Renowned activist Aisha Yesufu has charged Nigerians to snub political parties in the country for their preferred candidates in the next general elections.
In the course of the just-concluded sixth edition of the BizWatch Nigeria webinar, where she spoke as a panellist, Yesufu said the time has come for Nigerians to embrace individuals rather than political parties.
According to Yesufu, there is no political party without competent candidates, adding that power lies with the people who vote.
“If we are able to have people who are patriotic to Nigeria and are competent, they will begin to give us what people are asking for. There is no party without competent candidates. What happens most of the time is that the competent ones are not allowed to be the party’s flag bearers because they know when this happens it’s not going to be business as usual of corruption, lack of transparency, bad governance, and all.
“The citizens must be the one who decides who enters the office. The moment the parties realise that Nigerians would not vote for them unless they present credible candidates, they will begin to look for them and put them in. We must all become political activists. Vote out of conviction the candidates you think are the best,” she added.
Speaking further, the highly-revered political activist ruled out insinuations that votes don’t count in Nigeria, saying if indeed the votes don’t count, politicians would not be paying people to earn their votes.
Her words: “Any election is worth it because the people that would decide your future, that of your unborn lineage are the ones who get into power through elections. For any country to make progress, you must put in people with competent character and capacity in the helms of affairs. So, an election is worth it in every way and people must always be ready to put their all into it. We have from now to the next eight-month to vote in competent people that would be able to do the work and free ourselves.
“For people who always come with this mindset that oh, it is not worth it. The question I ask them all the time is -‘have you ever voted’? Surprisingly, a good number of them will tell you that ‘No! They have never voted’ . Then I said to them ‘how then do you expect a process you’ve never participated in, to work?’ We can’t sit by the side and not do the needful and expect things to turn out the way we wanted them to turn out. No! It doesn’t work that way.
“The reason election has been tilted in a certain way, particularly in favour of politicians who ordinarily shouldn’t be in power, is because a lot of people stay out of the process. People don’t participate in the electoral process because of the lies they have been told, which is ‘that votes don’t count’. And the question I ask is -if indeed votes don’t count, why then are politicians buying votes? It means these votes matter.”
