An aspirant of the Labour Party (LP) in the Edo State gubernatorial election, Tom Iseghohi, has pledged to transform the state into a logistics hub and guarantee round-the-clock water supply if he emerges victorious in the polls on November 12.
On Tuesday, Iseghohi made this declaration when he submitted his Expression of Interest and Nomination Forms for the Governorship Election at the Labour Party Secretariat in Abuja.
The aspirant from the Labour Party committed to revitalizing Edo State and ensuring self-sufficiency, leveraging his extensive expertise in business management.
According to him, “The first thing is that in Edo State, we have several issues we should not even have. We have a massive security problem, we have a problem with rule of law, we have a huge economic problem. The issue is that if you do not have rule of law and, if you don not have security, you are not going to have investments.
“In order to transform the state, you are going to need massive investments, because the days when you could run the states with your Federal allocations are in the past.
“Now you have to create capital, you have to create wealth. I am a known expert on capitalisation funding, so I will bring massive capital into the state. The other thing is that, without water there is no life and without power there is no life for the economy. So, within the first year, I will make sure that at a minimum, one ward in each of the eighteen local governments has water for twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
“Then I will focus on the things that are practical. I am not going to initially focus on major projects, I am going to focus on things that are practical, for example Singapore has five million people, Edo State has five million people, we have more resources than Singapore, yet our per capita income is two thousand dollars ($2000), Singapore’s is seventy four thousand dollars($74,000).
“I am going to make Edo State a logistics hub. Logistics creates tremendous employment and capital and as a result of that, in less than three years, Edo State will be completely economically transformed.
“We would have developed tremendous infrastructure, and the Edo State people would have a lot of infrastructure, jobs and the incomes would rise in Edo State. There will be safety and security, there will be power in key places and then there will be water.
“In response to a question about why he believed the LP was the ideal platform for contesting, Iseghohi stated that the party’s emphasis on the family matched his philosophy and set of values.
“I believe that the foundation of any country is the family unit. If the family unit is weak, the country is going to be weak, and if the family values are not consistent with society values or there are no values, then you are going to have anarchy,” he stated.
