By Chuks Eke
An entrepreneur, Chief Mike Emerah has blasted the. Presidential candidate of Labour Party, LP in the 2023 general election, Peter Obi for raising an objection towards President Bola Tinubu’s proposal to procure a new presidential jet for himself and Vice President Kashim Shettilma.
Tinubu had recently informed the national assembly that the presidency would require a new jet to perform it’s functions optimally as according to him, the life span of the existing jet being used by the presidency has greatly deteriorated so much so that it could crash on air and kill the president while on transit for a national assignment.
Tinubu’s proposal elicited some negative reaction from eminent Nigerians, including Peter Obi who vehemently opposed the proposal, arguing that the Nigerians cannot be dying of hunger and starvation while the presidency is budgeting billions of naira to procure a new jet for the presidency to be juncating from one foreign country to the other in the name of national assignment.
Besides, insisted that rather than buying a new jet, the presidency should dispose off all the existing jets under it’s possession and use the proceeds to procure a sound new one or in the alternative, repair the existing one or ones and jettison the idea of buying a new one.
But reacting to Obi’s suggestions, Emerah who is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, MD/CEO of Macdon Industries Limited, a subsidiary of Micmerah Group of Companies with corporate headquarters at Onitsha, Anambra State, described Obi’s utterances as extremely negative.
According to Chief Emerah, “I am disappointed with Obi’s utterances because it seems to me that he wants the President of a whole country like Nigeria to die in a plane crash, just as some Presidents of other countries have died in the past while using rickety jets.
According to Chief Emerah, “before now, I used to have much regard for and respect for Obi but with this his latest utterances, my respect and regard for him has watered down”.
“Even if the old jet must be sold, the presidency should first and foremost procure a sound jet before disposing off the old ones or repairing them and not vice versa”.
“By the way, if I may ask, is Obi saying that the presidency should stop performing it’s statutory functions until the old jets are sold before a new one is procured or is he saying that the old ones must be repaired before the presidency will start performing functions and besides, what is the guarantee that the old ones are properly repaired and the yardstick that the repair has been properly carried out”.
“I know quite alright that the Nigerian economy is bad but it does not warrant allowing our president to die in a plane crash because it involves somebody’s life and a president for that matter”.
“Assuming Obi is the president of Nigeria today, is he telling us that he will just lose his life in a plane crash because of bad economy or is he just trying to be selfish?”
“It is good that we tell ourselves the truth instead of playing dirty politics with our lives. I am therefore in support of President Tinubu to go ahead and procure a new jet to safeguard his life because at the end of the day, he is still the president of Nigeria and the jet in question belongs to Nigerians and not Tinubu’s personal property because if he eventually completed his tenure and vacated the seat, another president that will succeed him, including Peter Obi himself, if he wins the next election, will still be the one to make use of the presidential jet in question”.
