Shortly after he hosted this year’s Nigeria Media Merit Awards at the Ikogosi Warm Water Spring Resort, Ikogosi-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Governor Kayode Fayemi spoke with reporters on the defection of five Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governors to the All Progressives Congress (APC), the defection of Hon. Opeyemi Bamidele from the APC to the Labour Party (LP) and his second term ambition. Assistant Editor ADEKUNLE YUSUF was there.
Do you really trust that the five PDP governors, who recently defected to the APC, are bringing something good to your party?
Political parties, by their very nature, always evolve. And in every political party, you have people who constitute a broad choice – some are left of center, some of right of center, you have the good, you have the bad and you have the ugly. What every political party aspires to everywhere that I know in a democratic dispensation is to have the dominance of the good and the dominance of the people who really adhere strictly to the vision of the party and can contribute positively to its development in order to attract the trust and earn the confidence of the populace. If you look at the five governors that have come to us, as broad as the ideological spectrum in Nigeria is, what really is it that I do here (in Ekiti State) or that Governor Fashola does in Lagos or that Governor RaufAregbesola does in Osunor any of our government that Governor RotimiAmaechi is not doing – free education, free health care, infrastructure development in Rivers State? So you could argue that although he was in the PDP, he was in the left of center of the PDP. If you take Governor Kwankwaso and look at his infrastructure development agenda or you look at his micro finance scheme, it is first of its kind in the country. Or you look at some of his focus on education, as I speak to you, Governor Kwankwaso has about one hundred people studying medicine outside the shores of the country – all sponsored by his government. Everybody who made a first class in Kano State gets an automatic scholarship to study abroad. This is the kind of thing you will associate with us because that is our mantra. Broadly speaking, in situations where ideologies blur, personalities become critical and the commitment to the people in their own agenda become central to the equation.And just as you have that in the PDP, even in the APC, we are not a monolith. We have people who are on the extreme right wing of our broad choice who may even pass for conservatives, just as you have people who are in the extreme radical bent of our politics. To answer your question, the five governors are now in our party. And the nature of our political processes is such that governors are not unknown quantities by virtue of office they occupy and the incumbency that is associated with it. They have what we politicians call structures.
Talking about these five governors, your party alleged recently that there are plans to declare their seats vacant and probably remove them from office.What is your own take on that?
If you were in the shoes of the leadership of the PDP, although they say good riddance to bad rubbish and that they won’t miss them and all those statements, they know what it means to be a governor.Governors are in control of paraphernalia of power in their states. The PDP will try everything within their powers to subvert that, but the question to ask is: what law are they going to hold on to in order to declare the seat of any governor vacant? A government or a party in power is deemed to be owned by all the citizens of the state once the person becomes the governor. Before you become the governor, you can say you are card-carrying member of any party and this voted for me and that did not vote for me. So it (removing these governors from office) is not going to happen. I don’t see it happening. Let look at our history again. How many people have been recalled in our National Assembly that has that provision that if you move from one party to another without evidence of a split in the party you are moving from, automatically you lose your seat?
For example, Hon. Bamidele Opeyemi recently defected from your party and joined the LabourParty where he wants to run for governor. Does your party have any plan to recall him or ask the National Assembly to declare his seat vacant?
Really, the case of Opeyemi is a case for his constituency. It is not really a party matter.
But your party can ask the National Assembly to declare his seat vacant because there is no faction in the party is defecting from…
That is not a matter we have given a serious consideration. I understand that he is saying that he is running in another party, but he is yet to formally inform his party that he has left the party. When he does that, there are two ways he has to do that to make it formal: it is not enough be rumoured that he is doing this or he is doing that. He has to formally notify the leadership of the House of Representatives that he has crossed to a purported party. He also needs to inform us that he is no longer a member of our party. When he does that, we will cross the bridge. And to the best of my knowledge, he has not done that.
Is it not a bad omen that a prominent member of your party (Opeyemi Bamidele) has chosen to run against you?
What is wrong with that?
At what point did you disagree with Opeyemi Bamidele?
You don’t need to disagree to be ambitious. Ambition does not necessarily require any reason; just an ambition. I have not had cause to disagree with anyone, not least Opeyemi. If Opeyemi wants to run for office for whatever reason, the endorsement is not tantamount to refusal to run or not to run. Has he approached anybody in the party that he wants to run? Has he approached his ward? Has he approached his local government party leadership? Has he approached his state party leadership?
Maybe, he feels he does not need to do that, since you have been endorsed by the powers that be in the party…
For goodness sake, recall our history.Adekunle Ajasin was endorsed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Chief Josiah Olawoyin was endorsed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the UPN. The party primary took place and C. O. Adebayo, who was not endorsed, won that primary against Josiah Olawoyin, a close pal of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He was publicly endorsed, but Chief Obafemi Awolowo said all the candidates of the party at the time should be allowed to run in the primary. In Ondo State, Omoboriowo ran against Chief Adekunle Ajasin in the primary and lost. That was why he left the party. In Kwara State, C. O. Adebayo ran against Olawoyin and won.
In essence, are you saying there is going to be governorship primary in Ekiti?
As far as our party is concerned, there is a process. If you choose to run for governorship on the pages of newspaper, that is your own prerogative. This is a party that has process. Everybody who belongs to this party is fully aware of what the constitution of this party says. I am in this state, at least, no fewer than thirty aspirants have gone to PDP secretariat in this state to formally notify the leadership of the party that they are in the gubernatorial race in their party. How do you declare gubernatorial ambition in newspapers and you do not inform your party that you want to run?And then, you claim you have been debarred from running and say there is no internal democracy. Yet all you have a problem with is what the leadership of the party –both at the state and national levels – said that by what they have seen and the feedback they have got from people in the state,they don’t want to change a winning team. They want the governor to run again but they never at any point debar anyone from running.
But, if the leadership of the party said they don’t want to change the winning team, it is a clear message that nobody should run against you at all?
No, no, no. I just gave you an example from the same progressive camp. C. O. had no chance in the air if you go by the parameters of the politics of Kwara at the time. He won the primary in Kwara.
Are you saying you could be beaten in a primary?
It is about internal democracy. It is about allowing the people to have a say; it is not about portraying that you have support, you need to test the support you claim to have. That is what I am saying. I am not saying I could be beaten and I am not saying I could not be beaten. I am saying it is a democracy and I am a passionate democrat. If you believe that you have the popularity you often claim in the press that you have, test it with the people. And there is a process to do that. That is what I am saying.
Why do you think you deserve a second term of office?
In very simple terms, you were in my inauguration and you were here before then. All anyone needs to do, at the risk of sounding arrogant and immodest, is to take the Roadmap to Ekiti Recovery, which is my campaign promise, and take my inaugural speech on October 16, 2010, and mark it paragraph by paragraph. What I said I was going to do for Ekiti people and what I have done in three years. If you want to mark me on what I have done and how I have done it, you can judge whether I have passed the test of leadership or not.
Are you jittery anything could go wrong at all?
Am I am jittery? Not with the people of Ekiti.
What with the quality of candidates that may be coming out from other parties?
The quality of candidates will enhance our democracy, it will not diminish it. I really want a lot of good candidates to come up. But don’t forget that I ran for primary in this party in 2006 against some popular names you can imagine in Ekiti politics and I won when I was nobody. In fact, I was not known. I was an unknown quantity and a lot of people said I was a foreign candidate who just appeared from nowhere and came to run in the state. Compare that to now that I am seen across the length and breadth of this state as a promise keeper; a man whose word is his bond. He said he was going to do social security that has never been done anywhere in this country and he did it. He said he is going to do free education in a qualitative manner and he did. And the result in secondary school jumped from twenty percent pass rate to seventy percent pass rate. A man who said he was going to do free health care and he has done it.That’s what I want to be judged on. Of course, there are people who will want to judge me on other parameters. There are people who will say we don’t see him at parties, that we don’t see him eat booli by the road side, that he is not a populist noisemaker and he does not share money and that their personal infrastructure has been addressed, even though he is building Ikogosi and building roads and fixing schools and hospitals all over the state. He does not throw money at people, and in politics money is the oil of politics. But I will say that I share money. It is just that I have a different philosophy of sharing. When I give social security, the N5,000 old people collect at the end of every month is sharing. It is institutional sharing backed by law. It is not N200 thrown at people on the street that diminishes their self-esteem and dignity. I don’t share money as baba rere, baba ke, owomeji fun baba. I don’t come from that school of politics, and I am not apologetic about that. But it is a marketplace of ideas. Those who come from that line of politics will also come to the people. They had an opportunity and for seven and a half years, they were in this state. People knew what they did. It was one week one trouble. It was six governors in seven and a half years. So, why is it that we don’t deserve stability that others have had, especially where you have evidence that nobody has done what this governor has done in this state?
So, based on your work in the three years, are you confident of victory, if an election is held today?
Of course, yes. You know Ekiti people are very discerning. They are very educated and fastidious. It is difficult to please our people and I know. But once they discover the sincerity of purpose and they see that what you say is what you do, that you walk your talk, our people are generally passionate about that. And that is why we were more passionate about Awolowo here than in Ijebu. If you check the history, we were. It is because there is a connection. I was discussing what happened in Anambra with a couple of my friends and I said it cannot happen in Ekiti. In Anambra, you have non-governmental organizations, people who have more money than the government of Anambra, people who will run Governor Peter Obi out of the state because their own convoy is twenty times longer than the governor’s convoy.Here we all are very interested in governance and who governs. That is why you cannot take our people for granted. It was not fun for me to travel in the last one month to 131 communities as I do every November. In every single community that I went, people have their criticisms, they have their praises for government; they have what they will like me to do. I commissioned projects in 85 of those communities. So there is a direct connection because some of the projects are projects from our community government. The town unions run them – all we just do is to give them money because they decided on the projects themselves. There is no community you get to in Ekiti that people will not tell you that the government has just done this or that or that they gave us money to do this. And that is the greatest challenge anybody who is going to run against me in this state will have. That is why they resort to what they said I don’t do – the personal infrastructure that I don’t take care of. We will cross that bridge when we get there. We will define personal infrastructure the way we should.
