By Myke Uzendu, Abuja
Presidential candidate of Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi has declared that the reason he and his running mate, senator Baba Ahmed Datti are in the race for the nation’s presidency is not merely to occupy the office of presidency, but to reclaim the country and return I back to the rightful owners, which he said id Nigerians
Obi, who stated this at a one summit organized by the Coalition for Peter Obi (CPO), disclosed that the greatest undoing of the current crop of political class is that they became selfish and failed to build alliances and consensus across all the strata of the Nigerian society.
Obi said that the trust of his campaign and victory is to build alliance and consensus with the youth who are the active workers and drivers of the Nigerian economy as well as the under recognized Nigerian workers.
He said that it would be foolhardy for anyone to sugar-coat our current morass. He said that great nations are built through political alliances adding that the founding fathers understood the principle and forged alliances in the national interest.
Obi said: “Our job is to take power from those who have it and give it back to you. We have a country called Nigeria but we don’t have Nigerians. What we want to do is to create Nigerians.
“The only way to create Nigerians is to make people to have hope in Nigeria and the only way they will have faith in Nigeria is that there is hope in Nigerians.
“The only thing that is lacking in this country is leadership. And that is what we intend to provide. We are not trying to do something else. Leadership is what Datti and I want to provide. We are not looking for anything.
“In 2023, we will no longer allow drivers that don’t know where we are going. We will remove that driver. We will not allow him to continue. We will put another driver to continue because what we have now, and what is happening in Nigeria is that you don’t know where you are going, the driver doesn’t know where the vehicle is going, so every road leads us there.
“But we don’t want to worry. All we say is that 2023 onwards, we will no longer allow that situation. For now, we will manage it to the end.”
According to him,” Great nations are built through political alliances. Our founding fathers understood and forged alliances in the national interest. But things changed. Our leaders became selfish, myopic and corrupt. And our people suffered. That narrative and mindset must change.
“The new alliance we seek is between Nigerian Youths, the Labour Party, which represent Nigerian workers, and Like Minds. Collectively, it is an alliance of the OBIdients!
Obi said that the two big parties in the country are only vehicles used in siphoning the wealth of the country and inflicting misery and poverty on the electorate.
“The current structures of both the PDP and the APC are the stomach infrastructure that has brought us nothing but misery. Their understanding of structure is sharing of Nigeria’s patrimony to vested interests and influence peddlers. That is against what Peter Obi represents; that is against what Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed represents; and it is indeed, against the vision of the Labour Party”.
“I urge you to always endeavour to remind the opposition that Nigeria’s democracy must survive because of our structure -that critical mass that has been dehumanized and disenfranchised by the ruling oligarchs; the 100 million poor Nigerians who will come out on election day to fight for their future; the 33% unemployed Nigerians who already know who kept them unemployed; our structure is indeed the parents of 18.5m out-of-school-children in Nigeria, who will strive to ensure that such affliction does not visit them a second time. And finally, our structure is everyone seated in this hall today! Yes, we have Structure. And we are ready to move mountains to save Nigeria” he said.
“I want to assure you that as a people-oriented party and Movement, the people remain the fulcrum of our collective quest to take back Nigeria; the people are our STRUCTURE. I therefore urge you not to yield to the deceptive narrative of lack of Structure in the Movement. You all seated here are the Structures we seek” he added.
