LP will survive Mimiko’s defection — Akinbade SEPTEMBER 7, 2014 BY FEMI MAKINDE Leave a Comment The governorship candidate of the Labour Party in Osun State, Fatai Akinbade tells FEMI MAKINDE about the role money played in the August 9 governorship poll and other political issues in the country Many people expected you should have performed better than you did in the recently concluded governorship election in Osun State; how would you explain your relatively unimpressive performance? It was so because the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party allegedly paid virtually everybody who voted. Their votes did not reflect the level of love the people had for them but it was a function of money. Are you saying the PDP and APC bought majority of the votes they scored? Almost everybody that voted got money and rice. More than 20 trailer loads of rice entered Osun within a week; they dished the rice out to people along with money. Almost everybody who voted in the state got money. I don’t have Federal Government support where money can come from freely. I don’t have the support of any state government unlike the APC; we were left to use the little resources we could to raise money. But you have Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State who is in Labour Party. Are you saying he did not support your ambition? No, there was nothing like that from the governor for the election; none. There was no support from him. Is it true some of your party agents did not vote for you on that day? If all our supporters and agents voted for us, we would have scored more that the number of votes we scored. There were places that we didn’t record anything, which confirmed that some of them did not vote for us. Did you not have party agents in those places? We had agents in all the 3,010 polling units and we sent N1,000 to each of them; that was the only thing that we were able to send. We sent the amount when it was getting too late and money was not there. We decided to share N1000 per polling booth which was the only thing we were able to send, whereas the PDP gave N20,000 to its agents and APC about N30,000 to its agents, and individual voters took N2,000, N3,000, N5,000 with rice. How do you want to stop them from voting against those who gave them that much? How will you assess the performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission in the election? I think INEC really performed very well in the last election. Some people are complaining but I don’t know and I have not seen any concrete evidence that INEC was biased. The INEC was a good umpire; they did very well and I believe if they maintain the same performance in other elections, Nigeria will become stabilised. There are speculations that Governor Mimiko may defect to the PDP. Will this not lead to the extinction of the Labour Party? Political parties are different from individuals; the party was existing before he ( Mimiko) joined and I believe the party will continue to exist if he leaves. His exit will not mean the end of Labour Party. I know many in other states who will not leave the party if Mimiko defects. Even in Ondo State, you will discover that some people will not go. Hence, that cannot be the end of the road. There is a need for a third party in this country because some people cannot stand the PDP and they cannot stand the APC; that is why we have multi-party system. It will be too bad if we reduce the whole country to a two-party system. Will the Osun LP support President Jonathan in his 2015 presidential ambition? We will support him if that is what our national party wants. We have to abide by the national directive; if they direct us to do it, there is nothing wrong with President Goodluck Jonathan. How will you assess Governor Rauf Aregbesola’s first term? He has not done anything; I pity him because when he came first in 2010, he inherited a very clean government — he inherited assets and not liability. There was no liability in the state then. He claimed former Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola borrowed N18bn but Oyinlola did not spend up to N6bn out of the N18bn and he (Aregbesola) added more to make it N25bn. Tell me what project he has used it for. When he came in, there were not many people in the party; he (Aregbesola) was the alpha and omega and many people have joined him. That time, he could decide not to appoint any commissioner but he can’t do that now. That time, he could decide not to set up any board but where will he put all these people in the party now? He has a lot of challenges ahead of him and he has no excuse for not doing well. The roads that the administration is doing are Federal Government roads. They just opened the road without doing any reasonable work on them. Aregbesola awarded the contracts without following due process. No due process; that was exactly where this problem started. Will you say the PDP is behind the series of impeachments in the APC- controlled states to get back at the opposition party? Politics is like two people fighting and somebody bites the other one — it’s part of the fight. Whatever anybody does, it is believed they are all playing politics. Whatever you have, when you are going to war, you use it. You use everything you have to fight your opponent. I am not surprised, I am not saying the PDP has any influence on the impeachment saga but you cannot rule it out because everyone is fighting. Northern leaders have been blamed for the lingering Boko Haram crisis, do you share this view? Supposed Boko Haram members are in the South, we will know where they are. Where are they (Boko Haram fighters) coming from? Do we have a den or forest where nobody enters in the North where these people are assembling? Sometimes, you hear they come in a convoy of vehicles and overrun a place: where do they go back to? That is the question. I think we need answers from our security men. What is your advice to Nigerians ahead of the 2015 general election? I want to advise the entire country that in 2015, we must be very careful because the Boko Haram insurgency is still there and the parties, especially the APC and the PDP, are both brandishing their guns and cutlasses to make sure they win. I think they should take it easy because when you look at the Osun election, you will discover people were too desperate; the parties were too desperate to win. I don’t know where they got all the huge amount of money spent during the election from; it is dangerous for our democracy to be monetised. Yoruba people have an adage which says, ‘When a sheep is used as a bait on a trap, what do you expect the trap to catch?’ What do they want to gain by spending this huge amount of money to buy people’s conscience during elections? Copyright PUNCH. All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 06:12:05 +0000
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