Posted by From JACOB EDI, Abuja on
Governor of Cross-River State, Donald Duke, Tuesday, made public his Presidential ambition at the International Conference Centre. He had two weeks ago picked the PDP nomination forms.
•Promises to make environment his priority
Governor of Cross-River State, Donald Duke, Tuesday, made public his Presidential ambition at the International Conference Centre. He had two weeks ago picked the PDP nomination forms.
In a four-page speech entitled: 'A Great Future Beckons, Together Let Us March Into It", the out-going Cross-River State Governor declared that 'the time has come to banish defeatism and cynicism from our national consciousness. We are a country of can-do people. All over the world, Nigerians excel in their chosen fields. We must galvanize such passions at home. Hope has come. Hope in our Fatherland. Hope in our Motherland.
Hope in the goodness of the average Nigerian."
While noting that in 2007, the nation has a date with destiny, Duke promised to build on the gains of the President Obasanjo administration.
Specifically, Duke said infrastructural development will be one of his key programmes if he eventually won the party ticket at the December party convention.
'In the last seven and half years, some brave efforts have been deployed to rescue the country from the decadence and despair that have been our lot in the past several decades. Indeed, instead of being viewed as a failing state, Nigeria has been restored to the status of a work in progress. But much more now needs to be done to consolidate that work, and to strike out in new directions," he said.
Duke who declared the nation's educational sector a disaster area said part of his programmes will be to encourage pure sciences and mathematics in Nigerian schools.
He reeled out other programmes to include, effective power supply, developing the nation's agricultural sector, encourage job creation at both public and private sectors, road and rail network across Nigerian communities, crime reduction and making sure that Nigeria's dependency on oil becomes a thing of the past.
He also called for justice for the Niger Delta region saying, the zone that produces the oil that sustains the nation deserves more than it is getting.