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Dogara says 2019 poll will be referendum on insecurity, hunger

By Adamu Abuh, Abuja
19 December 2018   |   4:26 am
As Nigerians prepare for the 2019 elections, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has said that the poll would be a referendum on insecurity and hunger in the country.

Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara PHOTO: TWITTER/DOGARA

As Nigerians prepare for the 2019 elections, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has said that the poll would be a referendum on insecurity and hunger in the country.

Dogara, who spoke in Gombe during the North East zonal campaign and rally of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), urged Nigerians to do an introspection and decide if they have made progress in the last three and half years or have witnessed a decline in their living standards on a general basis.

“The 2019 election is about insecurity, whether we can be secure. Look at your own lives and see if nobody loves you, advise yourself, hold a consultation with yourself, sit down and argue with yourself, ask yourself what progress you’ve made in the last three and a half years. Don’t even ask any other person who may give you a biased opinion about yourself, but you know yourself very well, just sit down and if you want assistance, sit down close to a mirror so that you can see yourself.

“Compare yourself the way you look now and the way you looked some three years ago, and then decide whether you want to continue looking like this, that is if it doesn’t get worse in the next four more years. By the time you’ve finished having that conversation with yourself, make a decision,” Dogara advised Nigerians.

The speaker said Nigerians must decide if what they want in the next four years is higher levels of insecurity and hunger.“Today in Nigeria, 13 million of our children are out of school, 1.3m of those children are from my home state of Bauchi. If we continue like this, the numbers are bound to increase, and the crisis we will face in the future will be more than this Boko Haram that we are witnessing. This is because by refusing to give free and compulsory education to our children, we are raising an army for insurgency that will come and consume us as a people.

“So the vote in 2019 is not about anything, but about you. Do not make it about any other thing, but about what progress you want to make, in what kind of country you want to raise your children and live in, what kind of education you want to give to your children.

“All these are what we have in the 2019 ballot. And we trus,t as educated and enlightened opinionated people, that you’ll make the right choices.”

The lawmaker, who lamented that Boko Haram insurgency “is still fresh” said that under PDP administration, there was never a time when in one day more than 100 soldiers were killed.

“In any other country, that would have made their security forces to declare a national emergency, but here, it didn’t happen. God forbids, is that the Nigeria that we want going forward? Do you know that today, you cannot travel between Kaduna and Abuja? It is very difficult. Most of the people that can afford it are always commuting by train, and we thank God for the railways that was almost 95 percent completed by the PDP government before APC took over. “If you travel by road, there is 70 percent chance that you’ll be kidnapped. In those days, however, kidnapping was very strange in the Northern part of this country.” Dogara urged the people of the North East to vote massively for the PDP for the development of the region.

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