FESTUS Keyamo, Minister of State, Labour and Employment says the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu, has been ready for governance for many years.
The Director of Public Affairs and Chief Spokesperson, Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council, spoke in an interview with Leadership.
“The full agenda and the details in terms of the micro issues are all contained in our manifesto. That manifesto of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be released anytime from now. We are putting finishing touches to it. The manifesto had always been ready. So, let me first of all clear that up. It has always been ready. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been ready to govern this country many years ago. So, he has always had this document that is like to be his vision for the country. However, because of changing circumstances, because of the dynamics of the economy, and the dynamics of world politics now, we just have to tweak it a bit to also bring it up to date with present realities. That is exactly what we are doing and that document would be released anytime from now.
“But, let me be clear, without going into the micro issue, that the vision of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is to ensure that the templates of progressivism, which is the major fulcrum of the APC. Progressivism is a clear and simple definition of a government that pays more attention to intervening in the lives of the very poor and the middle class. A government that believes more in government intervention in the lives of the very poor, middle class, rather than the other people who would rather want a free market economy and whatever happens to the poor is their business in the free market economy, that is the basis of progressivism and so, all the policies of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be tilted towards that. Secondly, the thrust of infrastructure that President Muhammadu Buhari, virtually spent his energies on will be given attention. So, infrastructure development will also be one of the cornerstones of the policy of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, because in the promotion of infrastructure, then you can create more jobs. Not only in terms of direct employment, whereby people will be employed to build this infrastructure but to also make it easier for people to carry on their economic activities, that is the secondary effect of it.
“For instance, we make good roads for, farmers to bring out their goods from the villages to the urban centre, sell them, go back to their villages and live a good life. You can also stop the rural-urban migration, where the urban areas are becoming too crowded. People can remain in the rural areas and live a good life where they have the same type of infrastructure that you have in the urban areas and so it makes for all-around development. So, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, like I said, without going into the details, is also going to continue the infrastructural revolution, roads, rails, bridges and towers.
“One other trust again will be agriculture, because, in our quest to diversify the economy, the first bus stop is agriculture. That is also one of our major resources in this country, in terms of foreign earnings and job creation. If you look at the recent gross domestic product (GDP), our recent GDP went up about 3.1 per cent, making it 3.25 per cent or thereabout, which is a massive improvement from what we read before. Look at the components of that GDP, agriculture contributed about 24 per cent to that GDP and that is a massive leap in terms of inputs to our GDP. We also need to tell our people that that is not even our target. Agriculture should be bringing in not less than 50 per cent of the country’s economy, but previous governments paid less attention to agriculture, if not even for the problems of the farmer-herders crisis that we faced, it should have gone beyond that. But even in the farmer’s herders crises, we were able to push it up to that point, where our approach made the biggest input to the GDP.
“So, that’s the summary apart from all other issues that would be contained in that manifesto, which will be the thrust of Asiwaju’s vision. That is why you hear people talking about ‘agbado’. I like the ring of that. The other people think they are mocking the president and we laugh when we hear them call our president ‘agbado’ president.
“The last president that was ever associated with farming and ‘agbado’ and all that, was Olusegun Obasanjo in 1977. Remember Operation Feed the Nation (OFN). After that, no other president had taken that order from the former president. Maybe because Obasanjo was also a farmer, he was pro-farming when he opened the Ota farms. And, you know OFN was a big booster then before oil also came in and people began to grow lazy and left the farms.”
