By Olumide Adeyinka
THE Presidential canddate of the All Peoples Congress (APC) and Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenger and former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar on Saturday were conspicuously absent at the 2019 Presidential debate organised by the NDGS/BON.
The Presidentail debate held at the Nicon Hotel, Abuja.
While Buhari in a statement issued by the Presidential Campaign spokesman Festus Keyamo, SAN, alleged a busy campaign schedule as the reason behind his candidate’s absence, Atiku said he stayed away because the sitting President absented himself from the debate.
Atiku Abubakar who had travelled to the United States of America on Friday, returned to Nigeria on Saturday and had gone straight to the venue of the meeting, but had refused to mount the podium to field questions, preferring instead to return to his house.
But the debate offered a unique opportunity for the Presidential candidates of the Allied Congress Party, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, Alliance for New Nigeria Fela Durotoye, and the Young Peoples Party Prof. Kingsley Moghalu to sell their programmes to Nigerians.
In a programme hooked to by all broadcast stations, members of the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON), to a global audience, the three presidential candidates gave a very good account of themselves, expousing why they should be considered by the Nigerian electorates.
They also have very harsh words for the canddates of APC, Muhammadu Buhari and his PDP counterpart, Atiku Abubakar, insisting that the duo had shown their intolerance to the wishes of Nigerians who they had wished to serve.
Asked how he intended to fix the economy, Moghalu said the country currently lacked an economic philosophy.
He stated that the country must first decide whether it is practicing a capitalist or socialist ideology.
“So, my approach to the Nigerian economy is first to focus on reforming the educational system; ensure that our young people have the skills that can make them competitive in the 21st century and the skills that can give them jobs or help them to set up their own jobs.
“Then we will give them access to finance which my government will do through the creation of N1 trillion venture capital fund which we will give as equity capital, not loans that will have to be repaid with interest.
“This is because loans carry interests in Nigeria that is too high or we may not have the collateral to be able to access them.
“So, we will invest in new businesses that will create millions of jobs within the first four years.
“Therefore, the approach that we will have is skill, capital and literacy, that is what will fix the Nigerian economy and take it into industrialisation,’’ Moghalu said.
On his plan for economic diversification, Durotoye identified agriculture, housing and infrastructure as three key sectors that must be addressed urgently if Nigeria is to ever develop.
He said his government would ensure that it fixed the power sector, roads and provide housing for Nigerians, adding that his plan is to provide 30 million jobs.
He said the commodity sector needed to be strengthened so that farmers could have their produce promptly cleared.
On her part, Ezekwesili said her plan is to lift at least 80 million Nigerians out of poverty through improvement in the productivity of majority of Nigerians who “earn less than N700 a day’’.
To do this, she said her government would evolve policies and programmes targeting people engaged in the services sector which constitutes about 60 per cent of the country’s GDP.
It would be recalled that a similar debate has taken place last month between all the Vice Presidential candidates of the five most prominent parties in the 2019 presidential election scheduled to take place on February 16, 2019.