Lagos APC Berates Agbaje On Threat To Cancel Lekki-Épé Road Concession

Posted by African Examiner Latest Headlines, News, Nigeria 2015 Election Sunday, January 18th, 2015

The Lagos State chapter of the All Progressives Congress has berated the governorship candidate of the PDP, Mr. Jimmy Agbaje for saying that he will cancel the Public Private Participation arrangement that saw to the execution of the Lekki-Épé Expressway.

The party said the threat is an irrational election promise directed at foreign investors, which stands to cripple the economy of Lagos and affect the wobbling Nigerian economy.

In a release in Lagos, signed by the Lagos State Publicity Secretary of the APC, Joe Igbokwe, the party said that it is quite surprising that at this age and time when the drive for foreign investment is needed to break the shackles of economic doom, an aspiring candidate to the Lagos State governorship stool should issue such naked threat to Investors to boost his electoral chances. The party says that an Agbaje/PDP government will spell doom as the sixteen disastrous PDP wreckage of the country.

“Two days after Agbaje’s disastrous election promise to cancel the foreign-driven concession on the Lekki-Épé Expressway, Punch newspapers carried a report that foreign investors, alarmed by the economic and political risks in the country, had pulled out N783.17 billion from the Nigerian Stiock Exchange. This is an alarming economic statistics that should worry every Nigerian but in his desperation to con Lagosians of votes, Agbaje is threatening to stop foreign investment in Lagos such as the concession arrangement behind the construction and subsequent tolling of Lekki-Épé Expressway.

“Lagosians will like to know from Agbaje and his PDP why their PDP federal government is promising a non-existent 1.8 kilometers Second Niger Bridge that will be tolled from at least six positions for twenty five years while he is making a campaign issue of tolling a well delivered Lekki-Épé Expressway that meets the great needs of the beneficiary towns for a relief from endless traffic bottlenecks the PDP federal government has turned blind eyes to.

“Again, Lagosians are aware that the dilapidated Airport Road, which the PDP federal government has abandoned while playing politics with completed world class roads in Lagos is tolled and we wonder why Agbaje and Lagos PDP have not promised Lagosians that their assumed government will not only stop toll collection on the road but will build him in the unlikely event that they control the government of Lagos State,” it said.

The party added that “Lagos APC notes that out of frustration from the criminal negligence the PDP federal government has meted out to federal roads in Lagos for the past sixteen years, the Lagos State government has undertaken the reconstruction of many federal roads in Lagos and is currently delivering world class reconstruction of such roads like the Lagos- Ikorodu Road and the Lagos- Badagry Expressway which serves as a gateway to the country but which had been completely abandoned by the PDP federal government.

“But we find it alarming that someone that dreams of governing Lagos is issuing such economically disastrous threat to foreign investment in a state like Lagos when the federal government under the control of his party has made the sing song of attracting elusive foreign investment the epicenter of its failed economic programme for the past sixteen years. When we consider that his party is today promising Igbo an elusive Second Niger Bridge that will be built through PPP and the same concession arrangement that drives the Lekki-Épé Expressway, we cannot but expose the shallowness, desperation and hypocrisy of Jimmy Agbaje and the Lagos PDP.”

According to the party, it is easy to make bogus promises like Agbaje is now dishing out but practicality it is nothing entirely.

“We know those dragging Agbaje like a soulless puppet rank among the worst types of pests that can descend on any entity. The Disaster the PDP led governance has made of Nigeria in sixteen years is all there to warn us to visit pestilence and destruction on a working, stable and secure state like Lagos that mops up the fall outs of the wreckage which PDP had made of Nigeria in the past sixteen years.

“Lagosians are warned that Agbaje and PDP have nothing to offer Lagos than to reduce it to the same rubble PDP has reduced Nigeria in sixteen years of unprecedented waste laying,” it stated.