By Myke Uzendu, Abuja
As delegates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) decide on the aspirant that will fly the flag of the party at the upcoming national delegates convention, the party’s frontline Presidential aspirant, Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa has disclosed he his administration will be pro-people and that he will always get feedbacks directly from citizens on polices or problems confronting the nations so as to formulate lasting solutions.
He further stated that he will make agriculture more attractive in revenue generation than oil and make education more attractive so that parents from the northern part of the country will find no reason to leave their children and wards roaming the street under any guise.
Mazi Ohuabunwa who has toured the length and breadth of the country selling his transformation agenda to the party’s delegates said that North has been erroneously made to believe that crude oil is the power behind the economy of the country hence, people have abandoned agriculture and its value chain and concentrated on oil exploitation even as fossil fuel is becoming obsolete in the international market.
In an interaction with some journalists yesterday in Abuja he said that he will institutionalize ‘communal democracy’ anchored on dialogue, communal participation and feedback system. He lamented that political leaders are disconnected from the people and when there is a problem, they do not get direct information from the affected persons and will go about dispensing solutions which at the end of the day will not bring the situation to an end.
According to him, “There is no problem that is buffeting Nigerian that cannot be solved easily. I can seat down in my exquisite office and begin to trump up excuses, begin to decipher a problem that I don’t know about, blame it on one thing and apply the wrong solution. My government will be predicated on communal democracy. Immediately some people are facing or causing problem, call them, within them is the solution. The solution of any problem is within the problem. All you need to do is to dissect it which we don’t do enough if at all we do it”.
Commenting on the high rate of out of school children in the North, he said that the first solution is to find out why parents in the North abhor formal education especially western education. He said that his administration will try to dissect the hitches be it cultural, financial and otherwise so as to create an environment that will make formal education not only affordable but also attractive.
“We will establish and educational funding system that if you don’t go to school on scholarship, you will go on bursary, if you don’t go on bursary, you will go on students’ loan, that is if your parents or community cannot take care of you. You cannot stay out of school because of lack of money when we become president.
“The only reason to stay out of school is that you don’t want to go to school and the law cannot allow me to force you and even if I force you, I cannot force you to learn. You can go to school and you learn nothing.
“What we need to change is to remember that power belongs to the people, a leader cannot be more intelligent than his people, no leader knows more than his people but Nigerian leaders think that they know more than the people they are leading.
“If you want to lead, come down to the level of the people you are leading, they will give you all the information you need. They will give to you how to solve their problems”.
He assured PDP delegates that if he is elected into office, he will introduce revolution into the agricultural sector, ensure that Nigerians add value to their product and also export it to the international consumers.
According to him, “The government, state and federal will form cooperatives with the owners of the land and they will form big cooperatives. The government will provide implements and bring the machines for everybody who invest in that business and they will do commercial agriculture and do commercial harvesting, and do commercial exploitation and commercial processing.
“For each agricultural state, we are putting manufacturing or processing plant for canning of fruit concentrate, processing cassava, processing banana chips, there will be industries that will be adding value. So we’re going to be spotting raw materials, process them to add value”.
He described as fallacy and misnomer the notion that the North cannot be economically viable if each region or state is allowed to control its resources and pay royalty to the central government.
“Let no trucks come from the north to mile 2 market or Ojota in Lagos and see whether people will not starve after one week. Let no truck carry onions, tomatoes to the East, the Easterners will go hungry. Yams that are from Benue which is also regarded as part of the north, if it stops going East, the easterners will eat sand. So it is a fallacy and the north sometimes enjoys that type of story.
“They enjoy it and that gives them the excuse to say you people have the economy; we have the political power. The North was economically competitive with the south especially after the independent. Pre-independent, it was not so because of colonial power but when Ahmadu Bello became premier, he had a dream, he set up the northern Nigeria Development Corporation. He set up institutions, he set up a textile factory, he went into agriculture, at that time, rail lines were built to transport cotton, ground nuts, hides and skins to the coast. On their way back they will pick up tin and Columbite at Jos. The North is not inferior economically but somehow they seem to allow that impression to hold.
“Each time they talk about restructuring Nigeria they fight as if they are protecting something, what are they protecting? If we restructure Nigeria north is not going to be worse off.
“The only thing the south seem to have exclusively is oil which is losing value in the market. Oil is dying, people are going into renewable energy. They don’t use fossil energy; electric cars are all over the place. In the next 5 – 10 years, oil may be useless and we can’t drink it. The only thing we can do is crack it and get petrochemicals, power gases and begin to get other thing that we can use to do medicines and other things that are derivable from oil”.
The aspirants said that he will make the North explore the entire value chain in the agricultural sector so as to overtake not only the south but the countries the West Africa in Agricultural export and revenue generation.
