A presidential aspirant on the platform of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Alhaji Mohammed Hayatudeen, has said the ongoing conversation around zoning is distracting Nigerians from the real and urgent challenges facing the survival of the nation.
He passionately advocated that the national discourse be re-focused on what he called the issues that really matter – insecurity, economic collapse and the desperate need for job creation, on the Political Paradigm programme on Channels Television.
416 people were abducted and threatened with execution last week. So what’s that got to do with zoning? What does that have to do with zoning, the tens of thousands of our fellow citizens who have died in the last three years?
“The mother who can’t afford to buy food at the market, the father who can’t send his child to school. “What’s any of that got to do with zoning? He asked.
“What Nigerians need are leaders who are not defined by geography but by character, competence and empathy,” Hayatudeen said.
Doesn’t matter where you come from. What is important is that you have the capacity, the skill, the vision and the deep empathy to deliver for every single Nigerian,” he said.
“Nigeria’s security crisis cannot be solved in isolation,” Hayatudeen was emphatic.
He connected decades of bad economic policy to the growing wave of violence throughout the country.
“Nothing occurs in a vacuum. “There has to be an underlying cause,” he said. “The economy has been mismanaged and has underperformed for at least 20 years. “So, if we say that the population has grown, then that means that the number of people in poverty has grown five or six times, and today, about 110 million Nigerians are in poverty.
He dismissed claims that the current wave of insecurity is election-driven, saying the figures tell a different story.
“I’m a numbers guy. I have compared it with the think tanks, both outside Nigeria and inside Nigeria. “The evidence doesn’t support that narrative,” he said.
Hayatudeen, who was also a presidential aspirant on the platform of PDP, was clear on his decision to fly the ADC flag: the party’s constitution, manifesto and leadership are in tandem with his vision for Nigeria.
“Their leaders are straightforward, tenacious and experienced. “They have the will to mobilize whatever is necessary to fight and win this election at every level,” he said.
He said the ADC’s focus on the cost of living crisis, insecurity, job creation and poverty eradication were the priorities of the ordinary Nigerians and his own.
Hayatudeen also expressed concern on what he described as the deliberate suffocating of the political space in Nigeria.
He warned: “What the government has done is to muzzle the political space through surrogates and instruments of state making it impossible for Nigerians to exercise genuine freedom of choice.
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