Adedokun Waliyu 
The presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, has lamented that the country is currently breeding poverty, hunger and insecurity due to bad leadership.
He stated this at his campaign rally held on Thursday at the Hockey Pitch of the Abubakar Tafawa Bewa Stadium, Bauchi.
Obi, a former Anambra State Governor, lamented the huge debt burden of the country promising that under his leadership, things would be different.
He said, “Whenever I am in Bauchi, I am reminded that there was once a united and peaceful Nigeria. Nigeria was on the path of greatness from a revered leader from Bauchi and that is Tafawa Balewa. I come from Anambra state and I live in Onitsha where an elder statesman who believes in the unity of Nigeria, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, is from.
“Nigeria is breeding poverty, people are poor in Nigeria, people are hungry, people are insecure. All the money that we have borrowed, if we had used it the way Tafawa Balewa used the money he borrowed, Nigeria would have been heaven today.
“On June 19, 1974, Tafawa Balewa applied to the World Bank to give him $82m to build the Kainji Dam to generate power. Today, Kainji Dam is still there, it was supposed to generate 750MW. Today, the equivalent of that money is supposed to be about $1.250bn.
“Today, Nigeria owes N77 trn. If you divide it by the value of what Tafawa Balewa borrowed then, we would have had 150 Kainji Dams and Nigeria would have been exporting power to other countries today.
“This is a city (Bauchi) where someone who wanted to build a new Nigeria comes from and we are here saying that we want to build one Nigeria. A new Nigeria is possible, a Nigeria where you have jobs, a Nigeria with economic growth, a Nigeria that is peaceful, a Nigeria that is secured, that is what we want to build.”
He urged Nigerians not to vote based on ethnicity or religion, pointing out that people from all the zones of the country are currently living in hunger.
Obi, who also promised to create jobs for Nigeria’s teeming unemployed youths, assured the people of Bauchi that the newly-found oil in the state would be used to develop the state.
