PREAMBLE:

Our nation is at a crossroads.

Quality of life is at its lowest. Unemployment is at its highest. Nigerians are disillusioned. Life is sad, brutish, and short. We live in fear. Our nation is in the midst of a low intensity civil war. Underpinning systems for sustaining the state and society have collapsed: education, health care, and judiciary. We cannot continue on this course, we must change direction.

Today, our future and the future of our children are at risk. And the outcome, whatever it may be, is up to us. We must rise as a nation and herald a new Nigeria; together we must identify credible and capable Nigerians to stand for elections. We must evolve higher standards of governance, transparency and accountability at all times. Nigeria must demand more from its leaders.

The leaders of our country have failed us, but this nation of great, strong and hardworking people can find from among its children, men and women willing and able to deliver a better Nigeria.

KOWA is a political party and grassroots movement founded to lead the way to a new and improved Nigeria. We seek political leadership, through peaceful and democratic means for the purpose of providing the highest quality of social services to Nigerian citizens within our borders and beyond.

We affirm and uphold the inherent dignity of every Nigerian citizen, and pledge to guarantee and defend those rights as codified in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We believe in the individual, the family and the household, with the community as the building blocks of society, and seek to connect the government with the individual, through his or her immediate community.

At this defining moment in the history of Nigeria, we the members of KOWA commit ourselves to a secure, prosperous, orderly, just and compassionate society in which every citizen is enabled to actualize himself or herself and to freely participate in building a government that is responsive to the needs of all citizens.

We pledge ourselves to make Nigeria a nation that works. The future we envisage is one in which every Nigerian has access to a decent education, good health care, and can live in a safe, peaceful and stimulating environment where he or she is guaranteed opportunities for self-actualisation. We realize that the eradication of poverty and social injustice is our nation’s most urgent priority and thus our first duty to our fellow citizens.

Our Nigeria will practice true, fiscal and political federalism, where the powers and responsibilities of the state and government are devolved as much as possible to the immediate communities and the immediate communities are in the real sense the primary federating units of our republic.

Our Nigeria will derive its common cultural identity from a respect of the socio-cultural rights of its component national peoples and, rebuild our community values and our sense of pride.

Our Nigeria will guarantee individual liberty and dignity, provide equitable access to the distribution of wealth and assure the future of our children through long term sustainable planning. Our Nigeria will see Government as an efficient resource manager and service provider.

WE the members of the KOWA Party commit ourselves to advancing social democracy and our decisions and political actions are, and shall remain, driven by ideals, principles and beliefs that derive from this basic philosophy. While a sustained political engagement and the overall welfare of the individual Nigerian citizen form the ultimate focus of our political and grassroots movements, the organising principle of our party is based on service, discipline, efficiency, accountability and the highest professional and ethical standards.

It is time for a change. We can do better. And it is up to you.