The presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, has promised to offer visionary and creative leadership if elected in Saturday’s presidential election.
Tinubu said though he and his running mate, Sen. Kashim Shettima, are not supermen with the magic wand to miraculously solve all Nigeria’s problems, he would select the best and brightest talents in the nation to help the country achieve its manifest destiny.
The APC presidential flag-bearer also promised to work hard for the progress of the country if elected as president.
He said this via a statement issued on Thursday.
The two-term former governor of Lagos State, in a statement titled, ‘To My Compatriots: Why I Seek Your Mandate to be President of Nigeria’, said: “We are of the firm belief that Nigeria is too endowed and blessed for any of our citizens to live in abject poverty. We are a hardworking and talented people destined for greatness.
“We are determined to offer the visionary and creative leadership to help actualize Nigeria’s immense potentials. We do not delude ourselves that we are supermen with the magic wand to miraculously solve all our country’s problems.
“But what I solemnly pledge is the determination to select the best and brightest talents in Nigeria to help our country achieve her manifest destiny for the good of her people and the glory and pride of the black man.”
Tinubu further promised to work on the achievements of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, saying the present administration has done laudable projects in the areas of infrastructure, agriculture, and poverty alleviation.
The APC presidential candidate said his administration, if elected, would not only eradicate poverty in Nigeria but also usher in an era of prosperity in the country.
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“Millions of our poor and vulnerable people have benefitted from the various social intervention programmes of the Buhari administration. The amounts disbursed to these categories of our people are unprecedented in terms of the sheer transfer of resources to the less privileged sections of the population not only in our country but in Africa.
“It is remarkable and ironical that those who were in power for 16 years earned far higher revenues from petroleum than we did and yet were unable to effectively tackle neither infrastructure nor poverty. They now have the temerity to cast aspersions on the APC administration.
“Our campaign tours demonstrated clearly to us that you, our people, are not deceived.
“Of course, we are aware of the hardships suffered by our people and the challenges confronting our country. Some of these could have been mitigated by better conceptualized and articulated policies. The truth is that there can be no perfect government in any human community.
“Some of the problems are also of global origin such as the unanticipated COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted economies worldwide or the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that has disrupted global food and fuel supply chains.
“It is clear to me that there is a lot that the Buhari administration has done that are laudable in the areas of infrastructure, agriculture and poverty alleviation. We must build upon these achievements.
“There are also some sectors where we must adopt new approaches and stress new priorities,” Tinubu added.
The former governor, who stated that the Office of the President of Nigeria is not one of pleasure, said he and his running mate would dedicate themselves “wholeheartedly to working for the greatest good and happiness of the greatest number of Nigerians” if elected.
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“Senator Shettima and I have outstanding records of high performance in public office as Governors of our states. In Lagos, where I served as Governor for 8 remarkable years, I led a team of talented, hardworking, creative, intelligent, and purposeful people that recalibrated governance and set new standard in good governance that continues to propel the state to greater growth and development till date. That Lagos State is the 5th largest economy in Africa didn’t happen by chance. It is a product of consistent hardwork and creative leadership.
“We seek to demonstrate on national scale that energy and capacity that transformed our states to bring prosperity to all Nigerians.
“Our administration will work to ensure not just a farewell to poverty but also usher in an era of prosperity in our country. To achieve this, we will re-engineer our security architecture to enhance the capacity of our armed forces and security agencies to guarantee the safety of the lives and properties of our people.
“This will enable our farmers to return fully to their farms with the resultant increase in food production and affordability. We will initiate measures to boost the revenue earnings of our farmers and improve the standard of living in our rural areas, home to the vast majority of our people.
“We will task our ingenuity to drastically enhance the country’s revenue-generating capacity so that we can adequately fund and fundamentally improve the quality of social services in education, healthcare, and housing, among others.
“We are determined to ensure that incessant strikes by unions in our public universities become a thing of the past. We will make facilities and welfare packages in our health sector compare with the best in the world so that many of those health professionals who have migrated to other lands will be attracted back home.
“Ensuring adequate and uninterrupted electricity will be one of our cardinal priorities. This will help boost the performance of the industrial sector and create jobs on a massive scale for our teeming youths.
“We shall put in place a robust and virile credit system so that more people can acquire the basics of life such as housing, cars, and household equipment, and pay gradually. That will have the immediate effect of reducing the motivation to resort to corrupt means of wealth accumulation.
“To fight corruption, we will also provide better welfare and motivation to the judiciary to perform its functions with integrity while we will also enhance the autonomy of the anti-graft agencies and provide them the necessary incentives to make them less vulnerable to corrupt inducement,” Tinubu said.
The APC presidential standard bearer, therefore, urged Nigerians to turn out in large numbers on Saturday to vote for him and Shettima.
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