Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State has described the allegations of mismanagement of funds against his administration by the state chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Mr Damishi Sango, as a malicious, ridiculous diatribe and mere diversionary tactic employed by the opposition in the state to score cheap political points.
Sango had on Tuesday alleged, among others, during his maiden press conference in Jos, that the Lalong-led APC government received over N115 billion as revenue from the Federation Account and bank loans and diverted the funds to private use.
Reacting to Sango’s claim, the Governor, in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mark Longyen, said the PDP chairman’s allegations were aimed at diverting the people’s attention from the expected findings of the recently inaugurated Judicial Commission of Inquiry he set up to investigate all the financial transactions of the immediate past PDP administration of former governor Jonah Jang.
The statement reads:
The attention of the Plateau State Government has been drawn to media reports credited to the state chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mr Damishi Sango, who at a press conference on Tuesday, reportedly made wild and largely unsubstantiated allegations cum fabrications, ostensibly to cast negative aspersions on and maligning the person of our indefatigable Governor, the Rt Honourable Simon Lalong, and the APC-led administration in the state, just to score cheap political points.
Ordinarily, the APC Government would not have dignified Sango and his PDP cohorts with a response because even the least informed Plateau common man knows that the allegations are just wild allegations that, by and large, put logic on its head and curiously devoid of documentary evidence, and so should be ignored by all right-thinking individuals.
In fact, joining issues with the PDP and its leaders, who are clearly bent on drowning with their dying party, is tantamount to over-flogging a dead horse, which PDP represents. But our response is to set the records straight for posterity and expose Sango’s diatribe as the ranting of the leader of a political party which requiem mass the APC Government in Plateau State is already celebrating.
It is indeed not difficult for any discerning mind to decifer that the timing of the PDP press conference, which is coming barely a week after the Governor inaugurated a 6-member Judicial Commission of Inquiry to probe the immediate past PDP government of former governor Jonah Jang over alleged multi-billion naira profligacy, is a mischievously orchestrated opposition falsehood and diversionary tactics aimed at deceiving the public, unwittingly gaining public sympathy, and settling political scores with the Governor over the inquiry.
The good people of Plateau State should, therefore, not allow themselves to be deceived, used and dumped by these same leaders of a party, which is best known with the acronym of “People Deceiving People,” whose obnoxious agenda is a sinister move to divert attention from the multi- billion naira looting sleaze that the PDP and its leaders bequeathed to Governor Lalong, which the Judicial Commission of Inquiry he recently constituted is about to unearth and make public.
Now, to address the issues raised by Sango one by one, the former Sports Minister, who is on record to have been unsuccessfully contesting for the governorship of the state since 1999 and has perennially been woefully losing on all occasions on account of his huge unpopularity, is said to have claimed that the Lalong administration has received over N115 billion as revenue from the Federation Allocation and loans since inception and has squandered all the funds by diverting same to private use.
This is both malicious and ridiculous because it is a clear demonstration of how Sango and the PDP are twisting facts and figures in order to paint the Lalong administration black, a sort of Pull Him Down syndrome, something akin to giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it.
The net payments accruing to Plateau State from the Federation Account on a monthly basis, after the multi-billion loans taken by the Jang administration are deducted, are available on the website of the Federal Ministry of Finance, and one would have expected Sango and his PDP co-travellers to visit the site and confirm the figures. As a matter of fact, the state’s average monthly allocation is less than N2 billion, which can hardly settle Plateau’s wage bill of about N1.5 billion, before going to press, but they deliberately failed to do that and instead churned out imaginary figures.
The PDP chairman, who made the allegations in his maiden press briefing, also claimed that he was set to reposition PDP and reclaim the governorship seat from APC in 2019, and falsely stated without proof of documentary evidence, that the APC government spent N4.5 billion on the purchase of luxury cars for selected government officials “at a time pensioners and civil servants were being denied their pay package.”
