By Dr Omene Odafe
The recent highly insensitive hike in school fees heartlessly imposed on Deltans by the rudderless and failed PDP-led administration of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa is especially wicked coming at the present time.
It is clear that as the curtain is drawn on this colossal mistake of a cash and carry administration, the PDP is hellbent on the further impoverishment of the good people of Delta before it is finally sent packing forever.
The Okowa administration is a monumental and complete failure that has not been able to create any opportunities of any sort for the people of Delta State.
This is a Governor that has not facilitated any employment opportunities or, indeed, employed anyone besides an army of political appointees without portfolio, the overwhelming majority of whom cannot even enter Government House!
This is the same administration that most callously sacked a huge number of Deltans when it newly came on board just because the Governor would rather not pay salaries to the citizens of the state.
Everyone knows the huge amounts of money the state has been making from what were already exorbitant school fees charged in the various institutions across the state.
There is no state in Nigeria that makes more money from shool fees than Delta with its plethora of educational institutions yet, in its pathological greed, the state government is insistent on collecting ever more from hapless students and their already overburdened parents.
This is the height of governance by a macabre philosophy of pathological avarice, maniacal greed and diabolical deceit.
If it is not a humongous and quite shady loan of 12 billion naira that the state clearly does not even require and can easily do without, that is been borrowed at our expense, then our Governor and the PDP are finding other ways to mismanage the state for their betterment and to our detriment.
This is an administration whose sole achievement is a handful of corner roads and alleyways which are so poorly constructed that they have all either failed or are failing before our very eyes as we speak!
What a “Road Master” of a Governor, indeed!
So fraudulent is this so-called “Road Master” hype of the Okowa administration that some of the roads miserably fail even before they are commissioned!
This is what happens when an administration operates on what is effectively a “share the money” philosophy of governance.
Okowa became a medical doctor, a noble profession he never really bothered to practice and quickly abandoned for the spoils of political office, while enjoying the benefits of free education.
Now the same man, educated at the expense of the public, has placed education in state-owned public institutions, built and funded with money that belongs to Deltans, beyond the reach of the generality of those same Deltans!
It is as if for Okowa and PDP, the huge and highly alarming number of prostitutes and “yahoo boys” in Delta is not already worrying enough and more should be added to the number by sending our children out of school with exorbitant school fees that the Governor’s own parents could not possibly have afforded when he, himself, was going to school!
We should be reducing fees to encourage our youths and young ones and certainly not increasing them in what is the richest state in Nigeria, per capita.
The All Progressives Congress, APC, Delta State, completely opposes this latest additional hardship imposed on the people of this state by a PDP administration that clearly does not care how our people survive from day to day and the fees must be immediately reverted back to what they were.
We urge the good people of Delta to close ranks, come together as one and, purposefully oppose this increase in school fees in a state that can afford the very best for our children without further milking their already stressed parents dry.
- Odafe is the Director of Publicity, APC Delta State
