N82m Dinner: Rivers PDP Rejects Semenitari’s Account

The ruling People’s
Democratic Party (PDP) in Rivers State has rejected the explanation of  Mrs Ibim Semenitari, Commissioner for Information and Communications in the immediate past Rotimi Amaechi administration in the state, regarding the about N82 million allegedly used to organize a birthday dinner for Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka.
The party in a statement issued on Saturday in Port Harcourt by the state Chairman, Bro Felix Obuah, described it as “a fraud committed under the guise of a birthday celebration for Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka.
The statement dismissed the arguments of Mrs Semenitari, who was recently appointed Acting Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), as “not only hollow but petty and childish”.
The statement, signed by Obuah’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Jerry Needam, said the explanation of the former commissioner cannot justify the alleged siphoning from the state’s treasury, a whopping N82,000,000.00.
According to him, “while we agree that the Nobel Laureate deserves any form of honour in any part of the world, we find it a terrible disservice to Professor Sonyinka to use his name to steal public funds and mischievously pretent to be more protective of the man’s international reputation than the rest of us, thereby propagandistically portraying officials of the Rivers State Government as adversaries to the Laureate”.