The All Progressives Congress (APC) Youth and Students Council has urged youths in the country to vote for Bola Tinubu in the 2023 presidential election.
Mr Ezenwa Onyirimba, Director-General of the council made the appeal during an advocacy visit to the Chief Executive Officer, Connected Development (CODE), Mr Hamzat Lawal.
According to the group, Tinubu would ensure inclusiveness, provide a lasting solution to strikes by university lecturers and engineer reforms that would create jobs and opportunities for young people.
Onyirimba said that Tinubu’s antecedents speak for him and his actions have shown that if youths adopt him as president, he would carry them along in his cabinet and governance.
He said that Tinubu had displayed uncommon leadership capacity as governor and would steer the affairs of the country for the good of all.
“We all know in the history of Nigeria that the ASUU strike did not start with the APC government, it was because of agreements upon agreements previous governments did not meet up with, that the current government inherited.
“When Tinubu was governor of Lagos and the state university workers went on strike, it did not take up to a month to resolve it and till his tenure ended there was no strike again.
“What we are talking about is that Tinubu has the technical know-how, the understanding on how to better equip and run the education sector and nation as a whole.
“Tinubu has great plans for youths. We compared what he has done in the past and his future plans for youth to the plans of other candidates and we believe that youths will queue behind Asiwaju,” the D-G said.
Meanwhile, he sought Lawal’s support in galvanising the youths to support Tinubu’s ambition because of the major role he played in the Not-Too-Young-To-Run Act and his influence on the youths.
In response, Lawal said that his interest was the development of Nigeria, not individual candidates.
“Yes, you are advocating that as young people we should have a consensus candidate, I understand your position of interest because you are aligning with your political party.
“My position would not come from any interest, I am a civic leader, so what comes first for me is Nigeria.
“Your group is one of the first I am meeting with and I am also going to meet with other political parties, ultimately, it is the Nigerian people that will decide who becomes the next president in 2023.
“My own commitment is to deploy independent observers that are mostly made of young people to observe the election. In 2015, we deployed 5000, in 2019 we deployed 10,000 and in 2023 we are doubling it to 20,000 observers,” he said.
NAN
