The poor are groaning, Owolabi Salis tells Tinubu

US-based lawyer and politician, High Chief Owolabi Salis, has advised President Bola Tinubu to take urgent steps to execute visionary policies geared towards bailing the masses from the “excruciating throes of hardship”. In his goodwill message to the president on Democracy Day, marking the anniversary celebration of June 12 victory, the Ikorodu-born Lagosian, who in […]

US-based lawyer and politician, High Chief Owolabi Salis, has advised President Bola Tinubu to take urgent steps to execute visionary policies geared towards bailing the masses from the “excruciating throes of hardship”.

In his goodwill message to the president on Democracy Day, marking the anniversary celebration of June 12 victory, the Ikorodu-born Lagosian, who in 2019, contested for governorship on the platform of the Alliance For Democracy, said: “While I rejoice with you on this historic moment of celebration, I cannot but hasten to reiterate with every sense of emphasis on the need for you to hearken to this salient exhortation with every urgency it requires because the event today being celebrated will not be meaningful, unless a sustained and intensified efforts are made to mitigate the severe hardship which the people are currently passing through, and persistently groaning over.

While recalling that the general mass of the electorates unanimously voted for Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the business mogul of blessed memory, irrespective of tribe, religion or sex, he noted that the overwhelming popular support was inspired by the confidence reposed in him as the messiah divinely ordained to liberate them from the shackles of poverty, squalor and misery to a new lease of comfortable existence.

In this respect, he urged the president to put in place, effective measures geared at locating the country on the path of agricultural self-sufficiency, adding that it is inconceivable that any leader could ever hope to mobilize and lead a predominantly hungry populace towards any meaningful goal of nation building.

Also citing the successful experiment of China, he stressed that its leader, Chairman Mao, was able to harness the predominantly peasant populace to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, which he used as a pedestal to launch China to industrial and technological heights as a global force to reckon with in the comity of nations.

He stated further that the persistent demand for new minimum wage would not have generated much crisis or desperation on the part of workers if food, the most essential item for survival, were affordable to the common man.