BY Oluwatoyin Bayagbon
Kingsley Moghalu, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has emerged presidential candidate of the Young Progressives Party (YPP).
Speaking after clinching the party’s ticket in Abuja on Saturday, Moghalu said the time had come to retire corrupt politicians and build a great nation.
In August, Moghalu withdrew from the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) which produced Fela Durotoye as its consensus candidate for the 2019 elections.
In his speech, he said his choice to accept the presidential ticket under the YPP was a deliberate one, against people’s advice to do so on a bigger platform.
He said instead of “being another technocrat whose reform ideas are frustrated by the political leadership,” it is time for him to take Nigeria to greater heights under a new political dispensation.
“It is time for something new, something bold, something different. It is time for us to bring the curtain down on an era of waste, corruption, and incompetence that holds Nigeria back from achieving its potential,” he said.
“It’s time for us to come together and retire these professional politicians who laugh at us, believing that they will return to power whether we like or not.
“2019 is not just an election. We will be setting our destiny. It is a choice between remaining a mere fractious assortment of ethnicities and religions on one hand, or building a real nation on the other. It is a choice between having freedom or remaining in slavery under our recycled and corrupt politicians, between poverty and prosperity for our masses of the poor and the unemployed, and between stability and continuing instability of the Nigerian state.
“In accepting the presidential ticket of this vibrant, energetic party, I stand here before you to say that Nigeria is fully capable of achieving greatness at home and abroad in our lifetimes. But this cannot happen with our normal way of doing things.
“In our quest to rewrite the rules of political engagement in Nigeria, we must understand clearly who the enemy is. Right now, our current political class, having fed fat on our resources, are exercising by practicing “jumpology”—jumping back and forth between the visionless APC and PDP. This only tells us one thing: that neither party nor people matter to our politicians. In the end all they care about is what is best for their pockets, or their safety from prosecution for their misdeeds.
“I am here today to announce that in response to the parties of the past, in response to umbrellas that block out the light of hope, and brooms that sweep away truth and replace them with lies, in response to the parties of tired old tricks and tired old systems, I and millions across Nigeria will choose the YPP.
“I joined the YPP because I believe it can live up to its name of being progressive, that it can be an agent of raising standards across the board for politics and policy, that it can show Nigerians that it is possible to use politics to lift people from poverty, rather than merely corner our commonwealth for personal gain.”
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