Peter Obi, Presidential Candidate of Labour Party.
Presidential candidate of Labour Party, LP, Peter Obi has distanced himself from polls predicting victory for presidential candidates in the upcoming February 2023 polls and said only God can say with certainty if he would win.
Obi who was responding to a question as a guest on Monday’s Nigerian Guild of Editors forum in Lagos said if he could predict his victory, he would neither be selling his candidacy to Nigerian electorate during electioneering, nor would he honour the invitation of the Guild to reach his compatriots through fair, accurate and balanced reportage of his views on burning issues of national importance.
“If I could predict tomorrow, I would not be here. It is only God that can answer your question,” he said in reply to the question about what he thought of the most recent prediction by a UK based Fitch Solutions Group which said Ahmed Bola Tinubu of the governing All Progressives Congress, APC, would win the 2023 polls.
Obi who said getting a competent leader that would lead from the front and drive development was the major challenge facing the country, painted the sorry picture of Nigeria as an unproductive country with its large, arable land and yet unable to cultivate it and feed its teeming population.
“The ordeal of this country is the uncultivated land in the country, particularly the North. My commitment in Nigeria would be to move Nigeria from a consumption country to a productive one. If we can feed ourselves today a majority of our problems would have been solved.”
While taking a jibe at the borrowing spree of the government, he submitted that unless it was deployed to productive investments, “borrowing for consumption rather than for investment in key sectors in the economy for higher returns, is bad.”
