Victor Ezeja
Ahead of 2023 general elections, leading convener of the Third Force Movement, Professor Pat Utomi has challenged political aspirants at all levels to participate in a debate on critical development challenges to give citizens and voters a basis for evaluating candidates.
Utomi, who is the founder of Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL), said in a statement that nobody who cannot provide a logical and resourced strategy for halting the slide of the country’s economy, unemployment challenges and the declining quality of life driven largely by collapse of the power sector, should be taken seriously as an aspirant to Nigeria’s Presidency in 2023.
The Professor of Political Economy listed issues around which a series of debates will be organized by CSOs for citizens’ evaluation of electoral candidates for the 2023 elections at various levels.
These issues, he said, include Rapid Economic Growth with post oil strategies as the energy transition gathers momentum, Education, Health, Security, Environment, Infrastructure, and Agriculture.
Utomi said he published nine different feature essays on these issues in nine different news media platforms during the Easter Weekend under titles that include: making Nigeria the world’s Great Factory, Re-thinking Education, Re-vitalizing our youth to Revive Nigeria, Power, Production and Poverty; The Anchor of Hope and Nigeria in 2023; Rebuilding Nigeria when health is Lost.
He added that these opinion essays were designed to provide insights on those issues that he had offered his colleagues for debate in the collegial leadership of the Third Force.
The Third Force is a coalition of Political Parties, civil society organisations and social movements that have a goal of wrestling power from the incumbent to provide an alternative model of good governance.
He said the falling standards of education and the fact of the country being the world’s worst case of out-of-school children is unacceptable and should be a central issue of debate for all aspirants to public offices.
Utomi suggested a decentralization of education management and a pedagogy oriented toward creativity and problem solving.
Lamenting the slow rate of economic growth in the country, Utomi said any candidate who cannot show how he can move GDP growth rate into double digits and double output within 5-7 years, considering the rate of population growth, should be considered I’ll prepared for the job. He said the unprecedented publishing of the nine oped pieces from one individual in one weekend was designed to trigger robust rational conversation.
Arguing that Nigeria desperately needs sound thinking to pull through the current existential crisis, he said Nigeria must pay attention to how Deng Xiaoping’s push for knowledge took China from a country that had more than 95 percent of its people living in poverty to one with less than 2 percent in that state in one generation.
In the published articles, he said, he showcased how education strategy would not only result in Nigeria reaping a demographic dividend but in supporting the value chains of a development strategy based on the latent comparative advantage of endowments in the six geo-economic zones of the country on which competitive global value chains are to be built.
Utomi who said the parties of the Third Force which include ADC, PRP, SDP, NRM, and others who have been meeting with the labour unions to construct a coalition that has come to be known as the third force, plan to form a government that will put all unemployed graduates to work within a month of being sworn in and place them on the salary of at least #100,000 a month as a Green Army working on environment issues and learning new skills in executive vocational education programmes that will prepare them for positions in an anticipated manufacturing revolution that will outdo the burst of China rising in the 1980s.
He asked the PDP and APC to get ready to debate the issues with candidates of the Third Force.
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