The People’s Democratic Party has described the application filed by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property for the forfeiture of assets allegedly not declared by the Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu to the Federal Government as parts of the plots by the ruling party to silence the opposition.
Mr. Kola Ologbodiyan, the PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, in a statement on Thursday said while the opposition party was in full support of any unpretentious anti-graft war, the All Progressives Congress (APC) led administration’s “fixation on Ekweremadu, was another clear signal that it was not ready to fight corruption, but rather out to scandalize, persecute, and bring down its perceived opponents.”
PDP noted that the persecution of the Deputy Senate President began after he criticized the Buhari-led administration over the nation’s deteriorating democracy.
The statement said: “The PDP recalls that this government rushed to arraign Ekweremadu and the Senate President, Bukola Saraki in 2016 on trumped up charges of forgery of Senate Standing Rule, even when there was not even a mention of their names in the contentious police report or proof of evidence.
“It eventually withdrew the charges for lack of merit. The police raided and ransacked Ekweremadu’s official guest house in Abuja in May 2017 and blamed it on false whistleblowers, whom they charged to court. Nothing has been heard about the trial of the alleged false whistleblowers again.”
The party also said “In the current matter, apart from relying on an obsolete law to dabble into the roles of the Code of Conduct Bureau, we are not surprised that the panel could not carry out a thorough and independent investigation on the purported property of the senator, but relied on a petition by the former Chief Judge of Enugu State, Justice Innocent Umezulike, who is standing corruption trial in several courts, after his removal from office by the National Judicial Council (NJC) in 2017.”
In a similar development, the National Working Committee (NWC) of PDParty has declared its plans to host a public discourse on present-day politics and good governance in Nigeria. According to the party, the discourse tagged ‘Nation Building: Resetting the Agenda’ is set to hold on Monday, March 26, 2018, by 11:00 am at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja.
The party said the event which is aimed at the youth, women and special groups, will be attended by the national executive council members, state chairmen, governors, House of Representative members, Senators and other members of the party.