By Job Osazuwa
Governorship candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the forthcoming gubernatorial election in Ekiti State and former governor of the state, Chief Segun Oni, has said that Ekiti people were already fed up with how the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have ruled the state in the last decade. In a chat with journalists in Lagos, he said he was not perturbed by the financial muscles of the two major parties, expressing confidence that the people would vote SDP this time around.
What are your concerns going into the Ekiti governorship election?
My greatest concerns are thuggery and security. We are appealing to the law enforcement agencies to stand up to their calling. Let us be honest; it is not difficult for anybody to procure violence, but some people don’t want to procure violence. We don’t want to procure violence, and that is not because we cannot. We are saying that we should not destroy the younger ones. The government created poverty, which it is battling with. Let’s face it, how much is a thug paid? But, they don’t have any other thing to do, and that is why they would risk their lives. Even in their own eyes, the worth of their lives is very small. So, if the security personnel do their job, the propensity for thuggery and violence will reduce.
You are contesting against strong oppositions like former Governor Ayodele Fayose’s camp, on the one hand, and the incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi’s camp on the other; how do you hope to surmount them?
The people are on our side; and with the people, you can surmount any principality or force. And if anybody thinks he can push the people aside, then they have another thing coming. Without people, there is no politics, and the people have made up their minds that this is what they want. When Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas went for a re-election and lost, he simply went back to the people to ask them what he did wrong that made them reject him. But the Nigerian politicians would not do that. Rather, they would think that “maybe we have not given them enough money; maybe we did not deploy our rigging tactics as we should.”
Are you concerned about vote buying?
Yes, we are concerned about vote buying and we believe that is one of the evils that must be uprooted. But don’t forget that these guys have afflicted the people with extreme poverty, such that one meal to some people is between life and death. Therefore, if you go to some people and say, vote and cook a pot of stew, they would listen to you. But with education, we believe people will now begin to ask questions. This vote you want from me, how long will it take you to come back for another? This stew, how long will it take me before I need to cook another stew? Four days maximum. So, that means you are trading four days for four years; and they would know they have really got it wrong.
What gives you the conviction that the people are on your side?
We are convinced that they are on our side because we listen to them, and we hear them. We all are Ekiti people; we live there and we know we are on the right side of history, because the people are saying it and flaunting it. And that is the beginning of a revolution to come. The people are saying they want a new terrain and are tired of APC and PDP.
How deep is your pocket because you are competing with people who are likely to outspend you?
Well, we don’t have a deep pocket. If we wanted to have a deep pocket, we probably would have stolen the treasury dry. Some people have deep pockets because they didn’t do what they should while in office. There are governments in Ekiti that went all over the world searching for foreign investments, and where are the foreign investments? I am not ashamed to say I don’t have a deep pocket, because deep pocket is a euphemism for stealing while in government.
You were there before and now you want to return to the office. What do you hope to do differently to boost the economy of Ekiti State this time around?
I boosted the economy the first time I was in office and I’ll give you the statistics. The Human Development Report published in 2009 analysed Nigeria by states and we were number 34 on statutory allocation; but the same Human Development Index (HDI) ranked us 24 on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. If our GDP was only on allocation, we would probably be number 34 or 36. Moving further, the same HDI ranked us number 10 in overall HDI. Also, at that time, Ekiti was rated to have the highest average life expectancy in Nigeria. We didn’t have University College Hospital, Ibadan; we didn’t have Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), but people lived longest in Ekiti. We simply went to the fundamentals. People didn’t even know when we started solving most of the problems.
When we said we were going to start boarding schools, our opponent then, the ACN, went about telling people not to put their children in boarding school. We gave pupils of schools that agreed to have boarding laptops because we couldn’t give a laptop to a child that went home every day, otherwise half of it would have been stolen within a week. Aside from that, there won’t be power at home to power them. The teachers said we had not taught them how to apply the laptops, but I said no, this is not about the teachers; this is about the children finding their ways and becoming friends with their laptops. We also put school contents in there, which we did not tell them. We knew that when they search, they’ll discover them.
If I didn’t build roads, they would have gone about saying he didn’t build roads, but because I wanted to satisfy the basics, I did more roads than anybody else.
What has changed since after your tenure as a governor of Ekiti State over a decade ago?
The environment itself has changed. As a governor, I ran a health system that was probably the most efficient in the country. I had a revolving drug scheme, whereby if you go to any hospital or health centre in Ekiti, more than 19 times out of 20, you went away with your drugs. And what was I doing? We had a central medical store where some very rare drugs were stocked. The fast moving ones were stocked everywhere. If you went to the pharmacy counter in Iyemero and the drugs were not there, they would put a call through to the central store in Ado and we had some power bikes that would speed those drugs to you within an hour or two. We were doing that because that was the level of technology available at the time. Today, we may still have power bikes, but we will also use drones, because they will be faster and more efficient.
Since your first outing as governor, you have moved from the PDP to the APC and back to the PDP and now the SDP; would that not make you appear like a man desperate for power?
That is not about desperation. It is clearly about the attitude of somebody who is not satisfied with the evils or inadequacies that exist in the system. I am busy looking for the ideal for Nigeria; not for me.
Let us face it, the way we are managing political parties now still falls short of expectations. I was national vice chairman, and later deputy national chairman of two different parties, and I knew that these parties could be managed better. A party, for example, that has no sure source of revenue, and you journalists have never asked questions. They will rely on the governors to give them money, and those monies belong to the people of their respective states not the overall people of Nigeria. And that money means he who pays the piper must dictate the tunes. Some have said the governors are overbearing; why would they not be overbearing? If you put money in a venture, would you be happy to be pushed aside when decisions are being taken? Yes, when a political party starts, they may rely on donations, but for how long? The oldest political party in Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) does not rely on donations. They are major shareholders in MTN, so every time you are buying an MTN recharge card, you are patronising the ANC. They also have substantial investments in some mining companies. So, I am looking for an alternative that can proffer the real solutions. That is the kind of person that I am.