The gale of high-profile defections into the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is yet unending as the party leadership on Friday in Abuja said more governors will be joining its fold soon.
National Secretary of the party, Senator Ajibola Basiru at a one-day seminar for publicity secretaries of the party from the state and zonal levels, hosted by the Office of the National Publicity Secretary of the party.
At the event tagged, ‘Communicating Renewed Hope – A Capacity Building Seminar for APC Zonal and State Publicity Secretaries’, Senator Basiru also frowned at what he described as the weaponization of fake news, ethnicity and religion by opposition elements ahead of the 2027 general election.
He said; “Before now, people used to say, ‘do not blow your trumpets’, but if you do not blow your trumpets, the trumpets will get lost.
“This gathering is also important because even before the 2023 election, we had seen the weaponization of falsehood as an instrument of politics in Nigeria. Now, people will go and pick images from Somalia, images from Chad, images from where there is war, and put an address to it in Nigeria in order to create misinformation.
“We also have a situation where people who have had the opportunity of governing the sub-national, and without any achievement beyond establishment, they will come and be telling us what happened in China, in Malaysia, when in their own backyards, their communities ravaged by floods, and they did not put a single school building for eight years of their administration.
“So this gathering is important for us to be able to tackle those who have also weaponized ethnicity. Growing up in Nigeria, ethnic fault lines were not as pronounced as they have been made ahead of the 2023 election, and unfortunately, they are still doing carryover of that post-2023 election.
“Another fault line is that of religion. Weaponization of religion on the ground of politics. Even people whose sanctimonious attitude is very dubious now try to wear the toga of religion for the purpose of political ascendancy.
“These are part of the efforts that we need to put in place. How do we effectively tackle the weaponization of falsehoods, weaponization of ethnicity, and weaponization of religious bigotry in our country?
“In our vault today, being the largest party in Nigeria, we have 23 governors as at the last count. We still have more governors who are viable candidates to come. We also have some governors who are not viable candidates who also want to come.
“I won’t go into details of that. But we also need to showcase what our governors are doing so that we will be able to show to the people that it is not just about noise. It is about programmes and activities”, he added.
On his part, Minister of Mines and Solid Minerals, Mr. Dele Alake noted that at the macro level, the federal government has put in place a lot of policy initiatives, adding that those reforms have had very salutary effects on the macro economy of the country.
“And for the sake of those who may not be very vast in economic concepts, when you talk about macroeconomics, it means something like laying the foundation, you know, very enduring foundation for the takeoff of the economy of the country. It’s like building a skyscraper. If you want to build a skyscraper, the foundation you are going to dig is going to be a lot deeper than the foundation for a bungalow, for instance.
“But while you are digging the foundation of the skyscraper, most people won’t see you because you are going deeper and deeper into the ground.It’s when you’ve completed that foundation and you are now laying the building blocks that people see you and it becomes visible. So that is the kind of analogy I can use.
“Now, the macroeconomic indices are really shooting up. Now, the value of the currency is stabilized. So that is what the president did, removing the hydra-headed oil fuel subsidy, which had been dragging the economy of the country back.
“A lot of people had been milking the country dry through the phoney fuel subsidy, which was going into private pockets, but now that the subsidy has been removed, if you recall, too, there is hardly a government in this country previously that did not recognize the need to remove fuel subsidy. But none had the courage to do so. And so Nigeria was getting deeper and deeper into economic straits. So this government came, the president removed fuel subsidy with a fiat.
“And then, of course, merged the dual exchange rate. Now, these were two hydra-headed monsters, economic monsters, that were dragging the economy of Nigeria backwards.
“So once these were removed, a lot more money and revenue became accruable to the sub-nationals, apart from the federal government. The states, the local government, have more money than before. And if you also do a kind of content analysis, you will discover that a lot of the states that were in deep debt morass have cleared their debts right now and there is more money for them to embark on infrastructural development”, he added.
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