Fela Durotoye wants to become Nigeria's president in 2019. That isn't going to happen.
Motivational speaker Fela Durotoye threw his hat into the 2019 presidential ring on Thursday, February 22, 2018 in typical tech savvy fashion.
“Therefore, to be clear, I am aspiring to contest as a presidential candidate in the 2019 general elections”, Durotoye announced via an email sent to the Fela Durotoye Leadership Network.
Durotoye will be running on the platform of the Alliance for a New Nigeria (ANN), a political party “founded by professionals and technocrats with great political insight and wisdom required to build a formidable nationwide grassroot movement within the next 12 months and beyond”, he says.
“It’s time to choose our future over our past”, he declares. “It is our time and together we will deliver the future”.
Honestly, I very much would love for someone outside of the establishment to become Nigeria’s president in my lifetime. It was why I signed up to the Chris Okotie campaign in 2003 and 2007, distributing the candidate’s plans for a new Nigeria on cassettes all around Ojota in Lagos.
Durotoye’s biggest challenge at the moment can be situated in his own declaration statement.
Biggest hurdle
“It’s 12 months to the presidential election and we only have enough time to act quickly. So, let’s make each day count”, he says.
Therein lies the problem with the Fela Durotoye presidential dream. You don't build a "formidable nationwide grassroot movement" under 12 months. 2019 is just too soon for Durotoye and everyone else who is just making his presidential plans public.
You don’t wake up one day to become president because you talk a good game and appeal to a youthful demographic. This declaration from the 46-year-old Durotoye is coming a couple of years late. He should have been on that shop window years before.
Chris Okotie example
Okotie was pretty much the same. He would get up in the middle of the night–few months before the general election–and tell everyone who cares to listen that God has ordained him to be Nigeria’s president.
Fresh faced Okotie had no grassroot structure to his name, no ground game, embarked on zilch door-to-door campaign and appealed only to the elite who flocked his church while speaking through their nostrils.
To beat the PDP and APC at their own game, a newcomer had to have been working his socks off years prior. Durotoye should have been in our faces the moment Buhari was elected president in 2015. He should have been proffering solutions to Nigeria’s problems since the APC seized the reins of leadership from the PDP.
Durotoye should have been offering alternative policy proposals every other day on television and the internet since 2015.
He can actually start now. He’s only 46 after all. He won’t be elected president in 2019 for sure. For Durotoye, it’s time to begin walking the talk by building a ground game—one that would grant him instant name recognition in the villages of Cross River and Taraba ahead of the 2023 vote.
He's got to begin building that grassroot movement for 2023 if he's really serious about being president.
Yes, Nigeria needs a fresh face. But it’s got to be one who has earned his epaulet. Durotoye hasn't.
Presidential Race: Fela Durotoye is a breath of fresh air, but 2019 is too soon for him
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