Sokoto state governor and presidential aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Aminu Tambuwal has debunked reports attributed to him that the South South region cannot produce resident of the country.
Tambuwal denied the report on ChannelsTV’s Politics Today programme monitored on Tuesday.
Asked on the allegation that he ran imbalance committees when he was Speaker at the House of Representatives, Tambuwal challenged those to prove their allegations.
“Before I answer that, I read an online report that I said the South South cannot produce the President of Nigeria. I didn’t say that. Rather, I said in 2011 I supported a Presidential candidate of South South extraction, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan to win the presidency of Nigeria. I have many friends in the South South of Nigeria who are competent and who are qualified to lead Nigeria. I didn’t say that. What I said has nothing to do with that. I didn’t say that,” he said.
On the committees of the House, “We ran a very transparent, all-inclusive House of Representatives of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The facts are there in the Seventh House of Representatives for anyone to crosscheck.
“When you talk about balancing committees, for the first time, the committee on upstream was in the South West; Committees on Health and Appropriation were in the South South; Committees on Works, Aviation, Foreign Affairs were in South East; Committee on Water Resources was in the North Central; Committees on Agriculture and Police were in the North East; Committees on Education and Defence were in the North West.
“Even, a new Committee we created on Diaspora was in the South West and we gave it to Abike Dabiri and it was from there that she got active and she became a very good ambassador of the House of Representatives and of that committee.
On how long it will take him to tackle insecurity if he becomes President of Nigeria, Tambuwal declined to tell how long but specifically pointed out that he has idea of how to fix the problem, part of which he said is taking security to the community level and addressing the issue of state police and, essentially, get security closer to the people.
“If it means I, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, as President of Nigeria taking the bill personally to President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, I will do so because, I believe it is one of the interventions that we need as a matter of urgency to nip the issues of security challenges in the bud,” Tambuwal said.
