Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
USAfrica: In one of its most critical attacks, Nigeria’s main opposition political party, People’s Democratic Party (PDP), has assessed and called the country’s President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army General, “to show remorse, apologise to Nigerians for his monumental failure and national embarrassment that the APC government represents.” The PDP said Buhari wasted the opportunity of his interview with Channels TV on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 by trying to rationalise APC’s failures with his own “false figures” and data on governance and oil revenue.
The PDP has stated that “In his ludicrous attempt to rationalise his failures in office, President Buhari falsely claimed that under the PDP, from 1999 to 2014, crude oil sold for an average of $100 per barrel but collapsed to $37 per barrel when he and his APC assumed office. Such false claims fly in the face of hard fact as the records, which the President must have, clearly show that when the PDP took office on May 29, 1999, crude oil sold at $16.27 per barrel and about $80.42 and $63.28 by November and December 2014 respectively.” It continued that “Under President Buhari and the APC, the oil price has never fallen as low as $16 per barrel as recorded under the PDP but started at $37 to $39.44 per barrel in 2016 and has continued to hover between $60 to $70 per barrel to date.”
PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, in the news release titled “Just Go! Nigerians Don’t Want a Successor From You – PDP Tells Buhari” added the PDP government led by former President Goodluck Jonathan
handed over a $550 billion economy, the largest in Africa and 26th in the world to Buhari and the APC in 2015.
The PDP stressed the view that President Buhari had no answer to one of the questions from Channels politics reporter when he was confronted with the facts that when he took over, the debt stock was N12tn but now N32tn and counting; that inflation, which was about 9 per cent under the PDP is now over 15 per cent; that unemployment rate, which was about 8.9 per cent is now 33 per cent, that the Naira which exchanged at about N197 to a dollar under the PDP is now over N500 and that the petrol price which was N87 in 2015 is now N165 per litre under the APC.
