SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, (THEWILL) – Barely a day after Acting President Yemi Osinbajo visited Rivers State, Governor Nyesom Wike has dared the All Progressives Congress, APC, to compare him with any of their most outstanding governors in the country in terms of infrastructural development.
This was as he boasted that the gigantic projects he has executed in Rivers in the past two years would surpass whatever achievement such APC governor has to flaunt.
The governor threw this challenge on Friday while commissioning 10 internal link roads in Ogbunabali community, Port Harcourt, saying his administration had gone beyond “whether it can pay salaries.”
Shortly after the Acting President’s visit, Rivers chapter of the APC had berated Wike for allegedly asking the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, to inaugurate a motor park and a market said to have been newly built in the state by the state government.
It noted that as soon as Osinbajo, who was in Port Harcourt to inaugurate a $1.5 billion fertilizer plant built by Indorama Eleme Fertilizer and Chemicals Limited, left, Wike publicly accused APC leaders of preventing the acting president from inaugurating some projects undertaken by the state government.
The PDP Chairman in the state, Felix Obuah, had stated that prior to Osinbajo’s visit, the APC placed adverts in some national dailies persuading the acting president to put off the visit.
Obuah, in a statement issued by media aide, Jerry Needam, stated that their intention was to ridicule the state, “but were shamefully ignored by the Acting President”.
“The Acting President being a better educated, more exposed, and of superior class than the charlatans in APC could not have been swayed from honouring Gov Wike’s invitation having been in the State earlier, and amazed by what the Wike administration has been able to achieve in only two years in office, gave him the name ‘Mr Project’,” the statement read.
The PDP said it noted with regret that rather than invest all the millions of naira into more meaningful ventures or at worse, empower their few surviving ‘living dead’ members, the visionless APC felt the best they could do was to spend the millions of naira on media hype and publicity to misinform a more reasonable Acting President,” Obuah said.
Meanwhile, Rivers APC continued in a statement issued on Friday by its spokesman, Chris Finebone, that “The governor should understand that no President in Nigeria goes about commissioning local government projects such as markets and garages.
“The Acting President, pressed for time, managed to commission the only two road projects that appeared to be of some significance – the Chokocho-Igbo-Etche- Rumuokurushi Road and Chokocho-Umuechem-Ozuzu Road.
“We expect Gov. Wike to show appreciation that the Acting President squeezed in the commissioning of those two projects into his very tight schedule and not accuse the Ag. President and APC of playing politics.
“If anyone played politics over the visit, it was Gov. Nyesom Wike.
“We urge him to take the advice of the Acting President that public office holders should pay more attention to governance than playing politics. The governor should have cleared the projects he wanted commissioned with the office of the Acting President prior to commencing his media propaganda instead he put the cart before the horse.”
