WHAT A RELIEF...NOT ONLY TAX-PAYERS CAN VOTE!
I watched the live telecast of the APC political rally held in Ikorodu on Saturday the 17th of March, 2015 with mixed feelings...with Fashola doing most of the talking and Ambode busying himself with waving the party insignia...a native broom...
The decision to adopt this dominant-recessive format on the podium appeared to have been pre-planned and based on the presumed premise that Fashola "performed" during his tenure as the governor of Lagos State of Nigeria. Thus, APC egg-heads might have wanted Fashola's aura to rub off on the neophyte candidate!
With the governor speaking so lucidly and throwing jabs at the PDP contender, it was rather refreshing to note that Fashola is flesh and blood afterall...not some soul-less felon who would suggest that hawkers of common wares pay taxes out of their meagre earnings!
Hear him: "We hear he sells drugs. We will ask him to supply us his drugs...so long as they have NAFDAC numbers!"....in jocular referece to Jimi Agbaje, the main opponent in the gubernatorial tussle who is a pharmacist by calling...
It comes with some welcome...albeit comic...relief that the political cadre have in tandem with our constitution, made voting an all-comers affair.
Not even the obsessive-compulsive tax-mongers....sorry tax adherents....like the lawyer-governor of Lagos State has up till now, suggested that only tax-payers and party loyalists be granted entry into political rallies, be registered by INEC or be eligible to vote!
Yet, prior to this time, the Fashola government of Lagos State had consistently, commitedly and relentlessly excluded persons whose crosses of life had been so heavy as to yank them off the tax bracket from enjoying the "dividends" of democracy!
His government brazenly excluded them from benefiting from its housing shemes, its welfare programmes and other plans....such that there is practically nothing you can possibly do at "Alausa" without first presenting evidence of tax payment! And Fashola does not give a damn how you obtain the funds to pay such taxes!
Yet, only gainfully employed persons can possibly pay taxes and in fact, our legal statutes restrict tax payments to only those individuals that earn taxable incomes!
Governments in saner climes pay regular stipends to unemployed citizens to "keep body and soul together"!
The determination of a sitting governor to emasculate his own people can only derive from a killer instinct!
We sincerely hope that as our politicians are elected into office, they would remember that their mandates were not given by only the payers of taxes!
And that there would be no rekindling of their killer instinct as to lead them to revert to the status quo!
Fashola asked Agbaje to come take tutorials on governance....and I ask him the lecture topic....
"Emasculation Of The Citizenry"?
Dr Tosin Akindele is a Lagos-based Medical Practitioner and public affairs analyst.
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