Oshiomole Condems PDP Rigging In Edo State

Adams Oshiomole, Governor of Edo state and Former National President of Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has open up on politics in Edo State, PDP rigging in the state and how he ended god-fatherism in the State.

Governor Adams Oshiomole

In an interview with Leadership newspaper and other Nigerian journalists on the All Progressives congress (APC) campaign train shares some of the most unknown secrets of politics in Nigeria.

Read the full interview on from Leadership Newspaper below:

Some Nigerians believe that the South-South which is where you belong is a region in the hands of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Do you share that submission?
It depends on who you are speaking about. I am a Nigerian and I am well known. I am not in the PDP and I will never be in PDP. Edo is the heartbeat of the nation and we are in the South-South. How can you suggest to me that this is a PDP zone? It is not. PDP has never won any clean election in the South-South.

Often times, they had taken advantage of the terrain and if you do your analysis very well in the voting pattern, you will find that PDP has always lost elections in the cities and they turn in ghost votes from the creeks. 

But in Edo here you know we neutralized their rigging machine as far back as 2007 and since then, we have won every election in this state and in the last election that was held here on the 14th of July 2012, I won in every local government. It has never happened before, and even the godfather, I defeated him in his village. So, how can you suggest to me that South-South is a PDP zone? It is not. PDP has been an invasion force in the south but we are repelling them now.

 

Before now, Edo was seen as a state where godfatherism reigned supreme. But little is heard of it now. How did that happen?

Well, there is no magic. The truth is that, a lot of the personalities that the media celebrate, our media sometimes just take statements from the surface.
There are concepts that we use so freely without digging deep into them. For example when you say Mr. Fix, what does that mean in Nigeria political dictionary? What was it that he fixed? The media celebrate electoral fraud; pure and simple! A man loses election and someone has the capacity to manipulate the books using various state institutions to declare a winner a loser and declare a loser a winner and then they say he has fixed it. That is calling a spade by another name.

Those are the people that have the history of electoral fraud and they have to be so described because the ordinary meaning of “fix” is that something is in tatters, disorganised and somebody with special skills, knowhow or knowledge is able to make an order out of something that is disorganized.
But that is not what you refer to when you say Mr. Fix it. Someone wins primaries, as he is celebrating, the loser is announced as the winner and you say Mr. Fix has fixed it again. So, for me, those are the ways which the media inadvertently tend to celebrate electoral fraudsters who have defrauded the electorate   over the year. 

And in Edo state we have to organise. Don’t forget I am basically a worker and a worker mobilizes and I know from my union experience that the traditional ruling class don’t communicate with the people. They just talk at the people. They make assumptions about who the people are.
They look at the people condescendingly and all I needed to do was to do what I have always done in life, organising the people, speaking with the people, identifying their needs and reducing political discourse to a level that they can relate to the message and help them to understand that they are not spectators in a democracy.

The real beauty of democracy is that the people are the actually players, they are the drivers because with your voter card, you hire and fire. It is not like a football match where you might blame the coach if your team loses or you congratulate the coach if it is otherwise. In a real democracy, the role of the electorate is not just to clap. It is to determine the outcome both the beginning and the end of the process. 

So, that is what we needed to do and once we connect with the people, give them confidence, have a message they can connect with and you see that they vote on the bases of facts not on the distribution of maggi cubes and packets of salt and sugar at the eve of elections, steal billions of naira and bring a million naira and share to young ones; two thousand, five thousand to go and buy guns to shoot at the market without knowing who the bullet might hit. 

But does it not bother you that no one has been punished for perpetrating electoral fraud and what solutions can you proffer to this problem?
Well, for me you can’t take these issues in isolation. The culture of impunity; you can’t look at it selectively. There is a general culture of impunity in the country. Electoral offense is one of those offenses. It is not the only one. Even simple rules of traffic; a man exceeds the speed limit and in the process he kills someone and he goes home and sleeps. A man puts a vehicle on the road. The vehicle is not road worthy. 

In our laws, he is not supposed to use it for commercial purposes. But he puts it on the road, collects passengers and kills them two, three meters later and he goes home and sleeps. They are no liabilities for the owner, no liability for the driver and life just goes on. The relatives of the dead just go and organize a burial waiting for the next one. People steal so much money and everybody knows they are thieves. In Abuja, we hear of a level 12 officer, a Director stealing as much as 24 billion Naira. As we speak I am not sure where the guy is but I am sure where he is not. He is not in any prison. 

Too many things happen every day. Like I have had to remind young people going round these campaigns, I am not a lawyer but i am sufficiently knowledgeable about labour related issues and you will understand why. I know, for example, that it is unlawful to extort money from applicants in the name of employment. This is expressly stated in our labour statue, that you do not take money from the unemployed in pursuant of employment and it is moreso in the public service. To go into recruitment you need to be licensed as a labour employer.

Again you know even when you want to use a private consultancy for employment purposes, it is the employer, not the applicant that pays the fee to the consultant but here the poor unemployed Nigerian youths were defrauded and Nigeria got into the Guinness Book for conducting interviews for hundreds of thousands of applicants in a football stadium and of course many people died. 

I am not aware and none of you has reported that somebody has been jailed for that and even the minister was not removed. He was rewarded with national honours and you reported it and celebrated that the man is…is it CON or KPC or VCN? Whatever! If you look at every aspect of our national life, you can effortlessly see how things are decaying and the level of abuse of office, both in public office and private authorities.

Until we revisit the whole question of obedience, rule of law and a political leadership that has the will to enforce the rule of law, you can’t deploy ways, for example, to persecute electoral criminals if the general attitude to crime is that you rather cuddle it. You have heard somebody saying in Enugu that somebody who stole money that is not enough to buy a Peugeot ought to be excused. 

If you have that frame of mind, what are we gonna talk about? So, don’t think I want to really spend time trying to understand how I feel about excusing electoral fraud. I’ll rather talk about my general bitterness about the state of impunity in our country and that is why nothing seems to be working because there are no penalties for breaches.

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