The Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mr Peter Obi, yesterday reacted to a statement credited to the governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai that there is no single thinking brain left in the PDP.
He mocked the Kaduna governor; saying, “All the good brains are in the APC (All Progressives Congress), yet the country isn’t working.”
Obi, who was also a former governor of Anambra State, spoke in Abuja while appearing on ARISE News Television.
Recall that El-Rufai’s comments followed backlash by the PDP in which he was called to order over his statement describing Peter Obi as a “religious bigot.”
Addressing the matter, Obi stated, “Well, all the good brains are in APC, but the country is not working. The good brains are in APC, yet the country is collapsing. That’s all I can say.
“When APC came, this country was growing at six per cent, since they came, look at where we are! Everything has headed south, not one item is positive.”
The vice presidential candidate stressed that in 2015, APC came to campaign with a bundle of lies and presently, instead of the ruling party telling Nigerians if they had been able to fulfil their promises, they were spinning more lies.
Obi further regretted the country’s debt burden and carpeted the APC-led administration for not curbing the trend.
He explained, however, that while he was not against borrowing, there must be a purpose for it, and that this must be explained to Nigerians.
According to him, “We are using almost 60 per cent of our revenue to service debts. We are borrowing more. The Nigerian financial system, National Assembly, everybody is flying to London for a road show to borrow more money. This is what we should be discussing, what is this money going to be used for? Not discussing whether Peter Obi comes from Anambra or Imo.”
The vice presidential candidate also commented on the ongoing conversation on the minimum wage and said while he wasn’t speaking for the presidential candidate or the party, he said there was a need to sit down with labour, look at the income of the nation and the various states and determine the appropriate figure.
“Personally, I do not believe that somebody from Lagos should pay the same thing with somebody from Ebonyi State. If you go all over the globe, there is no place where two states pay the same salary even America,” he said.
On the search on Atiku by the security agencies, he said that the opposition leaders were not only targeted and persecuted, but the ruling party was turning the whole thing into the childish affair.
Obi said what the PDP was concerned with now was to bring the country back to where it used to be.
He said his principal, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, would prioritise security, national unity, education and job creation if elected president of Nigeria, saying the country is broken, that another four years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) should be beyond the contemplation of any right thinking Nigerian.
