He told reporters at an interactive session in Lagos while reacting to the president’s refusal to give accent to the electoral act, which he said was passed by the PDP controlled National Assembly, that the supposed top actors are falling below standards.
Presidential Candidate of Peoples Trust (PT), Mr. Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim has accused the two dominant parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of playing politics with the nation’s stability through the way and manner they are handling the electoral act.
Olawepo-Hasim, who regards his political party as a third force in the build up to the February presidential elections, has however stressed that rather than the APC presidential flag bearer, President Muhammadu Buhari and his PDP counterpart, former Vice president, Atiku Abubakar, presenting themselves as statesmen, the candidates are rather obsessed with immediate partisan gains.
He told reporters at an interactive session in Lagos while reacting to the president’s refusal to give accent to the electoral act, which he said was passed by the PDP controlled National Assembly, that the supposed top actors are falling below standards.
Olawepo-Hashim stated: “The president is conducting himself like a typical Nigerian politician of the era of political decline, rather than behaving as a patriot that I have always thought he is. By his actions, he is simply saying let me benefit from the fraudulent process for my 2019 bid. You can push for the new law in 2023 when I will not be contesting.”
He said it is regrettable that with the spiraling poverty in the land, insurgency by Boko Haram, violence in the North East and North West, incipient Shite rebellion due to high handedness, massive insecurity and bloodletting in various states, Nigeria may be damaged beyond redemption in four years, should we all succumb to the plot for the APC to hand themselves a fresh term through a faulty process.
The candidate, believed to be flying the flag of the young and the active, noted that the PDP led legislature had ample time to correct the perceived lacunas in the electoral act, which they had created in the first instance, but are rather distracting the polity with it.
He continued: “In the task of nation building, political leaders sometimes have to rise above the fray and take decisions in the national interest, even when it does not seem to benefit from it.
Some of us did this before. In 2000, when some of our colleagues wanted to change our two year tenure to four years, I led the opposition to this, even though I would have been a beneficiary of that exercise as a National Executive Committee (NEC) member.”
The PT presidential candidate called on the electorate and the entire citizens of Nigeria not to be discouraged from participating in the next polls as a result of the shenanigans of APC and PDP.