Nigerian professionals under the aegis of Professionals for Obi-Datti Presidency (PODP) have called on Nigerians to vote for the Labour Party (LP) ticket of Mr. Peter Obi and his running mate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, in next year’s presidential election, saying the Obi-Datti ticket represents competence, integrity, prudence, accountability, transparency and inclusiveness, all of which, the group said, the country urgently needs if it must be repositioned to take its rightful place in the comity of progressive nations of the world.
PODP comprises Nigerian professionals at home and in the Diaspora, who have come together under one umbrella, in answer to what they described as ‘a patriotic’ call to support the Obi-Datti ticket to win the 2023 presidential election, “so that Nigeria can be made not marred.”
In a statement signed by its Convener, Dr. Ben Chukwu, a Saudi Arabia-based surgeon, PODP said the 2023 general election provided an opportunity for Nigeria to break from the tradition of poor and corrupt leadership that had kept the country down over the years, noting that the Obi-Datti ticket was a fresh breath into “our staid politics of tribalism, nepotism and prebendalism that had hitherto wracked the nation’s leadership recruitment process, often leading to the ‘election’ of corrupt and incompetent people into positions of trust in Nigeria.”
“But Mr. Peter Obi and his running mate, Dr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed are very different,” Dr. Chukwu, an Enugu-State-born Fellow of the National Postgraduate College of Surgeons, stressed. “In these two, Nigerians have found good reasons to look forward to the future with hope and assurance of a better life. From their public and private lives, we are assured of the stellar services of two of Nigeria’s most accomplished public servants and businessmen - competent, honest, accountable and prudent. In them, we have two patriotic Nigerians with a mission to rebuild the country into a productive, wealth-creating nation boasting a huge, well-diversified economy that will no longer import everything it consumes and even consume more than it can afford.
“As professionals living at home and in different countries of the world and plying our trades in environments conducive for our professions, we are supporting the Obi-Datti ticket because we believe that the incoming Labour Party government will make Nigeria better for us all and good enough for professionals to once again practise under conducive atmosphere and even for professionals who had left for greener pastures overseas to return.”
In answer to a question, Lolo Kelechi Ogbuehi, interim secretary of the group and Dallas, US-based Nurse Practitioner, pointed out that, as a country endowed with oil and a myriad of other natural resources, “Nigeria should be leading in the world economy had we had good leadership.”
“It is, therefore, pertinent that we act together and save her by placing the right leader in power come 2023,” Lolo Ogbuehi stressed. “His Excellency Peter Obi is the man that can do this job; he is proven and tested. Please, Nigerians, let us join hands wherever we are and make this happen. This is our last chance or we will have no Nigeria.”
Appealing for issue-based electioneering as the campaigns are about to formally start, PODP urged candidates of the other political parties to try and address problems facing Nigeria and Nigerians and how they plan to solve such problems, rather than waste time and energy running one another down.
“Nigerians want to know how the candidates plan to solve the country’s numerous socio- political and economic problems. Nigerians are no longer interested in where any candidate comes from; we are more interested in what the candidates have to offer, how they want to solve our problems,” Chukwu further said in the PODP release.
PODP warned, however, that the group would not fold their arms and watch any attempt to compromise the election by corrupt politicians and INEC officials, advising those nursing such thought to perish it.
“While we commend INEC for the preparations so far, even amidst some of the observed hiccups, we, nevertheless, warn that INEC must do everything humanly possible to conduct free, fair and transparent elections next year,” Dr. Chukwu added. “The Commission must test-run its processes and equipment to ensure optimum performance of such processes and equipment ahead of the election. It must update the voters’ register to ensure that all who have registered to vote actually vote in the election.
“To the politicians, we have only this to say: perish the thought of rigging because we in the PODP, in concert with millions of other Nigerians, who are tired of your destructive tendencies will not fold our hands and watch you ruin our future and the future of our children and children’s children this time around.”
PODP also thanked its members for their cooperation and commitment to the ideals of the group, noting that the diversity of the group’s membership, what with Nigerian professionals from different ethnic backgrounds as registered members, and the willingness to contribute in cash and kind towards the successful implementation of PODP’s action plan, are clear indications that Nigerians are united in their quest for good governance in an atmosphere of peace, inclusiveness and security.
“The good thing about PODP is that it comprises Nigerian professionals from different parts of the country,” Dr. Chukwu declared in the PODP statement. “We are all Obidients, which simply means that we are Nigerians who believe in Peter Obi and Datti Baba-Ahmed’s philosophy of unity in diversity, inclusiveness, prudence, transparency, accountability in governance, and economic development through production as the ingredients needed for the development and progress of Nigeria.”