Social Democratic Party (SDP) Presidential candidate Prince Adewole Adebayo has said Nigeria’s problems are surmountable, vowing to kick out poverty in 18 months and boost the nation’s economy.
The SDP standard bearer in the 2023 presidential election, who stated this in an interactive session with journalists over the weekend in Lagos State, said the next president must have competence, courage and character to rebuild the country and restore hope to Nigerians.
Adebayo also said the country would continue to grapple with the challenges it is presently facing, unless it gets honest and purposeful leadership.
According to him, all the problems, including banditry continued to fester because of lack of sincerity of purpose by the nation’s leaders, saying,’’ What we call security problem in Nigeria is the regular day to day problem, in Nigeria we have mere skirmishes from bandits.
‘’Any problem that AK47 can solve is not a problem, the government is not just serious enough to attend to the problem, there is nothing serious, the Nigerian Army is very strong. I have done my assessment, I think the Nigerian Army is using two per cent of its attention on Boko Haram because they have seen that it is not the priority of the government.
‘’They have a lot of people who are making money from these things and others say let me join them because I will soon retire and they won’t pay my pension and this moron here is claiming N1 billion a week, so let me join them. That is what is happening. The bandits make money and the security people make money. That is what is happening.’’
The founder of KAFTAN Television added that, ‘’I have a plan for 30 million jobs. When people have jobs and you put people in school, you create the middle class and solve the problem of poverty. The job comes with accommodation and other incentives then, poverty will go away.”
On whether his party has the requisite structure to win presidential election, he said, ‘’legally speaking, all political parties are supposed to have the same structures because one of the criteria by the In dependent National Electoral Commission (INEC) used to evaluate whether the party will be deregister or not is that it must be present in every local government, in every ward, every state, every zone and in the FCT.
‘’I know this as a lawyer and because in the past I rescued many political parties from such problems by helping them get offices in different places so that there will be alternatives and so that such parties do not die, so that they can be visible.
‘’In this dispensation, you can find out from INEC SDP produced the highest number of delegates, the delegates that voted in the election that produced me as candidate were 1708 from every constituencies in Nigeria, I scored the highest number of delegates votes more than people in the APC and PDP and whatever, in some parties they just rented a hall and that was it. We did ward congresses in 8800 wards, we did 774 local congresses, we did 36 states and FCT congresses and we did the national convention in International Conference Centre, Abuja so these are real people in their communities. The names of these people and their telephone numbers are with INEC. Every delegate that came for our election had their photographs supplied.
