PDP’ll win in all elections, if —Olajide, PDP House of Reps candidate

The PDP governorship candidate, Mr Seyi Makinde, is currently on tour of local governments across the state, telling people his plans and programmes. As a candidate, what do you think are the chances of your party in the poll?

As you have said, we have been campaigning from local government to local government, assuring our people that they will be in better hands with the PDP. Today, I can tell you that the acceptability of the PDP has increased state-wide such that the voters are merely waiting for the Election Day to vote for us. Now, we are no longer worried about people voting for us; what we are worried about is the INEC conducting a free and fair election, because we are hearing a lot of things that INEC is almost becoming an arm of the Buhari government. That must stop, because what it means is that when the PDP was in government; if it had behaved this way, Buhari would not have been president But if they take it to a point that they will use the federal might to suppress the will of the people, it will not fly, because you cannot govern people who don’t like you.

We want the APC to understand that free and fair election is not something that they will dispense as a favour to us; it is something that must be done and I know that if the election is conducted in a free and fair manner, the PDP will win the elections at all levels.

You are aspiring to represent the most cosmopolitan federal constituency of Oyo State, Ibadan North-West/Ibadan South-West Federal Constituency, how do you think you can add value to the constituency?

Let me say this first; before you can add value, you have to understand the challenges. The first challenge being faced by our people in Ibadan North-West/South-West Federal Constituency is that of unemployment. You also have to understand the terrain of the constituency; a majority of all the people of Ibadan have their family houses in the constituency. So, it is equally important that you understand the challenges of each of the families, because families migrated from different places to settle in Ibadan. It is a common feature for these families to have houses in the constituency and then have farms. So, having said all these, I can tell you that I understand what we need to do to create employment. Farming is one of them and it is something we are no longer talking about in Ibadan North-West/South-West and we have to resuscitate that.

• Being APC member doesn‘t protect you from prosecution for corruption —Oyegun

Secondly, we have to help all the businesses that are in the constituency to grow so that they can create employment for our children and our youths. We also understand what we have to do in the area of the empowerment of our women. A majority of them have resorted to taking unhealthy loans from sharks such that their businesses can never thrive. So, we have plans to help them with interest-free loans, because of they do not bother about interests, it will encourage their businesses to grow, as they will not be bogged down by unhealthy facilities.

In a nutshell, I understand the challenges of our people in the constituency and I can tell you that I will add value by improving the quality of life of our people.

You have highlighted some of the challenges, how are you planning to tackle them in specific terms?

Let us talk about helping businesses to thrive; for example, I had a meeting with a few MDs in the Oluyole Industrial Park and a majority of them, if you look at the facilities they are using to run the businesses, some of them are paying as high as 35 per cent interest rates on the facilities. Don’t look at these businesses or the statuses of their owners, some of them run on loan facilities. If you look at 35 per cent of N1 billion, that is N350 million; that is a lot of money and if you are paying that kind of money just to use N1 billion, what kind of profit will you make? Unless you are making 100 per cent profit, your business is not going anywhere. But a majority of businesses need these facilities and they will take it, so it is like they co-own their businesses with the banks.

So, helping these people access grants from the Federal Government will give them a new lease and I am sure that our president-to-be, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has a lot of economic programmes that the businesses can take advantage of. We are going to sit down with them and help them; I will fight for it to make sure that most of these businesses get these grants, which if they do, their businesses will grow. If they get funds, they will be able to grow their businesses and create employments.

The other side of this is the encouragement of small scale businesses. We will focus on creating small scale businesses, because they are the anchor points and kernels of the economy. So, we will help people start small businesses where they can hire one or two people; if you hire one or two people and there are 1,000 small businesses like that, you will find out that their capacity to absorb labour will be more than that of the big businesses. So, we will use the economy of scale to tackle the issue of unemployment and grow businesses in this federal constituency. We know that with God behind us, we can achieve these quickly.

You are contesting against someone who has been in the House of Representatives for eight years and it is possible that you have taken a stock of his achievements; will you say he has let the people down?

I won’t sit here and denigrate or promote anyone; I will allow the people to be the judge. But I know that in the last eight years, all they can point to are just boreholes and this is something that even I, in my private capacity, have been building for our people. As I have said, I will let people be the judge while I focus on what I intend to do: the key things are employments for our youths; empowerment for our women and after-school programmes for our children in order to take care of their educational needs.

We will also focus on mental health; this something I am passionate about, because I understand that without mental health, the economy cannot flourish, education cannot go anywhere and people cannot be productive without it. We will focus on it.

So, we will focus on what we want to do as opposed to what someone failed to do; he is going around campaigning and I am going about campaigning. I am not worried that he is a two-term member of the House; that is the more reason he has to go, because he has not done much for our people. The programmes that I have for our people, they are going to see them.