the PDP may have stumbled on one of the statements they wrote pre-election, because it sounded more like some of those campaign materials that were not used or that have been used repeatedly, for which the voters passed a verdict in the last election.”
But Issa-Onilu insisted that the ruling party would not join issues with the opposition, noting that there was nothing relevant to argue about.
“Nigerians are aware of who caused the problems and who is trying to find a solution to them,” he said.
“At this stage, what we are focused on is how to ensure that all these problems that were created for over 16 years of PDP maladministration, that they no longer exist and we have made tremendous progress.
“In this country, we all know what this country was before the APC came; we all know the tremendous steps we have taken and the progress we have made so far. We are focused on that and we are focused on governance; we are focused on policy and implementation of our policies.”
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