The looters have come home to roost by Emmanuel Yawe

 Emmanuel Yawe

royawe@yahoo.com 08024565402

“President Jonathan’s party, the PDP is another source of worry. Even if Jonathan were a man of high moral standards, the PDP would drown him. It is a gathering of avaricious and greedy men and women..

They do not have an ideology in that party. There are certain agreements and minimum standards even among wild beasts in the bush. In the PDP, nothing is morally repulsive. The only thing they agree on in the PDP is that Nigeria is a war booty to be looted.”

Those were my words in this column, published first on May 30, 2011 and reproduced on May 24, 2015. Captioned ‘Can we trust
this President?’, my column first appeared a day after Jonathan was sworn in as President in 2011, having won the presidential contest on his own steam.

Four years after, having watched his performance in office, I felt like plagiarising my own work, so I reproduced it again – asking my readers to judge if I was wrong or right in predicting four years earlier that President Jonathan and his band of PDP looters would lead us to doom.

One reader was outraged because he felt I had scandalised him. A top shot in the PDP, he called me to make a serious protest. What irked him in particular was my blanket classification of the PDP as“a gathering of avaricious and greedy men and women.”On phone, he told me he was a foundation member of the party and it was libellous to publish that he is avaracious and greedy because he is not. While agreeing with me that the PDP has its bad eggs, he exonnorated himself from the vices I accused all party members of.“I am not avaracious and I am not greedy” he protested.

I sympathised with him, even offering my column the following week to enable him state his case.  He declined.Since my big PDP friend was not prepared to come out in the public to state his case, I will respect his person by keeping his identity secret.

On reflection and as a Christian, I remebered the Biblical story of Lot as told in Genesis 19. This man called Lot lived in the city of Sodom. The city was so full of sin that God in His anger decided to destroy it. He sent two angels to do the nasty job and the men found succour in Lot’s house. By evening, a large crowd of homosexuals both old and young gathered outside his house, calling on him to bring out the two visitors for a taste of their ass. The crowd persisted on defilling the men even when Lot offered them his two virgin daughters as alternatives to satisfy their libido. In the end, Lot and his two daughters were saved and the city destroyed with a rain of brimstone and fire by the angels of God.

I know for certain that there are a few Lots in the PDP. My anger and blanket condemnation must have been born out of frustration which in psycology fuells agression. This party had the singular opportunity of making Nigeria great but for some strange reasons decided to run it aground. It is not for want of good advice that the party went astray.

In the beginning, Solomon Lar raised the first major alarm. In a letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo dated July 19, barely two months after the party came to power, the first National Chairman of the party complained of marginalisation by the government it had just installed. He was roundly ignored and later eased out of office. Then followed a succession of party chairmen, each with a sad tale to tell. Chief Audu Ogbe for instance confessed that he signed his resignation with a loaded gun pointed to his head. Soon, the PDP became a one man orchestra – hardly a platform for the people and even less for democracy.

The end result is what we have today. If we are to believe the Comrade Governor of Edo state, one minister under PDP government of Goodluck Jonathan helped himself (most likely herself) to a whooping heist of $6billion. If the legendry Ali Baba of Saudi Arabia came alive again, his eyes would be filled with green. If this thief were around on the day Jesus was nailed to the cross, she would have substituted one of those two men who were the greatest thieves of their time who shared with Him the shameful and painful death of crucifixion.

But that is what the PDP gave us – one minister stashing away $6billion in just one account. What about her other accounts; what about the other ministers?

The tragedy in the PDP today is that the shit has hit it’s ceiling fan and everybody under the umbrella stands the risk of being sprayed with it. This time, it is not me who is accusing the party of harbouring avaracious and greedy men and women. Workers of the party are accusing it’s officials of running the secretariat aground financially by squandering N12 billion in nine months.

Led by Chairman and Secretary of PDP Staff Welfare, NgoziNzeh and Dan Ochu-Baiye respectively, the workers are calling on anti gratf agencies to probe the activities of members of the party’s National Working Committtee (NWC).

Ochu-Baiye, who read the statement signed by 74 staff members of the partyaccused it’s NWCof financial sharp practices and incompetence in running the affairs of the party.

He also accused the NWC members of using party finances to fund frivolous personal obligations as weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals, among others, running into hundreds of millions of naira.

He also mentioned the allegation by Ndudi Godwin Elumelu who paid N750million naira to the NWC to obtain the gubernatorial ticket of the party in Delta State.

He added that the governor of Kogi was requested to pay one billion naira to the same NWC to retain his ticket.

“How on earth will any political party undergo this level of tortuous mismanagement and expect to win elections?” he asked.

The National Publicity Secretary of the party, Chief OlisaMetuh, described the allegations as baseless.Metuh said the staff members were misguided in the pursuit of their interest when the PDP was fighting the cause of Nigerians with the ruling All Progressives Congress.

The music coming out of Wadata House now is what you get when looters come home to roost.

Ref: http://www.peoplesdailyng.com/the-looters-have-come-home-to-roost/