My agenda for Oke Ogun —Fagbemi

Chief Ismail Fagbemi is a physicist and the treasurer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), South Africa chapter. He has lived for more than 15 years in the Diaspora and has returned home to represent his Iseyin, Itesiwaju, Iwajowa and Kajola constituency in the House of Representatives come 2019. He speaks with Abiodun Awolaja about his plan to revitalise agriculture in Oke-Ogun area and his motivation for venturing into politics. Excerpts:

As an aspirant for a seat in the House of Representatives, what programmes do you have for your people?

We intend to run our programme in three core areas of agricultural revolution value chain, educational support and youth and women empowerment. On the agricultural support programme, we are going to create an avenue whereby our people will be able to form themselves into cooperatives and let them own mechanised agricultural farm implements which they can use to plough their lands, till their land without using hoes and cutlasses. They will have easy access to this modernised farming equipment. We are bringing seedlings from South Africa that will assist them. For instance, I brought tomato seedlings that can fruit (yield) between 20 to 30,000 tonnes per acre, compared to the local seedlings that can only give you between five and 6000 tonnes per acre. If we are able to provide them with this type of seedling, they would be able to improve on their agricultural harvest. This will bring them prosperity and take them out of poverty. Then, we are going to integrate this with transportation services which they are also going to own, so that they can convey their produce from the farm to the market. My area, the whole of Oke Ogun, is agrarian and the constituency I want to represent is fully agrarian. We are going to set up a market in the central area which is most likely going to be the Iseyin area, then our people will be able to bring their produce to this central market and be able to make more money through exposure to buyers from other states. This transportation scheme will solve the problem of produce rotting in the farms. Also, we are going to encourage them to add value to their agricultural produce by setting up SMEs, small cottage factories that are going to add value to their produce. I will give an instance of Cote d’Ivoire that exported a total value of $500 million of cocoa in 2014 and one of its buyers, an American chocolate company, posted a profit of $10 billion the same year. This means that Cote d I’voire has actually lost $9.5 billion whereas it thought it had made $500 million. For our farmers producing yam, we are going to help them to process them into elubo, poundo yam, packaged and exported.

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Iseyin is known for aso oke weaving and we are going to create a platform for weavers in Iseyin to showcase their woven materials online. They will sell them and earn US dollars. The black soap sellers in Ipapo will also be able to sell it online and earn foreign exchange. Also, the ori sellers in Otu and Okaka will also be able to take advantage. So will our farmers in Iwajowa and Kajola. We will also look at the issue of educational support, paying for our students’ WASSCE and also organise tutorials. Education, we believe, is the bedrock of development. To get people out of poverty, you need to get them educated.  We are also going to provide cottage financial services for our women and build mini stadiums for the youths in all the four local governments. We believe that very soon, we will be able to have quality representation for Nigeria from the zone.

But why contest on an increasingly fractionalised APC platform?

APC is the most progressive party in Nigeria today. I had pitched my tent with the progressives since the time of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), Action Congress (AC) and Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), up to APC. I have never jumped ship and will never jump ship beause this is the ideology that I am operating with. I’m running on the platform of the APC because I believe in the ideology and the manifesto of the party, which is progressive. APC is a legacy party of ACN, CPC, a faction of APGA and PDP. I was a delegate from South Africa to the ACN convention in 2013 at Onikan Stadium in Lagos where we dissolved ACN, and at the Eagle Square in Abuja in 2014 where APC was finally birthed. The party is progressive and really sincere about the emancipation of our people from poverty. Those who joined our party and could not learn the ideals of the party of course could not find space and peace in the party, and so they left. Most of the people who left the party in the Senate have come back. Senator Soji Akanbi of Oyo South and Senator Shehu Sani and others are back in the party.

How much money are you bringing into this campaign, particularly as election in Nigeria is now “see and buy” as we saw in Ondo and Ekiti?

I agree with you that election is perceived to be a see and buy thing, but I make bold to tell you that you really need to connect with the electorate before you can even think of bribing them to vote for you. Most of the people who will vote for you will vote for you in any case and those who will not vote for you will not vote for you even if you give them N1 million. You mentioned the case of Ekiti: I was in Ekiti in 2014 during the build up to the election and as an observer during the election. The incumbent then could not connect adequately with the people, regardless of the money that was being used to buy votes. You can’t use money to buy all the votes. There are some people who will vote according to their conscience. So, we really need to sell our manifesto and connect with our people. And that is exactly what I have been doing. I have been connecting with my people right from the ward level to the local government level. I have been connecting with the opinion leaders, traditional rulers and traders and selling my programme to them. We have a laudable programme. We believe that if they can see and connect with our programmes and projects, they don’t really need to mortgage their future by getting immediate pecuniary benefits which would make them to suffer in the future.

What do you think stands you out among other aspirants?

You know, in the time past, we have not really had it good. We have had issues with the kind of representation that we’ve had. Coming from the background of a party man right from the time of the AD, and as the national treasurer of the party in the Diasora (South Africa chapter), I have had quite a number of years of political experience that I believe I can sell. Also,  having schooled in the UK and lived in South Africa, I believe that I have the requisite experience and exposure in order to serve our people genuinely, with passion to take them away from the poverty that pervades the constituency and bring them into prosperity. With the agenda that we have in agricultural revolution, educational support and youth/women empowerment and development, we will be able to get our people out of poverty. That is my main stand. I am very passionate about my people and very sincere.