Nigeria’s major opposition party, The People’s Democratic Party has called for a dissolution of the Presidential task force on COVID-19 and its replacement with a convergence of experts in a special department under the purview of the national centre for disease control to professionally tackle the pandemic.
Njenje Media News quotes the opposition party in saying it is distressing that the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 has not demonstrated any capacity beyond mere announcement of figures of infected persons, deaths, recoveries, discharges and issues of local protocols rather than engaging in epidemiology, researches and production of equipment, drugs, therapeutics and other medical palliatives that can help stave off the impact of the global pandemic.
PDP Publicity Secretary, Mr Kola Ologbodinyan, in a pressure statement said that the Buhari administration did not make any budgetary provision in the 2021 Appropriation for the acquisition of essential therapeutics, including vaccines, even in the face of the heightened anxieties over the second wave of the pandemic in the country.
The party said that it is alarmed by the manifest lack of commitment and proactiveness by the Buhari administration to check the spate of the second wave of COVID-19 and the escalating deaths arising from the spread of the pandemic in the country.
The party has also accused the governing All Progressives Congress of using the pandemic as a corruption drainpipe and called out the minister of Humanitarian affairs and disaster management for carrying bundles of cash to the streets under the guise of palliative measures, but the PDP demands that the Federal Government should channel such resources directly to the respective state governments to cushion the possible effects of the pandemic on the people.
