ny fabulous reporter
A.P.C. CHIEFTAIN,CHIEF MRS YETUNDE BABAJIDE,A YORUBA AND NIGERIAN NATIONALIST CONTINUES TO PROMOTE THE ESSENCE OF A FOOD BANK SO AS TO CUT WASTAGE IN PUBLIC SPACES WHILE AT THE SAME TIME TAKING A DIFFERENT APPROACH ON THE RECENT PALLIATIVE MEASURES TAKEN TO CURB THE EFFECTS OF THE SUBSIDY REMOVAL..
SHE AFFIRMS HER FULL SUPPORT FOR THE ASHIWAJU BOLA AHMED TINUBU ADMINISTRATION :EXCERPTS;
1]Good afternoon Madam can you briefly introduce yourself to our audience?
My name is called Princess Yetunde Babajide and I am the Iyalode Ojodu,Iyalode Itaku in Oshun State of Nigeria and that should be at ilare quarters in Ile ife and am a bonafide child born and raised in Ile Ife by my parents.
I went to school in Osun state and from there I had gone for teachers training and then to the college of Education and then on wards to the University,
I am a farmer and that is the work I have given my hands to be doing and am also into Estate Management.
I am also into politics because I am the south west Woman Leader of the All Progressives Congress [A.P.C] FOR Tinubu /Shettima Grassroots Presidential campaign team…
The election has come and gone; how do you see this hurdle by the opposition against your candidate
There is really no form of challenge, I will not call it a challenge as The President we have today in Nigeria is a highly determined for the position and it is well prepared for the position he is occupying.
Somebody that is prepared for a job is different from somebody that is trying to steal an opportunity and my party has being on ground for so very long a time.
My party is the only party in Nigeria that went through the process of mergers and it was not only one party as a lot of party came together to form what we now call the All Progressives Congress [A.P.C.].
If you look at it critically you will see that my party fully represents the interests of all the political party, so I dare say that all those people challenging us are baby politicians that they want to take up opportunities available to them if any in Nigeria.
My party is well prepared and I can tell you that we are the one getting prepared to take Nigeria to the next level.
2]What do you see as a Challenge of many politicians in the country?
One thing that I see in our women is that they do not love themselves as they have the attitude of being easily jealous of themselves until when the come together and the speak the same language and they started to help themselves by pushing themselves up but as it is now it is getting better in this dispensation.
As we have women that are appointed Ministers and are getting ready for it but like I said earlier on women need o get ready for it, love themselves and know themselves and know what they can stand for to make things much better in Nigeria.
3]What is the way forward on this palliative issue as many people have being complaining, if you are The President how will you share this thing? Thank you so much as one of the leaders in A.P.C and as the South West Woman Leader and part of The Presidential Campaign Committee I am not in support of the palliatives at all.
I have said it severally times without number and I have sent my thoughts on the subject to an appropriate place.
One thing that I can understand from all of this is that our President brought out money for the nation for the palliatives but they did not tell them to use palliative money to be buying food and be sharing it for people.
There is another better way that he can do that, if the states can use the money to buy food or have a food bank where they will be selling food for Nigerians and now subsidize the money so that the subsidy can really go into an individual need.
Take for instance, if Lagos state can buy Rice a bag of rice now is like N30,000 Lagos state can use palliatives money to buy rice keep in a food bank and be selling that rice for N25,000 for an individual.
So, if an individual buys N25,000 bag of rice it will mean that a particular family has already collected N25,000 subsidy palliative.
Lagos state government can buy a gallon of Palm Oil for N6,000 and be selling it for N3,000 that means you will have already collected N3,000 subsidy palliative.
That is what in my opinion candidly what all the states were supposed to be doing ,it should not be that you are using the subsidy money to buy food and you are giving an individual 3 derica of rice I mean for how long and for how man people in the family.
So, this sharing of food for palliative is something that is not known to me and I will say no to it.
I have being campaigning on this for a very long time that each state in Nigeria would as a matter of urgency need food bank as a state can buy a vehicle to support a farmer whatever the farmers are producing let the state buy it off them and subsidies it and then the public will then come to buy it.
This for me will be the best way to go about this kind of thing.
The way they did with the BRT that they slashed the money into 50 percent can also be transferred into this as anybody that enters the BRT has automatically collected a form of palliative and that is what is supposed to happen.
So, if they can do BRT like that why is it that they cannot use the money to buy food.
You do not need to share food for anybody as the Governor himself knows that the people that they will put there they will not share the food supplies to the right people as they will use the occasion to embezzle.
They will take it to their various homes and be giving the food supplies to the family members and friends and that I exactly what they did or even though the politician that is what they will do.
The governors in Nigeria should know of the urgency of a food bank, they should wake up now and help to build the food bank as that is what we need.
That is what is going on in the global community and if you go to a place like London for instance you will go there and buy what you want to suit your taste.
So, the government can make life easier for our people as it depends on what we have and this is what we need right now but until we get there people are crying as a people palliatives is nothing but rubbish.
4]concerning the palliatives As a Woman leader what do we have to say about Governor Zulum of Bornu state? Zulum is the best Governor and I am not saying that the other Governors are not working .
Any Governor that does not give his own people food like Zulum at this particular time cannot be said to be doing well at this particular time.
One of our adages says that when hunger is moved off the table then there is nothing like poverty in place as people are hungry
Somebody like Zulum is close to where they produce a lot of this foods and that is why I have been advocating seriously of a truth that we need food banks in each of our states nationwide.
Zulum is giving its people one bag of rice .one bag of millet as we all saw it; he gave them ground nut oil and also vegetable oil and all that but if we are too far away from them why can we now give our own people half a bag. Any Governor that is selling a N25,000 would have given his people half a bag of rice and so only Zulum can be said to have done well in that palliative way.
5]Our Youths are being Misled by some chaste people; what is your advice to our Youths?
Thank you so very much because this issue is very sensitive to me as I have been mourning for more than a week now for the death of Mohbad.
Everybody has to take their own blame in this and this starts from the church/mosques and from the government.
Any society in which the state abandons the younger one’s this is the kind of results that you can see.
I have a particular project that I have being pushing for approval to the government of; Lagos state where we have a lot of our youthful population that are being misled and turned to drug addicts.
I have been campaigning about this for 5 years now when I did not even know what was wrong, Mohbad’s Death has now exposed a lot of things to us.
Nigeria is not supposed to accommodate Naira Marley as he is said to have being arrested 201 times.
The churches are not doing enough of what they are supposed to be doing, Mohbad is a church boy and the questions will be what was the churches doing that you can allow a young man like Mohbad slip from your hands and we have several cases like that in the churches.
Churches are just collecting money from people without giving them as much as they will need in return .kudos to Pastor Sam Adeyemi for the great job he has been doing as I have followed him for over 30 years and in fact if I am writing my own story and I did not have space for him then it is not complete even though as a Muslim I have being following him when he was ministering via radio stations…
He teaches success power and he did not teach the Bible alone as knowing God was different and then working and still be successful is another thing entirely as well.
Look at our universities who are perpetually on labour strikes even for a whole year as an idle hand is the devil’s workshop.
Parents are at fault, religion is at fault, the government is at fault and so everybody in Nigeria is at fault on our youths.
Some of us that had the God given grace to send our children abroad for further studies ask us what we did we spent money lavishly for what some of us did not have.
Money that you probably will need to be called a millionaire in Nigeria is what we use to send them to get good education overseas but I still believe that there is something that government can do.
6]What is the way Forward?
They need to have a food bank; get motivational speakers and let them talk to the youths and in a place like Lagos they do not need more than 20 people that will use as a case study for the project and when they start they will give them free meal on a daily basis for 3 months and make digital services available.
This is as you will do until all of them are removed from the streets and on each occasion, you use certain people in the society as their case study.
Then you will now start by asking them what do you want to learn, is it carpentry and other forms of vocational education and the state will back it up
Then government will take agriculture seriously and they know that if the rear cow or do to tomato the government will support them then they will take things seriously and it should not be a case of what wanting to be a farmer where there is no hoe.
This is my opinion of what a solution should be and this is the way forward but any other thing forgets about it.
7] how can a child of 18 years be the bread winner of a home?
It is highly improper I mean a child will go to school right from the primary to the university level, before a child can think of supporting himself and his parents, he or she will be between 18 to 23 years and I tell you anything less than 24 years is total poverty.
It is poverty that is bringing that type of situation as 18 years is still under watch and under training.
8]so what do you have to say to situations where under 18 or 18years are already taking on the toga of bread winners and they are not being questioned by their parents?
All those types of parents cannot be classified as good parents as I do not know what is responsible for it because it can be clearly see that there is poverty in our land as it could be this that pushed them to that kind of a thing.
I mean why should a child of less than 18 years or at best 18 years give you the parent food or gift and you are not questioning it I think it is poverty but a the same time it is not a good testimony for any parent that is involved in this type of situation.
9]what do we say about youths who are into prostitution while supposed to be in school?
I have just said that there is poverty in the land and so we have to check mate this type of situations.
Many of them steal our money and it is the money that they steal that they give to their children
All tiers of government including Abuja need a place where they will put the common man’s children so that they can take care of them but it is not all those children that like what they are doing by going into whore dom.
It is not all of our youths that love whoring but I do believe that if they have an option they will go in for it, let us use this Mohbad as an example if you go through his life he has an identity card of apprenticeship from his father where he learnt carpentry work and he now wrote there that he was CEO of Obaloba carpentry work and from that you will know that he wanted to become somebody but rather unfortunately there was nobody available to help him.
He had his own name before he met Naira Marley and when he started to work with Naira Marley that was when the latter changed his name to Mohbad.
I saw in one of his interviews whey he had to change his names from Mohbad to Emmanuel again and he said that this was his own name and that he saw that Mohbad as a name of a criminal and as such he wishes to distant himself from it as he did not want it.
Look at that if there were options made available by the state the young man will not have the type of [problems that he had and somebody even said that he was the only one that used to challenge Naira Marley but that the latter does not want anyone to question him.
A very good boy by all standards who knew what he wanted otherwise we risk losing more people like him in the future as there are so many ,many of them have label records but no offices and it is time the government have a state policy that will help to insure them so that they do not have the kind of crisis that they encounter and this more than any other reason was why we lost Mohbad as he had nowhere to run.
10]how long have you being into politics?
It has been 20 years now that I started partisan politics
11]Are you happy with the current state of the A.P.C. government in the state as it concerns women participation?
I am a little pleased but am not totally pleased because they are not giving us what we deserve, I am a progressive woman and I have always been an Ashiwaju person to the core, from the Alliance for Democracy to the Action Congress
