The national leadership of the People’s
Democratic Party has refused to hang the official portrait of President
Muhammadu Buhari at the party’s national secretariat.
Over 100 days after the President assumed office,
the PDP has yet to hang his portrait at any of the offices in its Wadata House
national secretariat, located at Zone 5, Abuja. The party has also said it
would never put Buhari’s portraits on its walls though it has removed that of
the former President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, who ruled on the platform of the
PDP.
“We will never hang his portrait in this office,
because President Buhari is not known to our party. He is not a leader of our
party and therefore we will never put his portrait here. We are a political
party, very partisan and therefore, we are not going to hide that,” National
Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Olisa Metuh, told our correspondent on the
telephone on Tuesday.
Jonathan was also the presidential candidate of
the former ruling party during the last general election but he was defeated by
Buhari, who was the presidential candidate of the opposition All Progressives
Congress.
The defeat was the first to be suffered by the
PDP since the return of democracy in 1999.
Before now, the party has always been hanging the
portraits of all the Presidents at the party’s reception area as well as the
National Executive Committee and National Working Committee halls within the
secretariat.
Metuh said the APC also did not hang the portrait
of Jonthan in its offices before the former President was defeated in the March
28 election.
“Can you find out if the APC had the portrait of
former President Jonathan in their office before he was defeated? That is just
it,” he told our correspondent. When asked whether the party was taking its own
pound of flesh, Metuh said no but that since Buhari “is not a member of our
party, we won’t put his portrait here.”
The APC National Publicity Secretary, Mr. Lai
Mohammed, expressed shock at Metuh’s comment.
“This is ridiculous and we have no comment. Let
Nigerians judge the PDP on this matter,” Mohammed said.
He said the PDP spokesman had a shallow
understanding of the concept of opposition politics.
Meanwhile, work has stopped at the new
secretariat of the PDP, located in the Central Business District, Abuja. Investigations
by our correspondent indicated that contractors handling the project were only
doing skeletal jobs at the site. When our correspondent visited the site on
Tuesday, there was no visible job being done at the site.
It was gathered that the cost of the project was
put at N11.5bn when it was awarded some years ago. At completion, the building
is expected to have 12 floors, with two other floors serving as the car park.
The party had claimed that the project was being
financed from levies and contributions from members. When a fund-raising dinner
was organized a few years ago, the party was able to realize about N5bn, and
the project, which started more than four years ago, was to be delivered in 126
weeks.
The former National Chairman of the party, under
whose leadership the project commenced, Prince Vincent Ogbulafor, had then said
that the complex, when completed, would strengthen the capacity of the PDP to
discharge its role effectively in Africa.
The party had claimed on January 5, 2015 that it
was going to spend part of the N21.8bn it realized from the party’s
fund-raising on the party’s secretariat.
A former Minister for Information and the
Chairman of the party’s Fund-raising Committee, Prof. Jerry Gana, had said the
money donated to the PDP was not meant for the campaign of the defeated
Jonathan alone.
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