Our Party is the least surprised about the latest episode of lie that is being played out yet again by the government of Mr. Abdulfatai Ahmed, this time, over a so-called 'Grand Prix Award in the Agriculture and Green Economics'. This is because to us, we have seen and experienced firsthand the deliberately scrupulous attempt by the government of the day to either downplay bad situations or outrightly resort to falsehood all in a desperate bid to cover up the patently incompetent governor and his laid back disposition to governance.

Rather, this latest public show of shame by the Government fits in perfectly into a pattern of 'official falsehood' that has formed the directive principle of the PDP-led government; if the Government is not denying the fact of the dumping from neighbouring states of beggars and destitute that are now distorting the social fabrics of the streets of Kwara state, it is outrightly cooking figures of the numbers of classrooms constructed even when the facts on ground indicate otherwise. All these and many more have indisputably put a question mark on both the intellectual and moral quotients of the state ruling elite! It has also further underlined the PDP-led government's distance from honour.  

To us as a Party, our immediate concern is not only on the public opprobrium that has greeted the lie of the morally deficient government but the amount of public fund reportedly sunk into producing a documentary that has neither brought food to the table of the Kwaran poor populace nor added to the quality of their lives. We are reliably informed that a whooping Twenty Four Million Seven Hundred and Fifty Million Naira (N24,750,000.00) was wasted on the production of a film conceived just to boost the elitist ego of former Governor Saraki. Only a profligate government, and one with poor foresight and vision like those of Messrs Saraki's and his successor's, will embark on this kind of socially worthless public stunt let alone celebrate it as a validation of foresight!

And to say that this amount is exclusive of the estacode and other travelling allowances of the lying information managers of the governor is to say the least reckless and wasteful. This has no doubt made the interrogation of the truism of Dr Femi Akorode's alleged personal attendance of the event inevitable. The public, in whose tilt Dr. Akorode's France trip was sponsored, deserves to know whether he was either actually sleeping away precious time at the event or went on a frolic of his own in France on the day of the award. This is because one would have reasonably expected that Dr. Akorede, who allegedly attended the award ceremony on behalf of the Government, and with all his usual pretensions to finesse and intellectualism, should know that the Kwara's 'A Farm for Africa' was NEVER awarded the so-called 'Grand Prix Award in the Agriculture and Green Economics', as he gleefully and barefacedly lied about. Rather, the information made available to our Party by the organisers of the awards confirmed that that category was actually won jointly by 'New Vision for Agriculture' and Total Waste; The World Wide Scandal of the Wasting Aimentaire directed by Simon Waldron and Oliver Lemaire respectively.

The tragedy however is not in Akorede's lying but in his believing his own lie! But what is even more regrettable is the shameful way the governor and his godfather took this lie hook, line and sinker, and how the idle political office appointees were all falling over each other, in their trademark laid back style, to place newspaper adverts on the false award. That a serving Senator of a federal republic would, without a modicum of decency and confirmation, be quick to take to the press and validate the lie as a testimony of his so-called 'agro-reform' is to say the least disingenuous, thoughtless and outrightly reckless.

But the paradox should not be lost on us. This whole episode has once again brought to the fore the need for the electorate to be circumvent in choosing their leaders. Kwarans would do well this time around to chase away this spectacle of an inept government and replace same with a more competent, truthful government.

Thank you.

Alhaji Suleiman Buhari
State Chairman, CPC