Subsidy: PDP Demands Apology, Restitution From President Buhari

BY GRACE ANYANWU, ABUJA – The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on Friday, asked President Muhammadu Buhari to tender an unreserved apology to the entire nation for allowing his administration to deceive Nigerians while secretly running an over-bloated and sleazy oil subsidy regime as now exposed by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The PDP said its demand is predicated on the confession by the NNPC Managing Director, Mele Kyari, that the Buhari administration had been running an over-bloated subsidy which is against the national interest.

These were stated in a press release by the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Mr Kola Ologbondiyan, saying that the PDP holds that Kyari’s open confession is a direct vindication its stand that the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led administration has been neck deep in serial oil fraud.

The party notes as appalling that while President Buhari castigated previous PDP administrations and announced that oil subsidy existed only as a fraud, he had secretly continued to preside over an over-bloated subsidy regime through which over N14 trillion belonging to Nigerians have been stolen.

The PDP quoted Kyari’s as saying; “there are many things wrong with the under-recovery … the under-recovery itself is so over-bloated because we are subsidizing the whole of West Africa. That has to stop.”

The PDP said that from this, it is clear to all that the Buhari administration had not only been covering sleazy oil subsidy regime but also an under-recovery fraud with an international dimension.

According to the party; “It is even more distressing that that such monumental racket against our nation had been going on under an administration whose leaders parade as saints while swimming in an ocean of corruption.

“Our party charges the Buhari Presidency to immediately name the West African countries that it claims to be subsidizing fuel for and the amount so far spent in such hazy enterprise. 

“This is so because there are already insinuations in the public space that the so-called West African countries could be the private purses of corrupt APC leaders and the cabal in the Buhari Presidency.

“It is however saddening that President Buhari had allowed such hemorrhaging of our economic bloodstream into private vaults.

“Now that the Managing Director of the NNPC has summoned the courage to make this confession, after our party counseled government officials to stop lying to Nigerians about trillions of naira claimed to have been paid for subsidy, what is expected of the Buhari Presidency is to, without any further delay, apologize to Nigerians, make restitutions and take immediate steps to recover the over N14 trillion siphoned in oil scams under its watch,” the PDP insists.