The national leadership of the Peoples
Democratic Party has refused to hang the official portrait of President
Muhammadu
Buhari at the party’s national secretariat, checks by The
PUNCH have revealed.
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 organised a
few years ago, the party was able to realise 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 realised 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.
Source: Punch Newspaper
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