A presidential aspirant in the 2019 general elections and convener of #Take Nigeria Back Movement, Mr. Omoyele Sowore, has promised to tackle the challenges of insecurity, poor electricity supply and decrepit infrastructure confronting the country frontally if he is elected as Nigeria’s president in 2019.
Sowore, who has been going around the northern part of the country in the past couple of days spoke during a chat with journalists in Abuja.
The 47-year-old aspirant said he has already encapsulated the priority of his government which was derived from a survey on prorities of Nigerians into the acronym, 'SPICER.'
According to him, 'SPICER' is an acronym for Security, Power, Infrastructure, Economy and Restructuring.
He said he had also identified other top priorities of Nigerians, encapsulated in HE, meaning Health and Education.
“We actually revealed in Ibadan that we have in place what we called 'SPICER' and it encompasses our priorities, the priorities of Nigerians based on our survey, internally and externally. So, we are going to handle and tackle security first because we have to stop the blood shedding that is going on in this country which is not limited to what the herdsmen are doing, but what armed robbers can do in a place like Offa where they just shoot and killed 50 people with no policeman showing for hours. So, security is a major issue for us.”
On how his government will tackle the seemingly intractable problem of power supply, the presidential said he will be innovative in his approach while vowing to do away with corruption ridden approach Nigerian past leaders have unsuccessfully adopted to solve the problem.
According to him, adoption of appropriate energy mix offers the quickest way out of darkness for Nigerians: “This idea of having electricity is also priority for us. We are not saying we want to provide electricity, like they have done in the past where they award contracts to themselves which is not to provide power but to increase darkness. We are working on an energy mix.
He cited the example of Tunisia which is exporting power generated from solar to countries like Malta, France and other European countries.
He said, “We don’t need to dig the ground too much, we just bring in solar panels, we assemble them and we hook them up to grids. If you go to Enugu today, there are still untapped coal, even though I am not a big fan of coal because of environmental implications, but we can still use it because even the U.S as advanced as it is, 10 percent of its power is sourced from coal.”
He also said there is the need to clean up Ogoni land to be able to reach and tap from its gas reserves.
He attributed the country's inability to solve its power problem to incursion of cabal who are benefiting from the epileptic nature of electricity in the country.
He said, “There are some people in government whose fulltime job is to sabotage any progress because they are selling generators. President Buhari came with a promise to end their activities, but instead they have become more embedded in his government. They are the one we call the Cabal and that is why they are running a ‘Cabalocracy’ instead of a democracy.”
He also promised that his administration will provide infrastructure with less funds than being stolen and taken to other countries now.