As the governorship election of Edo State draws nearer, a leading governorship aspirant of Peoples Party of Nigeria (PPN), Iyoha John Darlington has expressed his readiness to take over from the incumbent governor, Godwin Obaseki at the polls.
While speaking through the national Chairman of the party, Hon Razaq Eyiowuawi, the governorship hopeful said the level of infrastructural decay in the state has assumed an alarming crescendo.
He said that unemployment has resulted in crimes particularly violent ones which informed his interest and overwhelming desire to throw his hat into the ring.
The governorship hopeful expressed his readiness to put the welfare of Edo people at the front burner of his government.
“The successive administrations instead of providing Infrastructures have spent over two decades supporting, maintaining institutions and structures of repression and funding political vengeance, electoral fraud, corruption, meaningless and merry-go-round trips around the globe while our state’s service infrastructures continue to undergo incremental depreciation and decline of Greco-Roman proportions”
“Today, our living condition is better imagined than real as we have, in fact, become poorer thus forcing our children out of schools for unprecedented migration abroad. A good number of them have died while crossing the fiery Sahara desert to the coast of North Africa from where they embark on dangerous sea journeys on inflated rickety boats to Europe,” he said.
In his Edo for Edo People agenda, Darlington said his administration shall ensure the development of agriculture and the agricultural sub-sector to make hunger in the state a thing of the past.
This, he said, he hopes to achieve by establishing “state owned food farms across the three senatorial districts by discarding Nigeria’s medieval agro-template.”
To further put smiles in the faces of Edo people, he said the incoming PPN administration in the state shall set up Social Security Fund to provide monthly monetary assistance up to the tune of €300 euros, that is #120,000 to the unemployed in the state.
Darlington who hails from Uromi in the north central parts of Edo State, said he knows Edo state people and their challenges very well having attended St. John Boscos’ College, Ubiaja and thereafter proceeded to then Edo State University, now Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria for an Arts degree in the Humanities.
