The All Progressives Congress (APC) has condemned the People’s Democratic Party over comments on the administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Its spokesman, Lanre Issa-Onilu, in a statement Sunday night, said the comments were a desperate attempt by the opposition party to play petty politics with a serious matter of national and international importance.
APC said the accusation by the PDP that the APC-led government has not lived up to its responsibility of protecting the people of Kano State against the backdrop of some deaths recorded in the state is a case in point.
APC said the PDP’s similar attack on Kano State Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, was to score cheap political points.
“This allegation is not only baseless but very irresponsible. It is false in its entirety. Shockingly, while all well-meaning organisations, home and abroad, and individuals are putting in positive shifts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has rather chosen to dance on the graves of the unfortunate Nigerians that have been killed by the disease”, he noted.
“PDP has this rare opportunity to stand up to be counted by making positive contributions to end the scourge, but this opposition party thinks this is the time to politicise Coronavirus cases and deaths, particularly in Kano State.
“We invite the PDP to borrow a leaf from the patriotic efforts being made by the cross-party platform, the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF), who has kept politics aside and joined the President Buhari government in jointly, proactively and frontally combating the pandemic which is currently a threat to our very existence. The PDP must understand that only the living can play politics.
“The APC would, once again, refresh the memory of the PDP, since the party appears irredeemably lost in its present, unenviable state of idleness and irrelevance. Weeks before the pandemic hit Nigeria, this administration had started taking practical steps in preparation for it.
“The PDP may claim to be unaware, but emergency operations centres have been established in states to serve as coordination platforms and are networked to a national incident coordination centre. Many states are now better equipped and prepared to coordinate within and across their borders in combating the coronavirus. From just about four testing laboratory centres, NCDC has 15 testing centres as at today with testing capacity increasing to over 3000 daily from just a few hundreds weeks ago.
“While it is clear that no single country, including the advanced nations, boasts of adequate capacity to respond at this pandemic, and are all working hard to scale up capacity to contain the spread of COVID-19 and in the same vein making efforts to find a cure for it, the APC-led government has not been found wanting in protecting the lives of all Nigerians, except for PDP that is incurably irrational.
APC recalls that when the PDP held a rally in Oyo State against public outcry, it probably was a deliberate effort by the opposition party to jeopardise the lives of the people of this country.
It added that Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde, who was making a joke of the pandemic got no cautionary words from PDP.