Segun Awofadeji in Bauchi
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, yesterday, advised the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to emulate the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-controlled states in terms of infrastructure development as catalysts to surmount unemployment that is breeding social ills and insecurity bedeviling the country.
Abubakar, who spoke during the official Commissioning of the 4.2 kilometer Gombe-Maiduguri Bypass constructed by the Governor Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed administration and named after him, commended Mohammed for constructing the road and embarking on other projects with direct bearing on the lives of the citizenry, urging him to sustain the momentum and accelerate the pace of good governance in the state.
Atiku, who said Infrastructure developments had become instruments of economic empowerment to create jobs, however, called on the federal government to learn from the PDP states, pointing out that states controlled by his party were doing and that his verdict was evidenced by the commissioning of projects in those states compared to the APC states
“Let me commend you for reducing the unemployment in the state and the country at large, because it is this unemployment wave that is creating all the social ills that we are facing in the country. I wish the federal government would copy what the PDP states are doing in this country, because in every PDP state you go, you will find infrastructural development projects taking place and I cannot recall any APC state commissioning projects.
“Therefore, your excellency, you are virtually laying the pathway to the return of PDP in the state and also the country at large. I want to commend your contributions in that regards. Let me also use this opportunity to commend the state House of Assembly, that in spite of the fact that the assembly is controlled by the opposition party, the development of the state is far more important to them than political beliefs.
“These programmes that you have implemented and continue to implement are the bedrock of development, be it educational, healthcare delivery or any other aspects of development. But most importantly, these development projects have become instruments of economic empowerment.
“I wish the federal government will copy what the PDP governors and PDP states are doing in this country, because in every PDP state you go, you will find infrastructure development projects taking place,” he boasted.
On his part, Mohammed sai the commissioning of the Gombe- Maiduguri By-pass road was a milestone in the history of Bauchi as the state government decided to immortalise Atiku with it, in recognition of his contributions to the evolution to nascent democracy and as one of the founding fathers of the PDP.
The governor said when his government came into office in 2019, he made a lot of promises based on developmental roadmap, tagged: “My Bauchi Project”, which laid out an ambitious plan to take the state out of the backwaters of development to the front seat of human progress despite dwindling resources at all levels of government.
He said his administration did not take the confidence reposed in his government by the people for granted, pointing out that public office was the secular trust that should be held with a high sense of responsibility.
“For us, the equitable distribution of resources should be the corner stone of government business as a deliberate strategy, not only to deepen inclusion of stakeholder ownership of projects, but also to significantly reduce to the barest minimum, the feelings of marginalisation and exclusion that is a threat to national unity” he said.
