All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, governorship candidate for Abia State in the 2019 governorship election, Dr Alex Otti, has called on all Abians to leave their comfort zones and come to the rescue of Abia State which is under the misrule of Dr Okezie Ikpeazu.
In the press release issued and signed by Otti, he disclosed that Abia State has received N355 Billion from the inception of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu first term till date, adding that the state does not look like a state that has received 20% of the said allocation.
“Gentlemen of the Press, between the time the present Okezie Ikpeazu led government came on board and today, the state has received over Three hundred and fifty-five Billion Naira (N355 Billion) in Statutory monthly allocations and Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). These funds are aside the bail-out funds, Paris Club refunds, ecological funds and loans from Commercial banks taken by this government. Permit me to document the breakdown of these figures”
“These figures are exclusive of the Bailout funds of N14.15B and the 3 tranches of Paris club refund, totalling over N20B. Sadly, Abia doesn’t look like a state that has seen twenty percent of the above mentioned funds, forcing one to ask; where do Abia funds go to?” he said.
“At this point I would want to call the attention and reawaken the consciousness of some well to do and respected citizens and elders of Abia state, especially those who have access to the government in Abia to intervene and save this government from itself, as well as save the future generation from being mortgaged.”
Otti dismissed the recent media tour of projects embarked upon by the governor as a jamboree aimed to deceive Abians. NewsCritic reports that Ikpeazu embarked on project tour last week with journalists to showcase his projects and commission them. But Otti said Ikpeazu has nothing to show Abians as the projects he executed in the last four and half years of his administration that is wworth celebrating.
However, responding to Otti’s statement the Governor through the chief press secretary, Onyebuchi Ememanka said the serially defeated Governorship Candidate of APGA, Oti’s has resolve to continue to display his ignorance and play cheap politics with the State of affairs in Abia State.
Yesterday, Oti gathered a group of journalists in Lagos and fed them with nothing but barefaced lies, something that has become his stock in trade since his ill-fated attempt to govern Abia State started in 2015.
He said “Alex Otti seeks to govern Abia from his Lagos base. He doesn’t live here, has no business interest here and as such is completely ignorant of what happens here.
While we do not intend to join issues with Otti, who obviously is yet to recover from his serial defeats in two successive elections and the persistent rejection of his lies by the people of Abia State, we believe it is important to set certain records straight for the benefit of public record.
“You will recall that in the build up to the 2015 general elections in Abia State, one of the high points of Alex Oti’s campaign was that he had concluded plans to raise One Hundred Billion Naira from external sources which he will commit to the reconstruction of Aba and other towns in Abia State. In his press conference yesterday, Oti boasted about how he successfully truncated the attempt by the Abia State Government to secure a facility from the African Development Bank for purposes of infrastructural upgrade and other related uses.
“Gentlemen of the Press, will it be wrong to state that based on his own admission, that Oti is directly responsible for the slow pace of infrastructural upgrade in Abia State? Is it wrong to assert that Oti sought to undermine the efforts of the Government and people of Abia State so that he would have campaign talking points to latch on to?
“In the build up to the 2019 elections, during the Governorship Debate held in Umuahia, Alex Oti admitted that he can certify ‘only 59 road projects done by Governor Ikpeazu’ out of the 74 road project listed.
If just before the last elections, Alex Oti admitted to certifying these number of roads during the Governorship debate, how then could he have claimed, as he did yesterday, that Governor Ikpeazu has done nothing.
He doesn’t see the improvements in our schools. He doesn’t see the consistent top performance of our students in WAEC exams for four years now, he doesn’t see that enrolment in our public primary schools have more than tripled in the last four years from a little over 100,000 to over 330,000.
Oti will never see that our Abia State University has remained on a steady upward movement in terms of performance and stability for the past four years.
It noteworthy that in all his media interventions, Alex Oti is yet to identify even one single positive contribution from the Ikpeazu’s government.
