The senator-elect for Lagos-East senatorial district and candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Tokunbo Abiru, has promised to translate his campaign promises into tangible outcomes for his constituents and Lagos as a whole.
Abiru, who spoke in a ‘Victory Speech’ shortly after the Independent National Electoral Commission declared him winner of the Lagos-East bye-election on Sunday, polled 89,204 votes, while his closest rival and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Mr Babatunde Gbadamosi, scored 11,251 votes.
He said, “Now is the time to translate all the promises we made into positive and tangible outcomes our people are expecting us to bring about. Now is the time to take our people from the realm of expectations to the limelight of fulfillment.
“I commit myself irrevocably to the agenda I laid out before the electorate-offering people-focused quality representation; ensuring welfare of my constituents; working with my colleagues in the National Assembly to ensure special status for Lagos; promoting policies to improve national economic performance and financial sector development; implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals; facilitating the completion of all federal and state road projects in Lagos-East; promoting ease of doing business; supporting the 5 for 5 agenda for police reform; supporting fiscal federalism and joining forces with colleagues in the Senate and members of the House of Representatives to ensure devolution of powers to the sub-national governments.
“Within the limits of our statutory mandate, this is the time to make the aged smile; empower our jobless youths; minister to the vulnerable; secure the future of brilliant indigent children and support the implementation of the ideals of our party. To achieve these enviable goals, we are already in the process of establishing an Endowment and Empowerment Fund to actualise my private philanthropy. The Fund will implement different interventions we are coming up with in line with my agenda and the ideals of our party. Already, our team is perfecting the modalities for the implementation of all these intervention programmes. By the middle of January, we will unveil these programmes in full and begin implementation immediately. I thank our people for this mandate and promise to live up to your expectations.”
He noted that if there were people out there who still doubted the popularity of the APC, didn’t reckon with its leadership in the political landscape and still disputed its progressive approach to governance, its victory in the just concluded bye-election readily offered them an infallible answer.
He noted that having secured the senatorial mandate with a landslide, the party cannot afford to fail the people.
He said, “We cannot afford to fail those who voted for us; those who chose not to vote for us for whatever reasons and those who did not vote at all. We cannot afford to betray the invaluable trust our people reposed in us as a political party and as their representatives in government.”
