Bayelsa Network of Progressives have described as uncharitable, the statement credited to the Bayelsa State Governor, Seriake Dickson, in which he described the six years of the Presidency of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, as a waste to the Ijaw nation.

Dickson also claimed that during the administration of Jonathan, ministers and other presidential aides from Bayelsa were strictly after selfish interests.

But Bayelsa Network of Progressives in a statement issued on Friday in Kaduna, signed by its Chairman, Mr. Atani Isaac, said the claim by the Governor that the state was unable to attract any meaningful development during Jonathan’s Presidency, was just an attempt at ‘cheap populism’.

The group also accused Dickson of deliberately abandoning all projects in Jonathan’s locality as a means of despising the former President and making him look bad before his people.

Isaac said it was inevitable that there would be people, who for reasons best known to them still believe that Jonathan should have been an Ijaw President, instead of the Nigerian President he was elected to be.

“It was unfair that Governor Dickson was not referring to his inability to fully deliver on the mandate given to him by the people of our state, but was rather looking for help from above, Abuja,” he said.

The Chairman said before Governor Dickson can be taken serious on the said allegation, he must first come before Bayelsans, to explain, how he has locally delivered on his electoral promises and justify how the state has used the enormous resources, made available to it, under the Seriake Dickson’s administration.

According to Isaac, “Dickson is pretending to be walking the moral high ground when he is actually the one with a moral burden. He has proven to be a very bad manager of resources.

“Of all the Governors of the oil producing states enjoying additional revenue from the 13% derivation, he is the only one owing workers even with the smallest workforce. He should first of all remove the big log in his eyes before spotting the peck in the eyes of another.

“His attack on Jonathan is unwarranted and gratuitous. He is like the proverbial character in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that challenged his god to a wrestling match because of a flash of good fortune.

“He forgets easily how his political nest was feathered. Suddenly, he has started seeing himself as the authentic Ijaw leader just because he is occupying the seat of the Governor of Bayelsa State.

“He must be reminded that Jonathan was not made President by the votes of the Ijaw alone. His Presidency was for the entire country and so was his distribution of the dividends of democracy with projects and programmes taken to all parts of the country, including the Ijaw nation. Jonathan is not sectional minded like Dickson who has abandoned all state projects in the former President’s domain just to spite him and turn his people against him.”

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