2019: Buhari Remains The Best Option For Nigeria Right Now –ambode

Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has been in the fore-front campaigning for the
Buhari/Osinbajo ticket in the 2019 presidential election. He was cornered
last week by journalists during the peace meeting held with aggrieved
aspirants of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Marina, where he spoke
on his involvement in the campaign to re-elect President Muhammadu Buhari.
TEMIDAYO AKINSUYI brings the excerpts:

The 2019 Presidential election is fast approaching and with due respect to
other candidates, it looks like a two-horse race between the APC candidate
and incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari and the PDP Candidate, Alhaji
Atiku Abubakar. You have been in the forefront of campaigning for Buhari
and why he deserves a second term. Can you tell us why you think Buhari
should be given another term as President?

Just to be very clear, as an average Nigerian, not necessarily as a
Governor now, I will pitch my tent with, endorse and vote President
Muhammadu Buhari in this forthcoming Presidential elections on the basis
that having crosschecked all the presidential candidates, I believe at this
auspicious time in this country, the right person that can actually take us
to the next level and the next trajectory of the prosperity and progress of
Nigeria is President Muhammadu Buhari and I am very clear about what I am
saying.

Apart from the fact that he has been President in the last three and half
years, he has also been Head of State in the military era. But again, if
you cross check all the other candidates, most especially the candidate of
the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), when you put both of them on a weigh
balance, there is one that has integrity more than the other, there is one
that is more passionate about Nigeria and Nigerians, most especially the
poor than the other.

So, if the question comes on why we are voting for Buhari, it is on the
basis of integrity, on the basis of somebody who is passionate of which
those two values are values that I also cherish and practice as the
Governor of Lagos State. It is very clear that we are just like like-minds
and I will obviously engage Nigerians that those two values are the values
that can bring prosperity to Nigeria.

You need a lot of character; somebody that has character is likely to
create an enabling environment that can make this country to progress. But
beyond character and integrity, you can see that in the last three and half
years, we have made fundamental preparation to push this economy to its
positive trajectory and that's what President Muhammadu Buhari has been
trying to do and Nigerians don't understand.

If you have cumulative 16 years of disruptive infrastructural tendencies,
there is no way one single tenure can allow a corrective measure of the
infrastructural deficit, you have to create that environment to allow you
to do that. Let me give one simple example. Today, we are having the
reconstruction of the Apapa/Oshodi Expressway being taken on by President
Muhammadu Buhari.

This particular expressway which is more or less the nerve centre to the
economy of this country has never been touched in the last 40 years. Of
this 40 years, 16 years of PDP was inclusive. Within three and half years,
we have been very bold and very adamant that you need to rehabilitate the
Apapa axis for you to be able to push the economy of Nigeria forward
because anything that happens around the Lagos economy has a positive
trajectory to the nation's economy as a whole.

So, it's very clear, if you see a government that decides that and says
that, look, even in these years of abandonment, decades of abandonment,
they want to take on this whole issue, knowing well that in another two to
three years, it would be delivered, so they need to monitor it, giving it
back to those who abandoned it is not a good course to run. When you look
at the reconstruction of the Niger Brid