Yemi Adedeji, Abuja
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) says the attempt by the federal government to gag the media is pathetic, stressing that no amount of censorship or bandying false figures would stop Nigerians from reflecting on the real state of affairs of the country.
The party equally said that Lai Muhammed, the Minister of Communication cannot censor the media to downplay the failures of the president Muhamadu Buhari-led incompetent federal government.
Kola Ologbondiyan, PDP National Publicity Secretary in a statement issued on Thursday in Abuja said, Nigerians know that APC has failed and that Buhari-led presidency is directly responsible for the collapse of the economy, which was thriving under PDP.
According to him, “it is 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 pm the APC misrule.”
“We note the minister’s snap that the media should contextualise their reporting; how else should the media contextualise the sudden collapse of the economy with the narrative tumbling from 197/1 USD in 2015 when the PDP handed over power, to N360-400/1USD , without placing the blame at the door step of president Muhamadu Buhari.”
The PDP said how else around the media contextualise the fact that under Buhari government, over 8 million jobs between 2016 to 2017; 16 million were unemployed, 18 million were underemployed, while another 27.44 million refused to work in 2016 for various reasons related to frustration in the polity.
Ologbondiyan noted that, “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.”
He added; “how should the media contextualise the soaring costs of food, the rise in inflation rate from the N13.7% in May 15.37%; the rise in fuel price from N86.50 under the PDP to N300-400 per litre 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 pile-up of domestic which has scared away many contractors off their sites
“How would the APC want the media to contextualise the slaughtering of Nigerians in various part of the country by marauders while it’s federal government refused to take any concrete steps to nursing perpetrators to book,
“Sadly, instead of the APC to 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 the fight against hate,
“In all, the facts speak for themselves, the APC has wrecked our nation and it’s resort to propaganda and false indices will not help as Nigerians are now rallies with the repositioned PDP, ahead of 2019 general elections, to rescue and return the prosperous days when iur citizens once held their heads tall among other citizens of the world.”
