By Dapo Akinrefon
The nation is inching to the 2015 general elections. With the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) lifting the ban on electioneering campaigns, politicians have embarked on moves aimed at convincing the electorate on the need to support their ambitions in the elections.
For the presidential election, scheduled to hold in February 2015, aspirants vying for the exalted position have thrown the hats into the ring to make known their intentions.
Already, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has adopted President Goodluck Jonathan as its sole candidate. But a clog may have been thrown into the wheels of Jonathan’s adoption as the son of the late Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Dr Abdul Jelil Balewa, has indicated his interest to challenge the president in the presidential race.
In the All Progressives Congress (APC), many aspirants are jostling to become the party’s flag bearer.
They include a former military Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari; former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar; governor of Kano State, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso; newspaper publisher, Mr John Nda-Isaiah and the latest entrant, a professor of business education at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Mr Mahmood Aliyu.
‘My priority as president’
To address the enormous challenges facing Nigeria, Atiku posits that the APC is envisaged by the founding fathers to develop internal capacity to provide the nation with a leadership that will be committed to the public purpose and whose choice will be informed by the common good and the popular will of Nigerians. His declaration on September 24, 2014 to seek the nomination of APC as its flag bearer in the 2015 presidential election was his first major outing.
The former vice president is optimistic that the nation’s multifarious problems can be solved if he’s given the opportunity to rule.
He has since come out with a policy position whose main thrust is the explicit bid to modify the way the machinery of Federal Government works.
In his policy preposition, Atiku identified seven key policy areas that would turn around the country for good.
The key areas, according to the former vice president include employment generation and wealth creation; infrastructure and power; education and skills acquisition, security, citizenship and governance, agriculture and food security, Niger Delta and North-east re-integration.
To ensure employment generation and wealth creation, Atiku proposed the need to embark on a direct intervention through public works programmes, which also tend to support productive job creation initiatives by the public and private sectors.
He plans to narrow skills gap in the labour market as well as foster women empowerment to address the gender-gap job opportunities.
In addition, he plans to encourage and promote entrepreneurship amongst the youth, encourage local ownership of job creation initiatives, propose amendments to the legislations hampering effective job creation and review employment laws including labour-market deregulations.
He believes that in encouraging venture capital and private equity investors to invest in local start-ups, it will assist in drawing up a new deal with micro household enterprises amongst other benefits.
In terms of revamping the infrastructure and power sector, the former vice president propounded the need for the creation of a sustainable delivery system to address the dearth of Infrastructure.
Besides, he plans to aggressively increase the power generation, distribution and transmission capacities of the sector by strengthening the Gencos, Discos and Transco.
This will create sustainable funding structures to drive infrastructure and power development and also leveraging private investment in power co-generation capacity.
He also plans to review the federation account and restructure government finances to boost infrastructure development, which in turn will encourage infrastructure maintenance initiatives and reward private efforts to maintain and upgrade basic infrastructure.
In a move aimed at raising educational standard in schools, Atiku proposes to boost educational achievements in primary and secondary schools.
This move, he says, would “encourage and reward private sector to narrow skills gaps and widen participation in educational provision, encourage businesses to lead vocational training efforts and encourage business to re-train unskilled workers.”
He is optimistic that the model will reward households that keep children in the school system and help further improve the structure and curriculum of “our educational system to make it more relevant to labour market needs.”
Following the level of insecurity in the some parts of the country, Atiku holds the view that his security policy proposition will “increase the visibility of security agents, improve access to security services, improve Police-Community relations and aggressively combat the scourge of Terrorism and Insurgency by increased resources and better co-ordination between the security agencies. He also plans to improve civil-military relations, which will pave the way for the much clamoured establishment of State Police.
Also, he promises to improve border security while overhauling the national security structure.
To boost agriculture and ensure food security, his policy proposition aims at addressing the Land Use Act to improve small scale-farmers’ access to land, offer broad based support structures to farmers and small Agribusinesses.
He further aims at helping farmers and Agribusinesses Agglomerate and Manage Risk, increase Farming Productivity and establish an Agricultural Fund and reinvigorate the Agric Bank of Nigeria to be able to support agricultural production and Bank of Industry for high level value addition.
He promises to reintroduce previous viable and sustainable agricultural programmes with emphasis of rural infrastructural development, such as National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), FEAP and elements of the DFRRI.
Sensing the urgent need for the Niger a delta and a north East re-integration, Alhaji Abubakar promises to introduce initiatives which will be launched to address the security and economic decline and foster socio-economic reintegration of the regions.
He aims at ensuring a Niger-Delta Continuous Development Agenda, a Niger-Delta Social Awareness program, a Niger-Delta Reform Agenda, North-East Comprehensive Economic and Infrastructure reintegration program, North-East Security Master Plan and North-East Social Reintegration initiative,
Atiku expresses optimism that the Policy Implementation will be based on a system that “Judiciously allocates responsibilities and resources to the States and Local Governments, promote collaborative understanding and commitment of all tiers of Government regardless of party affiliations in a truly federal spirit with the active participation by private investors and development partners.”
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