Don’t help politicians to rig, Oshiomhole tells corps members

Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has advised youth corps members who will work as ad-hoc staff during the general elections to shun politicians’ advances to rig the elections.

Oshiomhole gave the advise yesterday at the opening of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) annual management conference in Benin.

He said: “This is easily the toughest election Nigeria will have over the past 16 years and NYSC is providing the bulk of the presiding officers and polling unit officers at critical levels in the electioneering system. I want to appeal to corps members that they must refuse to be compromised by desperate politicians.

“We have a political class, who, if they have the opportunity, will even bribe God that they go to heaven even if they are actually candidates for hell and the corps members will require God’s help to resist these desperate politicians for the votes to count and I think the corps members must find sufficient encouragement to identify that the issues at stake is not the future of those seeking power but the future of those who are not seeking power particularly the younger ones.

“What is at stake is their future, their place on this continent and on this planet. Every day that is mismanaged is opportunity lost, therefore, regardless of the intentions of those seeking power, the corps members must understand that their own future cannot be measured with N5,000, N10,000 or N20,000.”

“The good news is that the corps members have been playing this role and there is no evidence in the past that they have been a problem. Even where elections were allegedly rigged or actually rigged, from the proceedings in the court, that rigging was not done most of the time by corps members and therefore they have been playing their roles as true Nigerians who believe in the unity of our country.

“As young men, they should be more idealistic which means they should see things done perfectly and with all the innovation that INEC promises to introduce, including the card readers, I expect that this elections will be much more free than the previous ones.

“I remain a firm believer that the country we are in is greater than any of us. Whatever we do, presidents will come and go, whatever we do, governors will come and go and local government chairmen will come and go and like I told the GOC 2 Mechanised Division the last time, even military leaders will come and go. What is permanent is the institution of the Presidency, of the governorship and of the Armed Forces. Once we distinguish between the person and the office, there should be no problem.”