2019 Presidency: Kaduna PDP Certifies Makarfi
BY AMOS TAUNA, KADUNA – Former governor of Kaduna State, and immediate past Chairman of the National Caretaker Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Senator Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi on Monday in Kaduna declared that politics of religion and ethnicity must give way to merit based politics as the country approaches 2019.
Senator Makarfi who made his political intention to seek his party’s presidential ticket known was unanimously endorsed by his home chapter (Kaduna State) of the party.
Makarfi, who was at the PDP’s State secretariat where he met with the party’s stakeholders preparatory to his official declaration to contest for the presidency, said he had to begin at home, had to intimate his immediate constituency and seek their support and prayers.
According to the two term governor of Kaduna state, “After my tenure as the caretaker chairman of our great party PDP, I rested a while and began consultations on the way forward for our party and nation.
“Based on my wide consultations and calls, I have made up my mind to contest for the presidency under our great party come 2019 and am here to seek for your support and prayers.
“Let me say that there will be other contestants, some people who certainly are eminently qualified for the position too, but our political antecedents will make the difference at the long run and above all, the will of God will prevail.
“My modest efforts while I was the governor of the state is there on ground for people to see, but let me make it clear that politics of religion and ethnicity must not be the yardsticks for voting our leaders in the 2019 elections, let it be merit based of whoever is vying for any position.
“If considered and given the party mandate, my priority among others will be to immediately address issues of insecurity, infrastructural decay, unemployment, armed banditry, national unity and promotion of what binds us together, creating and distributing wealth.
“When you say you have raised our GDP by seven per cent, yes, is it possible, but who benefited from the increase? That is the question. So, when you create wealth, it is only meaningful when it is legitimately and evenly distributed and you distribute wealth by creating employment. Good paying job, not temporary jobs that people are paid peanuts and you begin to wonder whether the money being paid is transport money or a living wage.
“We must cut the cost of governance and redistribute that savings, so that, we create the middle class. Middle class in any society creates more wealth than the upper class; they create employment.
“They will say PDP has done nothing, but we have record of performance everywhere. We have record of performance at legislative level and we have record of performance of managing diversity among party men and women.”
In his remarks, the chairman of the Kaduna state chapter of the PDP, Mr Felix Hassan Hyet, who summarized the position of all other stakeholders who spoke before him, told the presidential hopeful that he has all the support of Kaduna PDP members and as a state.
Hyet said; “Come 2019 inauguration, rather than accompanying other people, we from Kaduna will be accompanied for the inauguration because we will produce the man to be inaugurated.”
