A former Secretary- General of the pan-Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, Senator Femi Okurounmu, has alleged that the funding of President Muhammadu Buhari’s nomination and election campaigns by five of the states in the South West during the 2015 polls has ruined the economy of the geopolitical zone.
Okurounmu said that the inability of the South West states to meet their financial obligations was because they had yet to recover and recoup the huge sums of money they committed to Buhari’s nomination and presidential campaigns.
Speaking with our correspondent in his Abeokuta residence, the veteran politician alleged that the imposition and forcible collection of huge sums of money and levies from the South West states by the leaders of the All Progressives Congress in the run-up to the presidential nomination and general elections in 2015, threw their governments in the current financial mess.
Most of the states in the geo-political zone are currently owing their workers months of salary arrears and retirees, a backlog of unpaid pension.
Okurounmu, however, alleged that such a situation had continued to persist because huge sums of money were taken from the treasuries of the five South West states to fund Buhari’s presidential ambition.
He said, “If we decide to investigate how the APC funded its presidential campaign, then Buhari will be out of office, because we all know how the APC funded Buhari’s campaign, even right from the nomination stage.
“That’s why all their governors in the South-West are broke today, they cannot pay salaries; they cannot pay pension because they were forced to bring money.”
The former Afenifere secretarygeneral, however, deplored the anticorruption crusade of the Buhari-led administration, saying it had been selective.
He stressed that turning the heat on the members of the opposition party alone was not the best way to pursue the anti-corruption war, adding that those Nigerians expecting the ruling APC to perform miracles had now been disappointed and disillusioned.
He stressed, “Those expecting the APC government to perform miracles do not understand Nigerian politics; they are gullible. I accuse them of being gullible, because, look at the APC members today, half of them were in PDP. So, if you say PDP has ruined the economy, half of those who ruined the economy are in APC today.
“A lot of northerners in PDP, because of this Northern agenda that they wanted power to go back to the North, deliberately sabotaged their party so that the APC could win. But they are still the same human beings that they were in PDP. Have they become angels in APC? If you are looking for corrupt people, PDP is not the only place where you have corrupt people. If anybody were to investigate all the APC people today, they probably have more corrupt people than you have in the PDP.
