The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Peter Obi has said that Nigeria is in a dire situation today because of dearth of good leadership.
Obi who made the observation while delivering an address entitled ‘Policy and Institutional Reforms at the Heart of the 2023 Elections in Nigeria’ yesterday at Chatham House, London.
He said Nigeria is captive to an elite gang-up and a “rentier political economy that has concentrated political power in the hands of those who came to power and influence mainly through their own contrivances and not through the affirmation of the people, and therefore, do not have the incentive to serve the people’s interest.”
He stated that there is no doubt that at the global scene that Nigeria is blessed with some of the most entrepreneurial youths in the world, in science, in business, in art and entertainment.
However, he said there was the need to change the leadership class from “predators to creators of value; from those whose wealth and power derive from the destitution of the nation and its peoples to those who have demonstrated the competence, character and capacity to invest in human development, create prosperity, and instill the right values and ethical conduct deserving of servant leaders.”
He said he and his running mate, Mr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, are committed to a new politics that starts with the ethics of servant-leaders and anchored on the marriage of clean hearts and skilful hands.
“We know that unless we change our politics by changing our political leadership, we are stuck with this terrible state of underdevelopment and misery,” he added.
He said if the LP is elected at the presidential poll on February 25, “we will patriotically reform our institutions particularly ones directly responsible for implementing government policies to make them fit for purpose.”
He said Nigeria “today is at a critical juncture” but was elated that the people, led by the youths brutalised by bad leadership, “are awake and leading the movement to transform Nigerian politics and restart the engine of economic growth and social stability.”
He said he and his running mate “count ourselves honoured to be trusted especially by the youths to lead this democratic revolution and we deeply pledge to do so with sincerity, accountability and unquenchable love and desire for a better Nigeria.”
He asserted: “We are simply, the symbol of the Nigerian youths’ struggles to reverse the ugly trend that keeps driving them into social anomie, despair and rejection of their beloved country.
“We are determined to do everything that needs to be done to rescue and lead our beloved country to prosperity, freedom, security and peace. We will use merit to assemble competent Nigerians from all sections of Nigeria to form an effective government of national unity.”
At the heart of the LP, Obi said, is how they will drive up the quality of life of the average Nigerian, dramatically reduce poverty and return Nigeria to a place of strategic relevance in a world that needs a thriving and well governed Nigeria stabilising the continent of Africa.
He said he had no doubt that the party’s policy choices as well as the strong institutions it will, “will move Nigeria from a country of rent seekers sharing oil receipts and consuming conspicuously, to one that produces, based on vast factor endowments whose value chains can move us towards a high employment economy.”
He pledged to “turn our youth bulge to a demographic dividend, rather than today’s harvest of a time bomb of violence and insecurity from the uneducated, unemployed and marginalised.”
On the shift of emphasis from consumption to production, Obi said that would be achieved by running a production-centred economy that is driven by an agrarian revolution and export-oriented industrialisation.
“With about 70 million hectares of arable land, we will pursue an agricultural revolution through proper segmentation of Nigeria to activate and harness the factor endowments of different parts of the country for both rapid and mechanized agricultural development and as a pillar for Nigeria’s other sectoral development and industrialisation.
“We will incentivise and invest in agro-cluster and industrial cluster development across our geo-resource zones to take advantage of agglomeration and scale effects particularly in northwest, northeast, and north central regions of Nigeria.”
On governance priorities, Obi said the party has restructuring as one of its cardinal programmes.
He said his administration will restructure the polity through effective legal and institutional reforms to entrench the rule of law, aggressively fight corruption, reduce cost of governance, and establish an honest and efficient civil service.
“Reducing the cost of governance in Nigeria is an effective way to fight institutional corruption. In addition to reducing cost of governance and streamlining government operations for efficiency and effectiveness, we will ensure that reforms are pursued in a way that protects the livelihood of our hardworking and efficient civil servants.
“Critical to fighting corruption, we shall install a new budgeting system founded on the cardinal principles of public accountability, objective setting, and programme implementation. This is against the extant budgetary principles of revenue mobilisation, expenditure allocation, borrowing without emphasis on monitoring, evaluation, and feedback. We will enforce the principle of performance auditing and institutionalise monitoring and evaluation process of the entire public service delivery as the primary means of actualizing our vision of a new Nigeria.
“This reform will institutionalize the personal involvement of the President in setting budgetary objectives of MDAs, and monitoring and evaluating the implementation process through the office of regulatory review in the office of the president. budget monitoring and evaluation capacity will be strengthened within the presidency,” he added.
