…Says he owes Amosun  nothing

By Willy Eya and Moshood Adebayo

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Former governor of Ogun State, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, recently turned 60. Daily Sun engaged him on a number of issues, including his tenure as governor, future political career, the crisis in his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), his demonisation while in office and his advice to President Muhammadu Buhari on the threat posed by Fulani herdsmen.
Excerpts:
What are your reflections on life at 60?
For me, giving thanks to God Almighty becomes important for me at 60, as I can see the hand of God in my entire life. It has been a life of hard work, which I naturally enjoy. And all my efforts have been crowned with success all the way both as a student, an employee, an employer in the private sector, a government worker, as governor and now a retiree. And at 60, I remain healthy with no life threatening disease. Looking back, it has been a life of very hard work and I believe, I am a true epitome of the adage, that hard work does not kill but laziness does.
During your 60th birthday anniversary, there was praise worship for a couple of hours. Have you always been a man of God?
My father was a clergy man; I was born and raised in the vineyard of the Lord. So, it is in my gene to praise God and to worship God and that is precisely why whatever I touch, the first thing I do is to praise God. And in any case, if you look into my life journey, I do have more than enough reasons to praise the Lord. What the Bible teaches us is that if you know how to give thanks, then God will know how to multiply your blessings. Don’t also forget that I am the Asiwaju of Remo Christians.
I asked that question because of some things that circulated around when you were governor, which were inconsistent with the life of a man of God; some people said you compelled them to take oath in the shrine and all of that.
They were all fabricated lies by political opponents and orchestrated by the media; that is all. They were tales by the moonlight, fictions, James Hardley Chase tales formulated by political opponents and largely amplified by the media.
When you were governor, particularly during your second term, controversy virtually became your second name…
No, quite on the contrary, principle was my second name; it wasn’t controversy. It was about being principled. There is just a minimum that I would not go beyond under any circumstance. That was what happened.
You were said to be a governor that did not brood argument or dissent.
That is the opposite of what I am. All of that was media orchestration. Quite on the contrary, I remain a democrat; quite on the contrary, what I enjoy most is if people can come, sit with me and argue; I always respect superior argument and fall in line. So, that is precisely the opposite of who I am.
Would you say that you were probably misunderstood then?
Deliberately misunderstood; all what happened then was what I call deliberate falsehood, formulated by political opponents and orchestrated by the media. I have described it correctly and I am not joking: Tales by the moonlight, fiction by James Hardley Chase. That is how I think I can describe what happened. It was the exact opposite of who I am and I cannot be any other thing. My father was a clergy man and he didn’t run into it by accident. He started it as a teenager and he remained like that until he passed on in 2011. I was a Scripture Union travelling secretary, as a secondary school pupil. Rascally students called us SU derisively then. At the secondary school level, I was the Chaplain in the school chapel; I was the School Organist. So, where would I begin to be all those things I was accused of? When would I start to be the son of Lucifer?
When you were in government, you were demonised so much that many people fear and shiver at the mention of your name. Now that you are out of government, how do you feel, knowing that most of those things said about you were propaganda?
I have always known that all those things said about me were not true, but when you are in office, you get all kinds of advice. In this case, I had two schools of thought. One school advised that I should not always respond to their criticism and propaganda, so as to enable me concentrate on delivering dividends of democracy. The other school of thought said no, you have to respond immediately to all such innuendos. Later, I situated my position with the first school of thought that a sitting governor must be abused and that you don’t necessarily have to respond to those abuses. Alas! we were wrong. But like I always stated, what shocked me was that people believed all those stories and not just ordinary people, but those we can call the elite of the society, the so-called educated people in the society that you expected would ask logical questions and raise issues also believed the tales. That was what I found out when I came out of government; you know the power of the media, people believe whatever they read. Regrettably, I have likened the Nigerian public to the Roman mob in the Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. As a governor, in a state like Ogun, I did my very best and no matter what anyone or group might have said or would say, in a way that has never been done, I, along with other people, transformed the state from a sleeping giant to what it is today.
You became a successful engineer at such a young age. If you were that successful, why did you dabble into politics?
Well, I also explained in one of my recent interviews that the fact of the case is that there is so much that’s required to be done and that there is a limit that can be done in the framework of being in the private sector. The challenge we have in our country is that public servants must use public service to accelerate development to make things happen. My going into service was not about me at all; if it was about me, like you said, I had no business there. But we believed we could seize the opportunity to turn around the society, which we did to a large extent and which I am sure even skeptics and critics in their quiet moments would admit. Let me tell you something that somebody told me recently; the person wasn’t from the state but he met one of my political colleagues from the state, that one then confessed to him and said, ‘Look, that guy (that is me), he did the right thing o, we were  just telling lies against him,’ a true confession. He said they were just telling lies against me because I was becoming too strong and popular. A lot of that happened during the time and to answer your question in a very straightforward manner, basically, public service for a few of us is not because there was something we were looking for but we wanted to change the society and if you want to change the society, it’s all about maintaining the minimum principles. And if you want to maintain the minimum principle, you would not, therefore, go and dine with the devil. If, for instance, that’s what people think politics is all about, no. So, when you insist that this is the minimum you will not go, people will then say you are difficult.
With the benefit of the hindsight now, did you regret the decision?
No regret, though my immediate family and I have been traumatised but the progress and repositioning of the state, which happened under our tenure is a consolation. I met Ogun State as a complete civil service state; it is now fairly one of the best industrial locations you can go in this country; that was exactly what I went to do there.  People were not going to Ogun State before; now, everybody is now going there. And while I was there, I had opportunity to put a few landmarks; I was able to prove that things can be done effortlessly without breaking your nose and running the place aground with debts with the way we did our projects; we woke up the civil service, we computerised the whole system. God enabled us despite the paucity of funds, we were able to build probably the best state secretariat any state can build in this country; we were able to build probably the best NYSC camp anybody can build in this country. With our little or no resources, we were able to build three brand new FIFA rated stadia; we were able to host the Junior World Cup, the Gateway Games; we turned around tourism with Olumo Rock development,  Everything we did opened our eyes to areas where hitherto nobody looked at and everybody is now talking about Ogun State.
Looking back, do you have any regret for any decision you took as governor?
None. To the extent that at any point in time when you take decision, you only take it within the limit of information available to you. So, I will say I have no regret for decisions I took with what I had at the my disposal at the time I took the decisions and I believe that I took the right decisions.
There is something in the Senate that is attractive to ex-governors. Suppose you find yourself there, what would you do?
There is no doubt that there is a whole lot of work to do at the level of the National Assembly. Some of the challenges we have spoken about require laws and regulations to support the polity. For instance, the issue of collapsed building, which has continued to kill people, we need laws; the laws that are there are not stringent enough.
There is a whole lot that can be done within the framework of the National Assembly to improve the polity. Construction is a total process. I remember I constructed this building virtually by myself some twenty years ago.
What has usually resulted into collapse of building is because the various agencies that have responsibilities have not also done their job and because of our penchant for shortcuts. You don’t build a building like this without an architect and a structural engineer, who will specify, clearly based on design, the amount of steel and concrete that will be required, any building at all. And finally, you need to ensure that the right materials are purchased.
What are your happiest and saddest in life?
There were so many happy days for me in life and there were quite a few sad ones too. As a governor, looking back on a daily basis, I regard the day we opened the Gateway Games in 2006, as one my happiest days because our dream to use the Gateway Games to open the state was actualised on that day. Although we won the bid to host the games, we had no money to execute it, but we decided to run the biggest and most successful game in the history of the country, which we did successfully through private sector funding. On the closing date of the game where over 30,000 people participated, we rendered openly an account of the game and reported a profit, which was a turning point in the history of the state and unprecedented in the history of the country. I was a lucky governor for all those things to have happened during my tenure. On the other side, there are quite a number of days. For example, on the day of my 50th birthday, on my way to the church when someone gave me the current edition of the ‘’Insider Magazine” with the story that OGD, wife arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police. Thereafter, we sued them and the court awarded the sum of N5 million in our favour. Unfortunately, they could not even pay the money and started begging privately. Imagine the damage such a publication would have done to my image and that of my wife all over the world. We are still suffering the consequence of such rascality till today in the psyche of some people.
How would you advise President Muhammadu Buhari?
The president and the commander-in-chief by virtue of that position, has a lot of information and knows more than me and you. That is the first thing we must appreciate. I have seen a lot of people criticising and condemning him but don’t forget I have been in government before. Regrettably it is not all information that can be shared. You know that there is an unwritten rule that when you have left the service at a level, there are certain things you cannot make public for 10 years. Things that ordinarily could have absolved you of some of the things you have been accused of. But there are some unwritten rules that for 10 years, you must keep quiet because sometimes if you talk, you can jeopardise the peace and security of the land. The way I am looking at it is this, yes, we expect the president to do a number of things and we think he is not moving as fast as we expect because we are in a hurry, that is quite understood. But we must also appreciate the fact that a President Buhari, who has been a head of state before, he is not new to Nigeria and Nigeria’s problems. He is sufficiently experienced and I think he is sufficiently networked to know what to do and I think what we should all do is just allow him to do his job. My advice to him is to continue with what he is doing but try very hard to carry as many people as possible along.
Chief Doja Adewolu, an elder from Ogun State once said that it was the present governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun that actually took you to former President Olusegun Obasanjo when you wanted to be governor and actually put down money for your political take off.
Well, these are some of the things I would not want to talk about, but to put the records right, I think you should tell Chief Adewolu that he probably had forgotten that I attended the same school with Chief Obasanjo; we both attended the Baptist Boys High School and to that extent, Chief Obasanjo is somebody I had known as a young man and if I needed anybody to take me to him, it wouldn’t definitely be Governor Amosun now or Mr. Ibikunle Amosun then. That is part of the misinformation that I have been talking about. Quite on the contrary, people should not forget that while I was running for governorship, Amosun ran for senate under my political machinery. If you are talking about Amosun providing money, I think Chief Adewolu,  a most respected elder, who supported me in 2003 was misinformed.  Fact of the case is that I don’t owe Ibikunle Amosun a dime and I challenge anyone with a contrary position to make such evidence public. Quite on the contrary, I ran a statewide campaign between 2001 and 2003 and there is no political office holder in 2003 in Ogun State, who did not benefit directly or indirectly from that wholesome campaign that God used me to lead, including the current governor.
Can you look at the state of the nation holistically; the issue of fuel, power, and the issue of Fulani herdsmen which has become a major crisis and probably threatens the corporate existence of Nigeria.
My starting point is that my consolation that we must have as a people is that there is a hand of God in this country called Nigeria because every time and anytime people think it will collapse, it usually comes out stronger; something usually happens and hope is usually restored. There are many few past instances to allude to this statement. Even if you don’t go far, the First Republic, when there was despondency in the land, and all of a sudden there was a change of government and later Nigeria embarked on reconstruction and others. The June 12 crisis, where many people thought all was finished for the country, but somehow, we wriggled out of it and thereafter we have democracy which is about 18 years now of non- stop democracy; so we are growing. I think that most Nigerians believe that the process of growth is rather slow, because they are better educated and enlightened and their expectations are higher than before. I appeal to Nigerians not to get unnecessarily agitated,because we will soon tell a good story and sing Halleluyah. The Fulani herdsmen is not new, we had Maitasine, Boko Haram and I just hope that the Fulani herdsmen will also become a history in  no distant future.
What is the future of Nigeria?
Nigeria has great hope. There are few  current socio-economic and political challenges, no doubt, but I am very sure,  she  will surmount it in the nearest future.  Nigeria will not go down; the current challenges notwithstanding are mind boggling, but by the grace of God, we shall over come it. However, I am a bit worried with the issue of Fulani herdsmen which is currently ravaging parts of the country. When we were dealing with the issue of Boko Haram, it was not an ethnic or religious thing as they commit their dastardly act of burning churches as well as  mosques  probably in equal measures. The country can deal with that and she is dealing with that. But these issues of Fulani herdsmen challenge is a bigger challenge and I am praying that the president quickly nip it in the bud because of its ethnic dimension which does not appear well for Nigeria. As someone who fought for the unity of Nigeria, risked his life to keep Nigeria one which was a task that he did, President Buhari must also ensure that the activities of the Fulani herdsmen is stopped with all the power and machineries of government within his disposal.
What’s your opinion about the moves to reposition your party, the PDP for future challenges as well as the issue of zoning and its chairmanship?
It is my fervent prayers that PDP as a party gets its acts together and gets repositioned for the betterment of Nigeria and her people. I don’t see anything wrong in anyone aspiring to occupy any position in the party.  The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, at least guarantees that as well as the PDP’s  constitution. As for the personality of our acting chairman, Alhaji Sheriff, as much as I know him, he is hardworking, a go-getter, quite energetic and a strongman, but that has nothing to do with where the chairman of the party comes from because if people say the chairman should come from a particular zone, there is nothing bad about it; after all our constitution provides for that. But facts of the case is that one is not particularly happy with ongoing events in the party both at the national and the local level, However, the need to begin to move is not compelling, that does not mean I can’t or I may not move. Why do we play politics? I think I have played my part, what’s important for me now is to motivate those upcoming youths.
Today, it does not matter which party one belongs, they come to me even though they know I am still in PDP. Even though technically I am still in PDP, I have promoted myself to the status of an elder statesman and it has to be like that.  On the account of interaction, works, people and I am happy that people across party lines recognize that. But there is no doubt that I remain completely dissatisfied with the PDP both at the national and local levels which has become a shadow of itself.  This is not the PDP that I joined when I did. I am hoping that the party will get its acts together, failing which one may look for another political option.