Why Nigerians Should Vote for Abubakar
Great leaders usually emerge at difficult times in their nations. Franklin D. Roosevelt led Americans out of a horrifying Great Depression during the 1930s. Deng Xiaoping radically transformed China’s overly socialist economy, lifting 1.2 billion Chinese out of poverty. Winston Churchill was a wartime leader who comforted his compatriots with inspiring speeches while leading Britain and the Allied Powers to victory over Nazi Germany.
The truth is that all nations are well endowed with great leaders; the only difference between successful nations and unsuccessful ones lies in their ability to identify gifted leaders among them and allow them to lead. And nations that choose great leaders almost always come out of their problems and discover ways to growth and prosperity.
The tragedy of African nations has been their inability to identify, or refusal to deploy, their best leaders due to sheer parochial and primordial sentimentality. So long as Africans refuse to give their best leaders the chance to lead them, so long will Africans continue to remain economically and socially backward. For example, can we field our third eleven instead of our first eleven in a World Cup tournament and expect to win against nations fielding their first eleven?
Today, Nigeria is at a crossroads. It is now faced with either the choice to change the course of its economic history or the choice to remain as backward as it has been. We must do away with parochial and primordial sentiments and elect a gifted leader — a man who is duty- ready to save us from a broken economy.
Just as in America and China, the status quo defenders are louder than the country’s reform-minded. But those who have been keeping us down face a big challenge. It’s inconceivable for them to watch the system they have benefited from since independence in 1960 dismantled by Atiku Abubakar. How can the masses of this country be finally liberated from their economic and social hostage and bondage, the kind of savagery and barbarism that existed in pre- enlightenment medieval Europe?
Like Hitler’s Nazi propagandists, an army of anti-Atiku campaigners has been released into the electoral battlefield where Muhammadu Buhari’s status quo supporters have set in motion the finest propaganda machinery. Their goal is to attack Atiku’s credibility, while brainwashing Nigerians into believing in Buhari’s fake saintly personality. These birds of a feather flocking together are peddling their fake stories about Atiku’s past, yet the same corrupt politicians are surrounding Buhari during campaigns. Because they know Buhari is incompetent, they are avoiding discussing what he has accomplished in the past four years or mentioning what he hopes to do in the next four years [God forbid!] in the face of his increasingly poor health and failing memory.
Atiku possesses all the credentials of a great leader. He is in a hurry to lead Nigeria’s economic and social transformation. So goodhearted and patriotic, he has prepared himself for this job for close to three decades. Exactly as the former Mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani stated it, Atiku like the Biblical Joseph, has emerged at the country’s worst crisis time. And just as the Egyptian Pharaoh allowed Joseph to lead Egypt out of famine, the Nigerian electorate have the duty to elect Atiku as their president who should lead them out of their present economic and social darkness into which Buhari has plunged them.
Is it by coincidence that, for the first time in Nigeria’s history, one of its finest businessmen is going to be handed its wrecked economy? President Donald Trump of America is already using his business acumen to turn America’s wrecked economy into the fastest-growing Western economy with unbelievable millions of new jobs.
Because Atiku is a familiar face in the investment world, the investment world is already aware of the kind of economic reforms Atiku will be bringing into the country. They know that Atiku is ready to open the economy to the world with the right business environment and the best ever investor confidence. So, all eyes are now on Nigeria. Leading investors cannot wait to come and invest in Nigeria’s economy which is expected to become one of the world’s largest foreign investment destinations. Even local investors are tired of being forced to sit on the fence for the past four years, for fear of the directionless Buhari’s economic policies.
By insisting on floating of the Naira, Atiku has demonstrated his immense understanding of how this singular decision could be the economic game changer that will bring to an end the ongoing unheard-of forex frauds, where hoarders creating artificial scarcity of dollars have been exploiting the fraud-ridden bizarre four forex windows. Doing away with the arbitrage that causes forex speculation and forex round-tripping will end instant billionaires produced during the last four years. This will trigger an unprecedented inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars in the economy leading to naira value stabilisation. Without restrictions and difficulties to freely bring in and take out forex from the country, dollars will become so available and cheaper that Nigerians will no longer have to depend on the hoarders and forex round trippers for their forex needs.
This is the golden opportunity we all have waited for all these years. We must not miss it, or else our children and their children will live to regret our decision on February 16. If we want to start this our belated economic prosperity journey, we must come together to elect Atiku and do so without sentiments. We are too smart a people to want to see Nigeria on fire as a result of re- electing Buhari.
If white Americans could swallow their pride to elect Barack Obama their first black president to unite the overly divided nation, why can’t we too put our differences behind and together elect Atiku to unite and reconcile our overly divided country? As former Muslim, Obama was also needed to reach out and reconcile America with the Muslim world so humiliated by President George W. Bush.
We all know that Buhari and Atiku belong to two worlds apart. Provincial and cosmopolitan worlds are too far away from each other. Here is Atiku the nationalist, the religiously moderate, the goodhearted philanthropist, the educationist and founder of one of Nigeria’s best universities, the mega- farmer and job creator, the humble, the tech savvy, and the youth receptive leader. There is Buhari the dictator, the bigot, the feudalist, the media intolerant, a man who Mallam Nasir el- Rufai accused in 2010 of “lacking capacity to comprehend current trends, to the extent (of thinking) that a blackberry was a fruit… and whose insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and parochial focus are already well-known!”
There is no way we can compare Buhari whose go-slow culture and appointment of people on the basis of where they come from and who they know with Atiku who as a successful businessman knows that, to get the best out of people, they should be appointed on the basis of their capacity to deliver on the job. In other words, based on what they know and not who they know.
It is this choice of ours that will determine whether Nigeria will continue to be one united country after the elections or will be riddled with pro- secessionist movements. It will determine whether we will continue remaining the poverty capital of the world and whether insurgency or insecurity will continue unabated.
Voting for Atiku on Saturday will mean voting for someone who will lead Nigeria’s economy into a trillion- dollar economy. It is voting for someone with the capacity to create millions of jobs annually for our unemployed youths. It is voting for someone who will finally mobilise our hundreds of thousands of SMEs and make them the engine that drives our economic growth. Unlike Buhari who is not even computer-compliant, President Atiku will revolutionise Nigeria’s ICT sector in a way that mainstreams it in the outsourcing service world. This will see the world’s leading tech companies relocate to Nigeria in their hundreds, creating along with million tech jobs. This is besides the billions of tech dollars that will follow them to Nigeria.
There is no better area Atiku’s opening up the country’s economy will impact more than its construction sector. Both local and foreign construction firms will scramble for the country’s construction sector. Especially with government’s build, operate and transfer policy, Nigeria will become the world’s largest construction site with hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into the housing and new city development, road and railway construction. Along with the industrialization of the country’s building materials industry, no doubt, the sector has all it takes to quickly transform Nigeria into a trillion- dollar economy.
Atiku’s plan for the creative industry — particularly those in Nollywood, music, and book writing — has been designed to trigger huge inflows of foreign capital. This is not happening presently because of government’s inability to dismantle the army of pirates in the country. That is what Atiku administration’s war on piracy wants to bring to an end by establishing an anti-piracy agency that works around the clock to fight pirates in all their hideouts especially deploying a technology such as “Zerofake Technology.” Once the pirates are put out of business, the industry will blossom with high return on investment attracting many foreign and local investors.
It’s out of love for the suffering Nigerians who the fuel mafia has been extorted money from that Atiku wants to block the impeding fuel monopoly by selling of the refineries and opening up the downstream to capable investor, whose massive investment will crash and bring below N100 the present high pump price of fuel. Who else would have had this foresight than Atiku?
Opening up of the country’s agriculture and food processing will be so revolutionary that it will attract an army of investors and create millions of skilled and unskilled jobs. Its integrative capacity will trigger the rapid industrialization and diversification of the economy into a trillion-dollar economy. Also handing the mining sector to states is another game changer Atiku is planning. This is because it will make states now viable as they improve on their revenue generation and job creation.
If American voters made the right choice of electing Franklin D. Roosevelt their president in 1932 as their ingenious economic and social transformer and after more than 80 years that decision is still celebrated by generations of Americans; and if the Chinese in 1978 smartly decided to hand their dilapidated and collapsing economy to radical reformist Deng Xiaoping and to allow him launch the far-reaching socialist capitalism that by opening up China’s economy to the enterprising and investment world, resulted in no limits to China’s economic growth and social transformation, why can’t we too hand over our crisis-ridden economic fortune to Atiku Abubakar, the man of the moment who has spent all these years preparing for this aweinspiring responsibility? For all the things Atiku has lined up for all of us in Nigeria to happen, it’s our duty to elect him our next president.
Atiku possesses all the credentials of a great leader. He is in a hurry to lead Nigeria’s economic and social transformation. So goodhearted and patriotic, he has prepared himself for this job for close to three decades