Nasiru Yusuf

The presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party, Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, stated that he and some other Nigerians dumped the All Progressives Congress and Peoples Democratic Party structures because they failed Nigerians.

KANO FOCUS reports that Dr Kwankwaso made the remarks on Sunday at the 2022 presidential Town Hall meeting in Abuja.

Kwankwaso stated that he is angry at the way some Nigerians are and that this anger drove him to join the NNPP as the APC and PDP systems failed.

He said, “Some of us are angry to the extent of leaving the PDP and the APC because we feel there are better ways of doing things in this country. We feel the system has failed and that is why we have decided to go to the NNPP. “

Kwankwaso, who said the current number of military officials was grossly inadequate, promised that he has made adequate arrangement to increase the number of military officers from two hundred and fifty thousand to one million military, army, Air Force and navy.

He stressed that he was going to take over every square metre of the country and pledged to increase policemen from two hundred and thirty thousand to two million.

“We will be willing to sit down with everyone with grudges in any part of the country to dialogue and at the end of the day, anyone, who decides to do otherwise, definitely, the law will take its course,” he said.

Further on security, Kwankwaso said, if the government was doing the right thing, many people would have put down their arms, adding that those who did not want to do that, it was the responsibility of the government to ensure peace as people went about their legitimate businesses not minding religion and ethnicity.

His words: “Today, in 2022, security agencies could not identify locations, especially, everybody including the criminals are using telephone and these telephones are not difficult to identify and these are the problems.

“In Kano, when I was in government, we constructed roads and of course, gates leading into the city and the idea was to put cameras, scanners so that anybody going into our city should be checked.”

He stated that NNPP was the only growing political party in Nigeria as other party did not have anything to tell Nigerians that was new.“In Kano, there was no child of primary age that did not get a place in primary school. No child of secondary school age that did not go to school after passing exams.

“Provide for people, provide for agriculture, provide for infrastructure, bring the people together, unite then. We had so many programmes and projects and everybody was busy and happy“We brought synergy between the military, the police, the SSS, civil defence. We were working together and we are still working together in Kano,” he said.

On the economy, Kwankwaso promised that, “We will create necessary palliative even if we take subsidy away, which is very necessary in the long term, that it has to be removed for better survival.

“In the economy, there are so many things that are intertwined, the issue of exchange, corruption, oil theft, we are supposed to give out 2.2 million going by the OPEC arrangement but the record is less than that, so we have to do whatever it takes to stop stealing.

“It is very critical to us that we work on how to stop stealing of oil and other assets owned by the nation. The issue of subsidy, we are aware that there is a lot of corruption in the field and the first area of attack on subsidy is the issue of corruption. Subsidy over all doesn’t do any good to anybody but at the same time, we are concerned with the welfare of Nigerians.”

He also revealed that he never borrowed in the eight years that he governed Kano State and that he left so much money in account of the electricity generation, adding that he left over 43 million dollars.

He said, “We inherited a budget, which recurrent was 70 per cent, capital 30 per cent but by the time I was going in 2015, we reversed that. I believe that in this country, we have enough money, enough resources and all we need is leadership that will ensure that every kobo goes into the right place.

“Our party is not based on the leadership of the money bags. Everybody knows that we have an ideology and beliefs on governance. We have done it before and by the grace of God, if we have opportunity, we will do it even better.

“We joined this party in less than seven months, we had our party structure, we have our candidates almost 100%, we have our leadership intact, and are campaigning, right from the sales of forms, we saw other parties spend hundreds of millions to buy but ours was completely different, because we believe in credibility, we believe in capacity and one united Nigeria,” the politician said.