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Nigeria’s former Minister of Education Dr. Oby Ezekwesili has formally on Sunday announced that she will run for president next year. Ezekwesili, a former vice president for Africa at the World Bank, issued a statement announcing her intention to run. Nigeria’s presidential election is scheduled to take place in February 2019. Ezekwesili who is in her mid 50s, served in Nigeria’s government between 2000 and 2007 under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, first as minerals minister and later education minister.
She promised to announce her political party of choice on Sunday (today), vowing to build an army of patriots willing to pull down the stronghold, “that is, the two failed dominant political parties in Nigeria – the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party.”
Since she left government some years ago, she had been part of a number of advocacy groups, notable among them being the Bring Back Our Girls, a campaign which seeks to raise awareness about some 270 girls who were kidnapped from their school in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok in April 2014 by Islamist group Boko Haram. She is also a founding member of the Red Card Movement, a third force initiative that is working towards sending bad governance away from Nigeria through unseating the two major political parties in Nigeria, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressive Congress (APC).
In her words, Ezekwesili said, “The pain of seeing us become a country where the worth of life is trending down to zero, sadness that we are now known as the world poverty capital with 87 million extremely poor Nigerians, and anguish at the increase in the number of out-of-school children constitute a driving force for seeking the office of the President. Trust in public officials completely waned, angst knowing that only 10 per cent out of three to four million young people entering the employment market every year will likely find jobs, and concern about the future of Nigeria as a strong indivisible nation are the issues that have also compelled me. I have fully persuaded myself to lead a people’s movement that will permanently terminate bad leadership, ethnic and religious divisions, mediocrity, and failures in governance. We, the people of Nigeria, shall run together and win.”