25 points from Interview of ANN Presidential Aspirant, Olawepo Hashim

MrRights present 25 points extracted from an interview by ANN presidential aspirants, Olawepo Hashim

• The country we want to build is the country where your regional descent should not define you politically.
• I’m completely a cosmopolitan person and we have a lot of Nigerians having dual citizenship. I don’t have dual citizenship. I have only the Nigerian passport. I’ve had the opportunity of taking citizenship of other countries but I had never done that.
• What I’m saying is that you have people who were born abroad who could even contest to become British Prime Minister. So, why should that be a big issue in Nigeria?
• The Nigeria of our dream is the Nigeria where any Nigerian can get up from anywhere and contest for public office.
• I was just talking about Sir. Kashim Ibrahim running election in Benue – a Borno man in a predominantly Christian state, a Muslim and he was elected into the Northern Assembly.
• You talk about Zik of Africa who was elected into the Western House of Assembly. I think what we have now is a complete degeneracy in our polity in this era.
• The founding fathers of our Republic were more progressive and more forward looking, whether they were from the North or West or from wherever. They were more nationalistic and more patriotic.
• It beats my imagination that the younger generation who claim to be more educated and more exposed, are regressing into clannishness which wasn’t even the case in the First Republic.
• We need to take Nigeria back to those values that gave Nigeria independence; a Nigeria where an Ibira man became the Mayor of Enugu and Enugu people had no qualms about it. That’s the Nigeria our founding fathers left for us.
• We cannot bequeath a Nigeria of the herdsmen that will start slitting the throats of citizens. That’s not the Nigeria we want to leave for our children.
• I think there is lots of irresponsibility on the part of the leadership where the body language of the various leaders have been encouraging division, rather than bringing Nigeria together.
• The fact that I’m happy to say that Abuja is my base now, we are also sending a message that that is the Nigeria we want to build. That is the Nigeria we want to have, where you can play politics from where you live and you don’t have to retreat to your ancestral origin before you can do politics. That’s the new Nigeria we want to build.
• After 2015 election, I promised myself that as long as I live in this country, I will never sit back and disallow the Nigerian electorate the opportunity to have a choice in an election by saying oh, we don’t have a choice.
• We have to present them with a credible alternative because in 2015, a lot of people really didn’t have a choice. The 2015 election was like a referendum to remove Jonathan and of course you see the consequence of what happened.
• People like us and you should not be in a country where people would be going to the polls and saying ‘just any idiot but this one’. That’s not a good election. Election should not be just any idiot.
• People should have concrete choices to make in terms of programmes, in terms of ideology and that is the least responsibility that we owe Nigerians.
• If we can present that alternative and that programme, regardless of how they vote, we would have done our duty and then it will be for the electorate to live with the consequences of their choice.
• I can put Nigeria back together. Nigeria is badly divided and it needs a unifier and a bridge builder.
• Nigeria’s economy needs to be rescued from complete collapse. Even the growth rate of 7 percent that we had for about 15 years until 2015 was not a good enough number to grow Nigeria out of poverty.
• We needed our GDP to expand sevenfold to be able to be at par with the countries that were in the same rank as Nigeria at independence such as Malaysia.
• We want to evolve a middle income country, having a per capita income of between $16,000 to around $25,000 and if we are going to be at that level, we need to grow within ten years, our GDP by sevenfold.
• I understand how the modern economy is organized and I’m an investor myself in different countries and I have done business for 27 years.
I have practical understanding of how to expand our GDP and grow our economy, as one who is on top of both economy, practically and theoretically.
• There are very few people in Nigeria who have the privilege of having strong level of political training and also sound economics and that’s important for Nigeria.
• We have to unite the country and at the same time, we have to deal with the economic challenges.
• Some months ago, we were discussing with some people who came to visit us from Shiroro (Niger state) and we were talking about insecurity.
• They said the kind of insecurity we are seeing now is not just about herdsmen and farmers clashes; that in Shiroro now, once they bury their yams in the ground around the planting season, some people will go and unearth the yams; some will even go and sell the seedlings in the market in order to have some money.
• So, what they do now is they mark the yam seedlings with paints so that when it shows up at the market, everybody will know that this is a stolen yam. This is where we have come to in Shiroro in Niger State.
• So, are you going to send policemen to be manning every farm in Nigeria? This is a huge social economic crisis. That one is no longer just security problem. It’s a serious problem of chronic poverty and collapse of all the economic lever of hope.
• You cannot discuss some of these security challenges outside the issue of poverty and the collapse of the economic support system for the people to live to be human beings in the first place. That demands an urgency of now.