In 2015, Nigerians were on the march again. Citizens were so angry with the brand of failure posing as governance that we took a gamble and placed their hopes in today’s ruling party, the APC and President Muhamadu Buhari, a 71-year old former dictator who has now shown neither the capacity nor the aptitude for the highest office in the land.
If that campaign was a movie, the title of the movie would be: “The lesser of two evils.”
Everything the APC candidate did was justified and excused because he was branded as “the lesser evil.” He was given an easy ride. No serious questions were asked about his competence or track record or world view; he couldn’t even be bothered to attend a presidential debate to defend his ideas in a competitive environment. Yet he was promising CHANGE. And a majority of Nigerian voters bought what he was selling.
But where is this change?
First, I will lay bare what is at stake in this election by telling you why the failed PDP and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, are not alternatives to the failed APC and its candidate, President Buhari. They are one and the same, siamese twins of failure and destruction.
Second, I will tell you why my candidacy under the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN) represents the most prepared, most qualified and most formidable choice for 2019, and why you cannot afford to sit on the sidelines in this battle for the soul of Nigeria.
Finally, I will address the most frequently repeated concerns about my candidacy and then what exactly we need to do to take this movement from here to Aso Rock.
Let us look back briefly to 2015
Do you remember? The chant all across the country was “Anyone But Jonathan.” Sadly, that is how we ended up with this reprobate government.
This time it is: “Anyone But Buhari.” And by that they mean that we should reinstate the failed PDP and its candidate, former vice president Atiku Abubakar because they think Atiku is the only person that can defeat Buhari in 2019. And in 2023, when Atiku and the PDP inevitably fail again, because a bad tree cannot bear good fruit? We will hear new chants of “Anyone But Atiku.”
That is how we get looped in a cycle of insanity – repeating the same thing, and expecting a different result. That cycle of failure is unsustainable and it has to end now.
2019 cannot be “Anyone But Buhari”. Our country is not a recycling plant for uninspiring old men with their old ideas and old dubious characters. We deserve better than their aggressive mediocrity. And that is why I am running for president – to lead a people’s movement that will permanently terminate bad leadership, retire these incompetents and fight for every Nigerian.
For those of you considering the PDP as an alternative, I really want to ask you: what is the thing that you see about them that is any different from the APC. Really? These people are the same: Siamese Twins of Failure.
Fellow Nigerians, here is the truth of the matter: the APCPDP is not two parties. The #APCPDP is one single party fielding one single candidate, and that candidate’s name is #BuTiku. Yes, you heard me right – #BuTiku.
Buhari and Atiku are conjoined from head to toe as ‘BuTiku’. There is no lesser evil in BuTiku. BuTiku are members of the same party.
What is the primary legacy of President Muhammadu Buhari? It is the destruction of our nation’s wealth, presiding over the worst economic recession Nigeria has seen in decades.
Even now that the economy has come out of recession, the growth is as sluggish as his government. Four out of every 10 adults today are either unemployed or underemployed, and Nigeria is now the Poverty Capital of the World, the World Bank confirmed that we now have more extremely poor people than India, which has a population six times our size.
And in the midst of this, his Vice President was celebrating last week at the Nigeria Economic Summit that handing bailouts to state governors to pay salaries is an achievement. What a big shame!
President Buhari declared after his victory that he “belongs to everybody and he belongs to nobody.” It sounded like sweet music at the time, but it was a big scam. This is a man whose wife – and surely his wife should know him better than we do – lamented that a mafia had hijacked her husband’s government.
There is no shadow of doubt: President Buhari is the most parochial, most nepotistic and most partisan president that Nigeria has ever seen.
This president talks about fighting grand corruption. Please, please, give me a break! Can corruption fight corruption? Does he think we cannot see? …a president that looks the other way while his friends and cronies suffocate and strangle our country.
This is not a time to speak in parables. I shall name names
Should we talk about his former secretary to the federal government, Babachir Lawal, who was accused of stealing hundreds of millions meant for Internally Displaced Persons. Imagine the depravity. And when this person was indicted by the Senate, President Buhari actually wrote to them to say he would not take any action against the man. He only grudgingly sacked this tainted person because citizens stood their ground and said NO WAY. Up until now, no other action has been taken against him by the government. And they do not plan to take any.
Should we talk about how this government recalled a former chairman of the Pensions Reforms Commission, Abdulrasheed Maina, who has an arrest warrant on his head for stealing billions from our nation’s pensioners? The Head of the Civil Service actually advised the president not to re-instate him, and what did the president do? He not only recalled this person, but he also promoted him! He only sacked Maina because citizens resisted and said NO WAY. Up till now, over a year later, the EFCC and Police have done nothing. And they do not plan to do anything.
As we stand here today, there are credible allegations against the NNPC of which the president is minister in charge and elaborate accusations against both the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari and his Attorney General, Abubakar Malami. Has anything been done? No. Nothing has been done and the president has no plans to do
anything.
If we dive into all the other issues involving the APC candidate – from the Air Nigeria nonsense to claiming in the morning that Abacha was not a thief, and then going in the night to beg for repatriation of Abacha’s loot – we may spend the entire day here today and we simply do not have that time.
As one of the founders of Transparency International, I often encountered rulers like the ones in charge of Nigeria. Their words and their actions are like parallel lines; they never meet. They say one thing publicly but their actions scream the opposite. I shudder to imagine the amount of corruption that will be uncovered about President Buhari and his government when they are kicked out by Nigerians next year. I shudder to
imagine.
I do not intend to dwell any further on these symbols of the past, but it is important that I define what #BuTiku actually represents so that citizens can easily identify and reject it no matter the packaging. It is important to let you know exactly what you are choosing on behalf of us and our children when you choose these icons of failure, disappointment and national poverty.
We must not pretend that we do not know what the stakes are. We know. You know. When your children ask you in a few decades what choice you made when faced between corruption and incompetence on one hand, and the ACPN candidate, Obiageli Ezekwesili on the other, what answer will you therefore give to them? That you chose corruption or incompetence over competence, capacity and
character?
I decided to join this race because I wanted you, and me, to have no excuse. We have in this race a candidate who has excelled in Corporate Nigeria, excelled in national government, excelled in private enterprise, excelled in international development, and then dedicated her life to fighting for every Nigerian from Chibok to Jos, from Abia to Ikot Ekpene. A candidate who is one of the very small tribes of Nigerians who have served in government, but who have no allegation of corruption against them? I don’t mean court case o. I mean allegation. Zero. None. Not
one.
I want to be sure you know that the choice is between on one hand #BuTiku, a ticket which includes a man who insults your intelligence by asking you to go get his WAEC certificate from the armed forces of which he is the commander in chief and another man who cannot tell you where he got the start up capital for his alleged multi-million dollar businesses; and on the other hand a woman whose track record is filled with concrete achievenments in education, solid minerals, public procurement and international development; a woman who has been fighting for this country every day of her life for the past 30 years – from being attacked on the streets of Lagos fighting for the June 12, 1993 mandate to taking up the challenge of this government and, at great risk to myself, visiting Sambisa Forest personally to fight for our still missing #ChibokGirls.
That is why, with a heavy but resolute heart, with a deep sense of responsibility but a clear understanding that I am entering into uncharted waters, I decided that I had no choice, that we have waited too long, and it is time for us to get in and fix this country ourselves.
So don’t pretend you have no choice. You do. And it is not one between the devil and the deep blue sea.
I am often uncomfortable speaking about my record, but I am now a politician. I chose to get into politics myself, and so it is my duty to remind you of my track record.
I led the World Bank’s operations in 47 African countries for five years, delivering up to $40 billion that helped countries tackle development challenges across a range of issues. I am not talking about theories, or claiming to lead an economic management team when all of us who did the work knew you were very busy supervising leakages and patronage. I am talking about the actual work of rebuilding nations.
These people are so incompetent that they make issues like infrastructure and human development, agricultural production and productivity, private sector development and economic reforms look like mission impossible. They cannot even speak about Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things because they are busy trading and drinking oil. That Nigeria has not moved forward is not because its issues are complicated. It is complicated because these guys have zero
capacity.
They enter into Aso Rock and they feel like they are now on top of the world. It is so easy for power and money to confuse them. Shame.
I was priviledged to be a cabinet member before I was 40, and a minister by the time I was 42, implementing the reforms that changed Nigeria’s broken and corrupt public contracting system to one of a global standard. Power doesn’t faze me. Power has never and can never confuse
me.
Then people talk about the grassroots? I have crafted and implemented multi-sector policy to transform the lives of those at the bottom of the pyramid. I have visited around this country. I have seen the poverty, audited the opportunities, and created solutions that have kept us from crashing. These men don’t know the grassroots like I do. These guys only have experience in compromise and corruption. My own experience is in caring for people and rebuilding nations.
As minister of solid minerals I led the repositioning of our mining possibilities for private sector leadership, cleaned up the chaotic mining titles registry and had Nigeria commended globally for leading on transparency in the mining sector when we established the Nigerian Mining Cadastral Office. Then I terminated the power of the minister – my own power – to award mining licenses as he or she pleases. I supervised the comprehensive geophysical survey of the country that generated basic data on number of minerals (34) and number of locations (430) across the length and breadth of Nigeria, opening up massive opportunities that we as a nation continue to enjoy. These are verifiable facts; the records are available.
I was education minister for less than one year, but in that time, we embarked on the most comprehensive reforms Nigeria has seen since 1999. We revamped the Federal Inspectorate Service and began the first ever nationwide inspection of secondary schools. We built the Nigeria Education Management Information System, collecting data and using it to analytically plan and make education policy. We introduced the private sector supported Entrepreneurship Studies as a compulsory General Studies course in all higher institutions. We started work on structural reforms of our curricula to position education as a key driver of transformation by linking curricula at all levels of education to the nation’s social and economic imperatives. We introduced Public Private Partnership models for education service delivery and very importantly ensured that Innovation & Vocational Enterprise Institutions were accredited, certified (National Innovation Diploma and National Vocational Certificate) and regulated by the National Board for Technical Education.
All these things I mentioned and more I haven’t even mentioned were done in just 10 months.
Trust me; this is not a noise making exercise. I know the work. I don’t just know ‘business’. I know capital. I understand economies. I know nation building.
You can trust that when I say that under an Oby Ezekwesili presidency, we will get to work immediately lifting a minimum of 80 million Nigerians out of debilitating poverty, I mean business.
Read the full text online at www.thepointng.com
Being text of a speech by the presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, Oby Ezekwesili, at a World Press Conference in Lagos…recently.
