Former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olabode George, speaks with BOLA BADMUS on the dispute between the Lagos State governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu and the leadership of the State House of Assembly which recently resulted in the rejection of some Commissioner- nominees by the House.
There is this crisis between the legislative arm and the Lagos State governor over the Commissioner-nominees list. Last week, the Lagos State House of Assembly approved just 22 out of the 39 nominees submitted to it by the governor, rejecting 17 others, sir, what is your view on this?
As the opposition party, we are still waiting for the court to decide but morning shows the day, people say. It shows you that there is a big crack in their midst because how can the same leadership of a party, the same party, members of the same party in the Assembly cannot agree, and they had to disgrace themselves publicly? It shows you that what we said about this party, APC, is that they are just there not minding the business for which they were elected but for their own self- aggrandisement.
The governor is the head of the party in Lagos, where are elders of the party in Lagos? These people (House members) emerged through a process. They are not there on their own, it’s not a private enterprise. Can you imagine an organization where the board takes a decision on something and one managing director would decide to head in another direction? He would be fired. Something is not adding up.
I don’t know all these people, but we saw their performance, some of them were commissioners before. Well, I, as an elder, I should see it in a bigger picture because my concern is my state, my state should be stable, my state should be healthy, my state should address the issue of unemployment for the youth, lack of proper education, lack of public health for the generality of the people and the pain inflicted on the masses by the policies of the national government affecting our people here. Who is secure now in Lagos? When you are going, you are quite watchful, whether you are a poor man or you are a rich man, or an indigent person, you are not secure, you are not happy because it is only when your neighbour is happy that you can be happy.
You know, no matter how healthy or how wealthy you are, if your neighbour is not healthy and he is not happy, how do you manage it? So, that is one bit of it that I saw that they need to go and readdress themselves to. Our party would not behave like that. It is a shame.
Then the most disgusting part of it which I must address: what got me totally angry, ehn, was the fact that, two days before, one professor, I don’t know whether he is still serving, or he has retired, led a league of Muslims to go and protest that on the list, the number of Christians was higher than that of Muslims. I said what! I don’t know where that man comes from. In Lagos, there is no family that you won’t find the three religions, Christianity, Islam, and the traditionalist, in the same family.
My own elder sister is an Alhaja, am I going to disown her because she is a Muslim? When she goes to church, she is seen like everybody else. When I go to any Muslim friend, I have a lot of Muslim friends (We have been friends since we were kids), we don’t talk about your religion. Your religion is personal to you and you take the tenents they teach you to bring it out to be the centre of relationship with your other fellow human beings.
And look at the Holy Bible, the father of Ismael, Ismael is the head like the no1 Muslim, who is the father of Ismael? Is it not Abraham? Who is the father of Isaac? Abraham. So what is the fight about? And who decided that you have to be a Muslim when you were born? Who decided you have to be a Christian when you were born? And the day you die, you die, you go and meet your Creator there. We don’t talk about religion here, and they (APC) should be very careful because I would move like hell to make sure this madness is stopped, we don’t need it.
Look for people who are competent, professional people that can dispense service to the people. What is the essence of being in government? You are telling the people that you will go and utilize the resources of the land for the benefit of the people. So if that professor and his group go to the market to buy something there, would they say you have to be a Muslim or a Christian before I buy from you? That is stupid.
From your own perspective, do you think there are other reasons that could have led to the non-approval of the remaining 17 commissioner- nominees?
That’s why I said the centre is not holding. They all emerged from this particular political party called APC and we are telling the people, can you watch them now, can you see? If they cannot hold themselves together, how can we trust them to hold the generality of the people in Lagos State for peace? How?
To some people, it appears that maybe there was no consultation between the governor and the lawmakers before the names were submitted.
I don’t know, I don’t belong to their party. If it is my party now, I can’t see how a decision like that would happen without the proper structure and discussion because it is not a private company, it’s not a private enterprise. It’s a collective responsibility, everybody must be involved. Maybe, he made the mistake by just sitting down in his room as if it’s Sanwoolu’s private company and listed the people without consultation and maybe he consulted them and they still wanted to fight him. I don’t know, it’s not my party. It’s a total shambolic behaviour, it’s disgraceful, it has never happened before, why is it happening now? People are tired of them, we have told them. This mess that came out of Lagos State can never happen in our own party. It’s a disgrace.
What meaning do you read to Obasa’s statement that the governor is not senior to him and that they are colleagues and that nobody can dictate to him?
Okay, can he dictate? If he is saying the governor cannot dictate, okay, can he also dictate? I just tell you, if he made that comment, it shows you something. The Yoruba people have a saying, ‘ti ko ba nii idi, obirin kii je kumolu.’ There are certain underlining issues that are coming to unfold. Governor is not senior to me? But he is the Executive Governor, and you are the head of the legislative arm, you must work in concert to produce a serviceable good. And they are not even six months into the administration, they are undoing themselves.
And can we also say this thing is happening in Lagos State for the first time because the overall leader of the party, President Bola Tinubu, has now moved to Abuja?
When you look at it that way, that’s a shame. A political party is not a private enterprise. It’s owned by every member of that party, every member has a stake there. There is no personalization of a political party. The moment they personalize it, then it’s no longer a democratically established political party. The government of the people for the people by the people, the people own that. You know, maybe the system we are running is a little bit different from what they do in South Africa.
How?
In South Africa, the individuals don’t contest, it is the party that you would go and vote for. So at the end of the election, they would collate all the numbers of votes for party A, party B, party C. They would now say okay, party A won the election, party B got this total votes and also party C. Then the hierarchy of the party that won the election would now go, sit down with other members and the stalwarts, and say who should we now send to be president. You understand? Who should we now send as vice president? There is no poster or banner of individual candidates on the streets for elections. It is those of the parties. That’s a major difference between our own system and theirs over there.
Here, individuals will go for primaries, and we would be fighting ourselves, no. In South Africa, the party that won actually presents who would be the president, vice-president, the speaker, and who would be this, who would be that? The party does that.
So when you start to misbehave, the party has the stick to withdraw you, withdraw your nomination, and put somebody else there, but not in our own. In their system, this kind of thing cannot happen, you understand. It is the party who would say okay, we have the majority in the House and say okay, you be the speaker and you be the deputy speaker. And when you don’t fall in line with the dictate and the dictum of the party, the party has the power to show you the way out.
If you are going to assess the government at the centre, how would you rate it?
I have advised severally that this journey is not a day journey. As an engineer, let me put it this way, technically, there are 24 hours in a day, and we have four years uhnn, and there are 365 days in a year, multiply 24 hours by 365 and by 4. See the number of hours the president would sit in office, it’s a long haul, we are just starting.
The initial mistakes made, we have spoken on them. I wouldn’t hide myself. Teach me how to fish, rather than be giving me fish to eat. The first mistake made was the N5bn given to every state as paliatives. To do what? What is the population of Lagos? About 22million, we got N5bn. Bayelsa is less than 2million in population, it got N5bn. Kano is also a heavily populated state, it got N5bn. Jigawa, next door neighbour, it got also N5bn. Is that justifiable?
Kwara also got N5bn, what is the population of Kwara? You remember, there was something that I saw when they were giving them rice and just one ‘mudu’ to one family, would you be giving that N5bn everyday? The mess in the financial sector is shambolic, heart wrentching, I feel absolutely mortified, beyond words that that happened. Where is our reserve? If you don’t have enough reserve, how do you support your currency? What is going on? Those leakages, is it true about this oil subsidy scam? What are the facts behind this story? When you listen to some stories, I am not an expert there, but I want to be educated. Story upon story, about lies, about lies, we don’t even know who is telling the truth. Who were those who benefitted from forex mismanagement, who? dollar was going at different rates to different people, depending on your link, that’s what we were told. Let’s know the truth, it’s not a private company, that money is owned by Nigerians, tell us what the hell is going on, don’t patch, patch so that we would not repeat the mistakes of the past, we are drifting badly. And we have gotten to a stage where you can’t say na you alone can fix it, no!
But the government has said that Nigerians should exercise patience.
Nigerians should exercise patience and you are seeing the waste that is going on, you see the lackluster effects on the people. You and I live commonly in the public. You see the crowd here, I know how many people I attend to. They would come here, they would say Baba, I can’t pay my children’s school fees; Baba, I cannot eat; you see how people were jumping into the lagoon, to commit suicide. About three days ago, we were going on the street, one woman jumped in front of moving cars, she was waiting for somebody to hit, kill her. That is the situation of things.
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