The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Lagos State has rolled out relief initiatives to alleviate the sufferings of Lagosians following the lockdown associated with the ravaging coronavirus pandemic in the state.
Kick-starting the first phase of the scheme, Adedeji Doherty, Lagos State PDP chairman, noted that the lapses observed in the state government’s relief scheme where several indigent Lagosians were not reached by the Lagos State initiative would be corrected by the party.
Doherty said, rather than just fault the inadequacy in the state government’s palliatives arrangement, the party chose to attend to the needs of those deliberately schemed out of its scope of coverage.
According to him, “We saw what the state government was doing and believed that we could not sit idly and criticise whatever APC government was doing wrongly or rightly at this time, but to assist both our party members, sympathisers and general residents in various communities who were deliberately being sidelined in the distribution of the government managed relief/palliative scheme.
“As chairman of the PDP, I wrote two open letters to the governor regarding this abnormality and he responded by saying that the process was hijacked by some elements in his administration”.
Speaking about the modalities in place to sustain the relief plan tagged ‘Lagos PDP COVID-19 relief initiative’, especially for the deliberately sidelined people in the state.
He stated that the relief is meant for distribution across 57 LGAs/LCDAs in the state.
“We went on to create a whatsapp platform of about 100 members made up of personal friends and party faithful, who I pleaded with and finally got them to contribute towards assisting most of those that might have been sidelined in the process.
“The relief initiative has the following materials as donated by our donors; noodles, freshly baked bread and vegetable oil, and they are distributed on a house-to-house basis. While some were enough to reach all the LCDAs, some materials couldn’t.
“We are of the opinion that the government would and cannot reach everyone anyway, even if the process was perfect and as such we had to ignore our party differences and take part in achieving the goal the government had set for itself and the state as a whole.”
Doherty further said: “Our programme is still on-going as we are still receiving more relief materials and we are getting ready to do the next round of distribution.”
To ensure probity, the PDP chairman hinted that all payments are being made directly to Honeywell Flour Mills but PDP relief written as payee including the donor’s name.
“We had also instructed our coordinators to be fair in the distribution of the food items which we delivered to them directly with the assistance of the Nigerian Peace Corp- who helped monitor the distribution and supervised the social distancing order which was put in place by the government.
“However, we believe that this would and cannot also be enough to go round and that is why we intend to make it an on-going programme, even after the pandemic,” he added.
Iniobong Iwok
