Group lead sensitisation advocacy ahead 2019 polls

A group, Legacy Initiative International (LII), led by Dr Kenny Martins, is already moving across the country trying to sensitise Christian and Muslim leaders on the need to collaborate to ensure that Nigerians are aware of the need to embrace God in the way they choose and vote their candidates to be able to institute good governance in the country. BOLA BADMUS reports.

As Nigerians look ahead to elect another set of leaders to run the affairs of the country, come 2019, and political parties, numbering close to a 100 are having aspirants jostling to contest on their platforms for various elective positions, including presidential, governorship, senatorial, House of Representatives and state House of Assembly seats. Stakeholders in the Nigeria Project are also looking at strategies and ways to ensure that the citizenry, this time around, come together as never before to determine who and who should qualify to be voted for, with particular focus on the end result. That end result is to positively move the country forward rather than self-serving on the part of those who eventually got voted into office, a situation, which has been the bane of the country.

Among the stakeholders in the Nigeria Project is a group called Legacy Initiative International (LII), which has expressed concern about the fate of the country over the years, despite the huge resources God has endowed her with.

For instance, the group, whose grand patron, Chief (Dr.) Kenny Martins, was in Lagos a few days ago together with other chieftains, including Bishop Bayo Babalola, Bishop Oscar Ossai, Prince Chudi Chukwuani and Chief Jonny Cheagu, its national secretary, to engage in an interactive session with newsmen, lamented that since the advent of the Fourth Republic, Nigeria is into commencing in 1999, not a few Nigerians are in doubt as to whether democracy is working or not.

According to Kenny Martins, even before the country got to the stage where it is now, operating the Presidential System of Government, it had tried the Parliament System, practised regionalism and federalism, in the past, with most Nigerians agreeing that the country’s “yesterday was always better than her today.”

He, however, identified the key problem facing the country to be basically the fact that Nigeria has not, in its nearly 60 years of her existence as a country, employed spiritual factor necessary to aid the voters enthrone good governance by electing only persons that have been duly vetted into political offices.

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Martins, who has no doubt played key roles in political development of the country, specifically noted that the absence of God factor in efforts at enthroning good governance, through the leaders that were always voted into various offices to manage the affairs of the country, have been the bane of Nigeria as a nation, and this is in spite of the fact that Nigerians are great adherents of the two major religions, Islam and Christianity and do demonstrate this by attending mosques and churches regularly.

According to him, Nigeria is in serious political and economic crisis, and also suffering from insecurity with nothing appearing to work over the years, since it became an independent country because the God factor is missing in the way it is governed. Whereas most of the well- developed country’s of the world, such as the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Switzerland, Checkslovakia, among others, were able to attain such height because they imbibed spiritualism in the way they choose their leaders in order to bring about good governance to their people.

Also speaking, Prince Chukwuani, a patron of the group, attested to the fact that LII had met practically with all the Christian and Muslim leaders and groups in the northern and southern parts of the country, declaring that the common thread tying them together was how Nigeria can secure good governance.

Chukwuani, who said the LII was planning to embark on second round of consultations with the religious leaders ahead of the 2019 elections, said it was poised to avert perpetual conflict and religious divide like it was happening in Congo with all the resources it was blessed with.

Now as the Legacy Initiative International (LII) moves around the country ahead of the 2019 polls to seek understanding and cooperation of Muslims and Christian leaders, as well as their adherents to ensure that they vote God-fearing leaders into various elective positions, the whole nation is waiting to see how far the body would go in realising this dream of enthroning good governance in Nigeria, one that would transform the country and take it to greatness like those well-developed rations across the globe.