By CHARLES IWUOHA

Founding member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former Director General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), Mr. Osita Okechukwu, has dubbed President Bola Tinubu’s anti-graft war as hope renewal and identification with the masses nationwide.

He urged President Tinubu to “bail-us-out from the economic stranglehold of one per cent class of deep pockets who over the years mangled the Petrodollars allocated to them for industrial development, hence failed to lift millions out of poverty.”

Okechukwu, who was reacting at the Enugu airport on Sunday over the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s recent interrogation of the utilisation of foreign exchange allocated for industrialisation, agreed that the nation was in dire need of bailing the citizens out from the stranglehold of the one per cent class that had been feeding fat on the sordid-forex market.

Okechukwu said: “For me, this amounts to identification with the collective interest of masses nationwide, as most of us hold the earnest view that we need to recover more monies, as it is not only General Sani Abacha that stashed our monies abroad.

“When one learnt that the Ola Olukoyede-led EFCC raided the Dangote Headquarters and other big wig firms, it is with nostalgia that one recalled the famous pledge at Independence Thanksgiving Service, National Ecumenical Christian Center, Abuja, made by our dear First Lady, Senator Remi Tinubu, that ‘Nigeria’s wealth is the Commonwealth of all, it belongs to everyone. God has blessed my family, we don’t need the wealth of Nigeria to survive but to do the right thing and I promise you on this Alta, that with your help (and) with the help of God, we will set this nation on the right path.’

“One felt relieved and prays that President Tinubu combs all corners in consortia with Femi Falana’s red dossier, so as to reduce our debt burden and revamp our economy.”

According to Okechukwu, “This renewed anti-graft-war is the surest way and means of avoiding more gruesome economic recession, exodus of our doctors and nurses and erasing the paradox that Nigeria, the country that produced the richest African, is the World Poverty Capital.”

Okechukwu stated emphatically that if President Tinubu maintains this anti-graft-war momentum, “it will be pure Hope Renewal and Nigeria will be one of those history will record as nations where change emanated from unexpected quarters.”

He therefore appealed that the citizens “should give Mr President the much needed support to pull through the anti-graft-war and implement Section 16(2)© of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”, which he said cautioned that, “the economic system is not operated in such a manner as to permit the concentration of wealth or the means of production and exchange in the hands of few individuals or of group.”

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