PDP ripped off Southeast for 16 years, says Chekwas Okorie
National Chairman of the United Progressives Party (UPP), Chief Chekwas Okorie said Thursday accused the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of misleading the Southeast into investing almost 100 percent of their political capital into the party in sixteen years without anything to show for their support.
He said that within the long period of political servitude, the PDP-led federal government ensured that the entire southeast zone became one large area of abandoned construction works.
“If this is not deliberate, then what will be the explanation for the very painful fact that in 16 years, there is no project that was started and completed by the PDP government in any part of the southeast geopolitical zone,” Okorie asked.
“We are aware that the PDP has an unwritten policy that no Igbo person will ever be the President of Nigeria until 150 years after the Nigeria-Biafra war.”
“The manner with which the military junta of Abdulsalam Abubakar presided over the massive deceit of the entire Igbo people by the PDP in the short-changing of late Dr Alex Ekwueme in his bid to become the party’s presidential candidate in 1999 is an unprecedented and biggest political 419 ever perpetrated against any race in Nigeria by a political party and its Military sponsors”.
He noted that appointments of Igbo men and women into political offices were no less deceitful; stressing that it was more scandalous that the appointments existed in addition to five Senate presidents with nothing to show for it, except transforming the lifestyles of the appointees.
Okorie, stated that the Igboezue Cultural group, which he claimed was in touch with extant Igbo associations nationwide to reposition Igbo political engagements with the rest of the country, would not stand and watch Igbos misled again in the 2019 general elections by voting the PDP.
“That option is largely responsible for our outright irrelevance in the politics of Nigeria, leaving us perpetually lamenting about our unfortunate situation, regime after regime,” he said.
Okorie, who stated that the group was not opposed to the choice of Dr Peter Obi as the running mate of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the PDP as well as the gathering of some stalwarts of Igbo extraction in Enugu to adopt them, however, said it was erroneous to classify the outcome of their gathering as a consensus position of Ndigbo.
He said there was no consultation of any kind beyond the PDP family to arrive at the choice, stressing that the group was not convinced with the position taken by Atiku Abubakar on the vexed issue of restructuring of the country.
He said the group would work for the completion of President Buhari’s second term in office in order to pave the way for a patriotic Igbo man or woman to be elected President of Nigeria in 2023.
The group, according to him, believes that four more years of Buhari was by far, better and more bearable than the possible eight years of Atiku Abubakar, which according to him, would bring back the sad memories of 16 years of PDP.
