THE Presidential candidate of Social Democratic Party (SDP), Adewole Adebayo, has promised that, within 18 months of assuming power if elected president, he would eradicate poverty in the land and boost the nation’s economic prosperity.
Speaking with newsmen at the weekend, the lawyer-turned politician, stressed the need for competence, courage and character, as necessary attributes a leader must possess to help rebuild the country and restore hope to teeming hopeless Nigerians.
He said: ‘’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.”
Adebayo said until there is honest and purposeful leadership, the country might just still continue to grapple with almost the challenges it is presently facing, emphasising that only the person with capacity and capability could bring the country out of the woods.
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.’’
Asked if 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 Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) use 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 1,708 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 8,800 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.
‘’They are not people you gather on the streets and you say they are party members. So, we have the structures but in some sense, what some people call structure is a big man somewhere, who can for four years be cooking rice and killing goats for people to come and eat for free and who can mobilise as many thugs as possible, if he needs to go the hard way.
“In SDP, we cannot adopt illegal means to win power, because these big parties in the elections we had contested against them, they relied on votes buying. If really they have these structures, they should not be buying votes.”
