Well, I think without attempting to do an analysis of all the parties you have mentioned, we know the collateral damage that APM has. They used to be PDP and APM or PDP-APM as they call themselves. And so, they are also a new party and are trying to establish themselves even though they were formed by the current sitting governor of the state, who will be completing his two terms in 2027 and is seeking his third term through another proxy. We know that is not a thing that Oyo State people look kindly at. The coalition that brought him in 2019 was to end a potential third term of an incumbent at that time as well, which was Governor Ajimobi’s tenure when he endorsed a candidate for his party the APC. The other party mentioned is the APC which seems like the ruling party at the federal level, trying to bring in their own candidate. It will be their attempt to return to power after the Governor Ajimobi-led administration has gone away. But we all know the internal fractures that they have. The internal fractures are along many lines of the titans within the party who feel disenfranchised. And the ADC you mentioned is a very newborn party as well, just like APM. But SDP is the oldest political party in Nigeria as we speak. They are not new and are well known to everybody. In fact, they are so old that almost all the current actors had their political teeth cut in SDP. The current president of Nigeria, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was a senator as an SDP senator. The current Olubadan of Ibadanland, who I respectfully refer to as Kabiyesi Rashidi Ladoja, was also an SDP Senator. Our current incumbent who has now formed APM, also when he tried to start in PDP and was not given a chance, contested in SDP. So, one of our most successful governors in Oyo State, Kolapo Ishola, also came from SDP. So, we all know SDP very well and we know how the previous actors have acted. But the rebirth of the party has ensured that worthwhile people have started to join. And people like us have been given an opportunity to join the rebrand and the push. So, our aim now is not only to go on with reforming and leading Oyo State, but also to contribute to national discourse and push Nigeria forward in a progressive way. So, we like to say SDP is the home of true progressives. As I listed previously, everybody cut their teeth in SDP.
You said that the APM is a new party but it’s an old wine in a new bottle. And it’s been a party whose governor has been in the saddle for seven years now, going to eight years. And so, they seem to have this incumbency factor. Will it not count against the other parties, including your SDP?
Well, there’s a potential to think like that. But the incumbency is actually more an albatross than something that counts for them. Because we know that Oyo State people are very intelligent and they are very dynamic. And they are also very progressive in the sense that they do not want someone to perpetuate themselves and continue in perpetuity to lead them, especially when the leadership seems fraught with a lot of ill-advised decisions and directions that the state should not be going. And there are many projects that we can begin to analyse to show that the people are already disenfranchised and dissatisfied. So, the incumbency is more of an albatross, because I struggle to see how APM can defend the last seven years or eight years of the current governor successfully.
Well, this is one governor they say has performed very well. The argument of APM is that he has transformed Oyo State from the rustic city or state that it used to be. Is that not going to count for achievements for him?
Well, they count for something. I don’t know whether we would call them achievements. Because when we start to inspect them one after the other, we have to ask, achievements at what cost and in what directions? Are those priorities placed right or misplaced? Now, if we start to look at the things they point to as achievements, we may begin to ask further probing questions – at what cost? Oyo State debt profile right now is one of the highest in the entire South-West. So, what have they been spent on? You mentioned the Circular Road. I don’t know how many people ply it today despite all the money that has been put into it. It has not being commissioned. So, it’s not going to be in the life of this administration. Is that an achievement or a project destination? We are building bridges to nowhere, not used by anybody for any commercial activity and without a definite opening time in the frame, especially in the frame of this administration. We are talking about the airport. Yes. The airport has gulped several hundreds of billions, if they will be truthful. They’ve revised the budget upward multiple times, upwards. They said N52 billion initially but it’s in excess of 100 billion now, if they will be truthful, that they’ve committed to it. We all know that airports do not add any commercial or economic value to a state without a plan. Is it meant to be a cargo airport or a transit airport for passengers? They’re not clear on that, yet they’ve ploughed all these monies in.
You mentioned all these other inner roads and connecting roads. At what cost? Some of these inner roads have created more problems than solutions. If you look at the Bodija/Isopako Road, they closed a whole important single road that leads into an international plank market from February to July. And when it was commissioned and opened, it wasn’t still even fully done or motorable. Yet it had crippled commerce for more than six months. The other inner roads were existing roads that were not necessarily improved, redesigned, reimagined, but only resurfaced.
In my last interview at the Declaration of Intent, I said we needed to get away from pedestrian thinking and start to go into system-based governance. Where we put things in place, underpinning them with maintenance, underpinning them with support, underpinning them with feedback that makes it long-lasting and sustainable. All of these, I dare say, has not been part of the imagination of this current administration. Would I call this success? I may call it partial success. Because the road is currently resurfaced.
So, what will you be doing differently if you are elected governor of the state? How many-point agenda are we looking at?
We have a seven-point agenda, actually. And central to the entire agenda is bringing governance closest to the people through the local governments. We believe that it is only the local government that can address the plethora of localised problems that are unique to certain and specific areas. For example, the agrarian Oke-Ogun can never have the same problem as a cosmopolitan Ibadan city. So, if we don’t understand their problems, we cannot apply the same solution to everybody. I believe that central to our theme is to turn local government into service centres that are able to pipe through the entire thrust of our administration to them. Once we have that backbone, every other thing can ride through the local government services. Education can ride through it. Health care delivery can ride through it. Support services for the agri-community can ride through it. Infrastructure development and real needs assessment can direct the infrastructure delivery that we are talking about. Youth empowerment, the kind of skill sets that are required in every local government, therefore, will be different.
How will you handle local government autonomy?
I think the incumbent governor has a complete misunderstanding of what local government autonomy means. I think he’s probably suffering from the fact that he would have to relinquish the wallet that belongs to the local government to them, rather than the actual administration of the local government. If we talk about coordination or delivery of services, a state government can coordinate, suggest to, and advise the local governments. I think what is proper is to allow the local government that level of fiscal autonomy, where they decide where their funds go, even if they are co-signed by the state.
I don’t think the state has the equipment to tell the local government what they need, what they should have, and what therefore should be approved for them. A local government chairman should be content with being a local government chairman, sometimes. And he should feel compelled and capable of aspiring to be a governor at some point, or even a president. They shouldn’t be lackeys or subordinates to a state governor. But with competent people at the helm of local governments, I dare say they are the closest to the people, who can deliver government services most to the people. So, it’s not lost on us that the governor may be ruining the wallet that is leaving his control. It’s why he holds that dim view of local governments.
As a socialist party, what will SDP do about free education?
In my last interview in Tribune, I spoke extensively about education, especially education in Oyo State. It breaks my heart to announce that Oyo State, during the times of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Bola Ige, it was one of the foremost educationally advanced states in the entirety of Nigeria. To now juxtapose that to the current position we are in, Oyo State has now become the most educationally backward state in the entire South West.
How did you get that data?
UNICEF printed it. They wrote a comprehensive report, The UNICEF report, that over 200,000 children are out of school in Oyo State. And as our foundation was active in that regard, we did not keep quiet. We approached the current governor of Oyo State with these statistics. The only retort he gave us was that, well, I’ve stopped children paying for NECO. But many pupils drop out from primary schools and junior secondary schools. They won’t even get to the point they can benefit of the generosity of 3,000 naira. Our view is that, first and foremost, the entire education needs to be looked at again, with the view to actually delivering the pedagogical kind of thinking, the Socratic way, where the knowledge imparted to children is now consequential knowledge, not just repetition and cramming where they do mental maths on the road, but it’s applied to nothing. We believe that skills that children need now are not just the ability to read and write. It is no longer sufficient. The ability to apply it to our environment is more important than being able to solve Pythagoras’ theorem.
What about sports developments?
Sports is a massive industry worldwide. Everybody knows that a club without a feeder system is just a training ground. Until we create that sort of system that allows the children’s ability to be harnessed from primary school to secondary school to universities. It wasn’t only shooting stars we had in Ibadan. We had Exide Battery Boys also at one point in time, they had a football club and Leventis United. But many other football clubs had, at one time or the other, been in Ibadan and collapsed. Every country that excels in football builds industries and infrastructure around it. I would return Academicals back to the institutions and I will also return the Principal’s Cup, just like we want to reinstate the literary and debate societies. Extra-curriculars, athletics, that get our children back to competing, back to bringing out the best in them from the primary school level, so that we can see those that are truly gifted from a young age.
For example, if we look at Jamaica, it is not a very big country. But they produce the greatest athletes in the world. And they start from the primary schools to identify the people that are gifted and that are skilled, that have the kind of body structure to excel. And we all know that this is the cheapest form of productivity because what they use is their body and a pair of boots on their legs. So, it’s not a very expensive venture to go into, if only the state can look at it holistically like we intend to do.