LP, PPA kick against Buhari’s portrait in their offices

Aligning with the decision of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, two other political parties, the Labour Party, LP and the Progressive Peoples Alliance, PPA, have said they will not hang the portrait of President Muhammadu Buhari in their respective secretariats.

According to the parties, their decision was as a result of the action of the ruling All Progressives Congress, which before it came to power, allegedly refused to hang the portrait of former President, Goodluck Jonathan in its national secretariat.

The LP and PPA stressed that their action was a payback for the APC.

It will be recalled that the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, on Tuesday announced that the party will not hang Buhari’s portrait in its offices.

“We will never hang his (Buhari) portrait in this office, because President Buhari is not known to our party. He is not a leader of our party and, therefore, we will never put his portrait here. We are a political party, very partisan and therefore, we are not going to hide that”.

The National Chairman of PPA, Mr. Peter Ameh, while explaining the absence of Buhari’s portrait at its national secretariat to Sunday Punch, said the APC blazed the trail of “subtle civil disobedience” when it was in opposition.

Ameh said: “Your storyline should be whether the APC had the photograph of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan. They did not. And that is the story; the APC did not have Jonathan’s portrait in the party’s national secretariat.

“Everything is about precedence. Throughout Jonathan’s tenure, the APC didn’t have his photograph; so, may be other political parties are also learning from the precedence set by the APC. They are following in the footsteps of the party during the last administration.”

Speaking in the same vein, the National Chairman, LP, Abdulkadir Abdulsalam, said the party did not have Buhari’s portrait, noting that apart from the fact that the APC never accorded Jonathan such respect, the new administration had failed to make the official portrait of Buhari available to it.

Abdulsalam said: “We don’t have the photograph of President Buhari in our secretariat because the APC never had the photograph of ex-President Jonathan in their offices.

“We are supposed to get it but we don’t. The fact of the matter is that the Federal Ministry of Information should have called us, not only political parties, to say that the President’s photograph is available at the Federal Ministry of Information and that all organisations should apply for it.”