Covid-19
Lagos PDP flags off COVID-19 relief outreach
By Olanrewaju Adesanya
The Peoples Democratic Party in Lagos State has rolled out relief initiatives to alleviate the sufferings of indigent Lagosians,as the ravaging Coronavirus pandemic persists,afflicting both the high and mighty in the nations of the world.
Kickstarting the first phase of the scheme,Engineer Adedeji Doherty,the Lagos State PDP Chairman notes that the lapses observed in the state government’s relief scheme, where several indigent Lagosians were clearly not reached necessitated the initiative.
According to Doherty,rather than just faulting the inadequacy in the state government’s palliatives arrangement, the party choose to attend to the needs of those deliberately schemed out of its scope of coverage.
Doherty said,”We saw what the State Government was doing and believed that we could not wait and criticize whatever they were 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 to the deliberately sideline frame in the state.
Doherty 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 faithfuls, who I pleaded with and finally got them to contribute towards assisting most of those that might have been sidelined along the line.
“The relief initiative has the following materials as donated by our donors;Noodles,Fredh baked Bread and vegetable oil 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 Government would and can not 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.
“Our program is still ongoing as we are still receiving more relief materials and we are getting ready to do the next round of distribution.
To ensure probity, the Lagos PDP boss hinted that all payments were and is being made directly to Honeywell Flour mills but PDP relief written as payee including the donors name.
” We had also instructed our Coordinators to be fair in the distribution of the food items which we delivered to them 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 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 ongoing program, even after the COVID 19 Crises is over .” Doherty said.