The Governorship candidate of Zenith Labour Party (ZLP) in the November 16 gubernatorial election in Ondo State, Dr Abass Mimiko, on Thursday urged the people of the state to vote for qualified candidate in the forthcoming election irrespective of the zone the candidate hails from.
The ZLP candidate, Abass a younger brother to former governor Olusegun Mimiko, who stated this while addressing journalists at the correspondents’ chapel of Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Secretariat in Akure, said the state is not ripe for power rotation.
He said the idea of power rotation among the zones in the state was not foolproof and would therefore not take the state out of its present political and economic challenges.
According to him, what the state needed at the moment is a competent leader with capacity and experience to turn the state around from its present situation.
He said he would not have bordered to join the race if the system had been efficient and the people of the state were happy with the government.
He said, “It is not time to think in terms of rotation. Maybe when we have the luxury of success in the future, we can come to that. As of now, if we have the luxury of success in the future, maybe we can come to that.
“We need an efficient running system that is productive for the people before talking of rotation. A place where people are already happy with their lives.
“I am not using Lagos as a prototype of goodness, but for example, in Lagos state, it doesn’t matter if they have a very good governor or not because the system has a lot of businesses and a lot of things running, almost like an automaton.
“But in Ondo State, we have to understand one thing, we are running basically on federal allocation. We must have a leader that can use what we have to get what we want.
“That is why I said, if everything was running smoothly, it would be an embarrassment. I felt embarrassed the first time I said I wanted to run for governor.
“I said, why would people in Ondo State think about this? Is it a family affair? But when we took a younger sister, related to me, to the mother and child hospital to deliver, she had complications, but we thank God she survived, and the baby survived. On day three, we went to discharge her.
“We were in the car, I was celebrating, I was dancing in my seat with the baby. The mother of the baby was shedding tears. After persuasion, she confided in me that four women lost their lives at the mother and child hospital within the three days she spent there.
“When I weigh my embarrassment of being the brother of a former governor wanting to be a governor, versus the pain and the suffering of the people, I think my embarrassment is nothing.
“So, what I am saying, in essence, is that we need quality people. First and foremost, let this system run efficiently. Then if we like, we can make rotation a law.
“They will say it is not constitutional. Yes, we can put it into law. But we can have a proper agreement within the state that from now on, it is no more a gentleman’s agreement.”
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