On Democracy Day, Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, likened Nigeria’s current situation to the ill-fated Titanic, criticizing the extravagant lifestyles of Nigerian leaders amidst the country’s challenges. Speaking in an interview with ARISE NEWS, the former governor of Anambra State expressed his concerns about the state of Nigeria as the nation celebrated 25 years of uninterrupted democracy.<\/p>\n
Obi remarked, \u201cThe first thing you do as a leader who inherited a difficult situation is to lead by example, and it starts by your own style, your behaviour, your conduct, how you manage resources. You cannot say that things are difficult when you\u2019re living in conspicuous consumption. Nigeria today is the country with the highest amount of people without homes – over 24 million, yet you\u2019re spending twenty-something billion to build a house for one person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Drawing a parallel between Nigeria and the Titanic, Obi elaborated, \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to show a clear plan, it is not enough to say we\u2019re going to go through problems. If we\u2019re going to go through problems, this is very simple. You enter a plane, there is a bad weather, there\u2019s going to be a turbulence. The pilot says, we\u2019re going to go through bad weather, it\u2019s going to take us maybe one hour, two hours because of this weather, and he follows it through. That is not the time- in that bad weather, everybody, even the crew, are asked to sit down. That\u2019s not the time to start serving food and wine and everything when everything is up and down.”<\/p>\n
He continued, \u201cI always say what happened to the Titanic is what is happening in Nigeria. While it was going down, people on the upper deck were busy dancing until the whole thing collapsed, that\u2019s what is happening now. We should change and do things rightly. We can change and manage corruption and everything and all that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Addressing the steps needed for improvement, Obi emphasized, \u201cYou start by living like somebody who is coming through difficulty, who is facing difficulty, who wants to change things. That\u2019s how we do it. You don\u2019t engage in what we\u2019ve been doing- buying vehicles, partying and everything as if things are normal when you say there is difficulty. You need to deal with the issue of cutting the cost of governance, that\u2019s where you start. You need to deal with the issue of massive corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting on his past governance experience, he added, \u201cI\u2019ve served in a system where I came in and found that things are bad, and we start by cutting the cost of governance. The role of a leader is not to remind people of the past or mention the past or think about the past. Your role is to show the path by doing things that are right. Change starts from you, by you if you decide to walk the right path, that\u2019s how it starts.\u201d<\/p>\n
When questioned about his growing popularity since the last election, Obi stated, \u201cMine is to continue interacting and being part of the process of building a new Nigeria that is possible, because we can\u2019t go on this way. We\u2019re heading into a disaster, we must do things rightly. Like I always said, I\u2019m not desperate to be president, I\u2019m desperate to see Nigeria work, and work for the poor people of Nigeria. The system has been very uncaring for the people of Nigeria, and we must succeed. Work where we have to remove this criminalised system, corruption that we the politicians have unleashed on the country and make it better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Democracy Day, Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, likened Nigeria’s current situation to the ill-fated Titanic, criticizing the extravagant lifestyles of Nigerian leaders amidst the country’s challenges. Speaking in an interview with ARISE NEWS, the former governor of Anambra State expressed his concerns about the state of Nigeria as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5445,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5442\/revisions\/5445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shakamomodu.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}