The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, Omoyele Sowore has vowed to scrap the Senate and frivolous spendings if elected president on February 25, 2023.
Sowore said this on the Arise TV News while responding to a question on how he would tackle the issue of debt, low revenue and deficit in the country, saying he would stop wasting money on irrelevant things..
“But most importantly we must discuss our revenue cum what we spend money on, the amount of waste in this country, I have said and I will repeat it that I want to abolish the Senate so that we can use that money to take care of education. I will stop investing in irrelevant things.
“And with due respect, I don’t want to spend a dime on pilgrimage. I will spend that money to train our kids who are in school and then ensure that we plug all the areas where corruption is happening now.
“Make sure we digitalise our country so that people like the accountant general…By the time you go after all of them, we will have more than enough money. Don’t let anyone deceive you that Nigeria doesn’t have money, we have money. Our problem is that the money is going to the greedy; socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
“Our debt to GDP ratio is not out of control; our problem is revenue to GDP and it is because we don’t capture our revenues appropriately.
“There’s a body known as RMAFC, the revenue mobilisation body said recently that federal government agencies have N10 trillion unremitted revenue to the federal government.
“I will go after that; I’m going to also abolish what is called security votes today in Nigeria so that N271 billion that goes to governors and also federal agencies. You will be surprised that over 799 federal agencies also collect security votes, I don’t know who they are protecting with it, I will abolish it.”
The former Nigerian students leader also took a jibe at operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) saying they were busy watching ‘BBNaija’ instead of gathering intelligence while he was in their custody in 2018.
He said the agency is not doing enough to gather and analyse intelligence to put an end to insecurity arising from terrorism and banditry in the country.
While talking about his agenda and how he plans to tackle the security situation in the country, Sowore said intelligent people must be appointed to manage intelligence organisations.
He noted that the leaders of the security agencies in the country cannot deliver the country from the clusters of criminal elements who have taken over some parts of the country.
“I am not the Nigerian President today. If I have been voted for in 2019, you will not be talking about places being taken over by bandits because I have divided the security problem into three.
“One is physical security. The second aspect is the collection and analysing of intelligence and execution of intelligence. But you can only collect intelligence when you have intelligent people running intelligence organisations.
“I was detained at DSS for five months. They were there watching BBNaija instead of collecting and analysing intelligence and using that to stop terrorists and bandits.”
He said the security architecture of the country was designed to protect the regime and the rich people who see the country as a business enterprise.
He, therefore, called on Nigerians to stop voting for analogue politicians who have nothing to offer to salvage the country from security and economic comatose
