Sowore, who spoke while featuring on Arise TV programme on Friday, unequivocally stated that the people would not have a Nigeria that worked “when we keep giving social and political promotion to people who have failed the country over these years and further make them the front line candidates in the 2023 General Elections.”
The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has reiterated that Nigeria needs competent people with ideas to fix Nigeria before it is too late.
Sowore, who spoke while featuring on Arise TV programme on Friday, unequivocally stated that the people would not have a Nigeria that worked “when we keep giving social and political promotion to people who have failed the country over these years and further make them the front line candidates in the 2023 General Elections.”
The renowned human rights activist maintained that Nigeria needed to be fixed and urgently too, adding that "it is something that must be done without delay otherwise there will be a revolution and you can stop it."
Diffusing the argument that Nigeria was complex and that was why things were not working, the AAC presidential candidate, asked "If Nigeria is complex; why is it so easy to steal from Nigerians? Why is it so easy to manipulate the system? This is the reason why I said Nigeria is not complex; what we have is people with no capacity whatsoever and you keep promoting them to govern the country.
"You are not going to have a Nigeria that works when you keep giving social and political promotion to people who have failed Nigeria over these years and you make them the front line candidates."
Sowore said that he had put his life on the line because he wanted to ensure that the anomalies were addressed when he became president.
"We are putting our lives on the line to ensure that maybe one day the country will produce that space for competent people, good people, and people with great ideas and knowledge to have the space. This is because right now everybody has got to accept, almost as a rule that the incompetent people are the ones that are ruling the country all these years. The thieves amongst us are the ones ruling us including the drug barons amongst us.
“They are the ones organising our country. We believe that those who game the system, those who shortchange the system, violators of human rights, those are prominent people in our country, they are the ones who get chieftaincy title, they get the national honours while the competent people are just condemned o the dustbin.
"I want a reversal of that; while incompetent, wicked and dishonest people are thrust into a dustbin of history in our country so that the competent people of Nigeria can fix Nigeria. “Nigeria needs to be fixed and it is urgent and it is something that must be done without delay otherwise there will be a revolution and you can stop it."
Speaking on how he would grow the foreign reserve, Sowore said, "Hear from me today that you should not worry about foreign reserve. You should instead worry about local reserve, that feed people here; so that Nigeria in 2023 is not going to be getting grain, bags of grain from food and agricultural organisation around the world."
He said that every time he featured in an interview, people kept asking him how he was going to get money to finance all the projects he envisioned for the country.
"Where do you get money from and the thieves in a country are getting money to buy whatever they want. They buy everything in this world, buy Rolls-Royce. They buy private jets. They built houses and empty mansions all over the place and we keep asking those who need the money; where are they going to get the money from."
While lamenting the poor condition of wages and how it affected the education of Nigerian youths, Sowore promised that he would not supervise a situation where students would be out of class for nine months out of 12 months of the year.
He however, slammed some media groups for being complicit in the promotion of corrupt people into political offices.
He added, "People who don't come for interviews, you keep inviting their spokespersons. They never talk to you but when it is time for debate; you said these are the frontline candidates. Who decided that they are the frontline candidates, when they don't even talk about issues to Nigerians.
"So let’s deal with the issues with reality. Talk to people who have ideas, people with manifesto. You have candidates in this election who have no manifesto and they have sworn that they may not provide one but they keep promoting them as people with solutions. How do you find out your solution when it is not in any written or in any content?"