Former Secretary to the Oyo State Government and a governorship aspirant on the platform of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Chief Ayodele Adigun, has revealed that he has so many reasons for dumping former governor Rashidi Ladoja.
Adigun, who Ladoja’s former party- Accord for APC, said he observed that what obtained in Accord is same to what he experienced in APC.
Adigun, who hails from Ibadan North East local government, spoke in a recent interview.
Speaking on where the APC got it wrong in the state, Adigun, who was once a permanent secretary in the Oyo State Civil Servive, explained that “the problem is fundamental. It is always very dangerous to make the leader of government the leader of the party. When you have immense power, you tend to misuse it. In the past, the leader of the party was different from the leader of government. It is dangerous to concentrate too much power in the hands of the leader or the governor by making him the leader of the party. When you do, they don’t listen to leaders of the party because they have the control of government. That accounts for the breakup of many political parties in Nigeria.”
He continued: “In Oyo State, we are in July but the workers were last paid in April. These are the lucky ones. The staff of the College of Agriculture in Igbo Ora said that they had not been paid for 25months. How do you want them to survive? There is poverty all over the place. Some pensioners have not been paid gratuity since 2011. Primary school teachers have taken government to court for owing them. This is a sad commentary on the part of government.”
On why he opted for the newly formed ADC to contest the 2019 election, he explained that “In every evil you find a streak of good. APC does not have solution to Nigeria’s problems. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was magnanimous enough to call our attention to the rot in the country. He was able to call our attention to the inactivity of the government of the day. Instead of commending him, they begin to call him names. I think we should salute him for this and for midwiving a political organisation. Obasanjo is not a member of ADC though.
“My government will not be a lazy one that waits for stipend from Abuja to perform. When people say that they want to run, most of them don’t know what they are saying because they concentrate on expenditure, saying ‘I will pay salary, build bridges’. It shows that they don’t know the nitty-gritty of government. You cannot talk of expenditure without talking about how you generate revenue. All governments are local. The problem with Oyo State is dearth of intellectual capacity in government to fathom new ways of getting revenue.
“When I go out every day, I see Oyo State government wasting money. There is literally money on the streets of Ibadan, not to talk of the entire state. I have 15 new ways of generating revenue for the state. With my experience in the civil service and government, it is possible to generate N20bn on a monthly basis in the state. How I will do that will be a subject for another day. As an insider before, I know what can work. You require requisite public service experience before you can handle governance. You can be a successful bank or private sector manager, but to handle the public sector is another ballgame. Any state government that waits for Abuja to pay salaries must be indolent. It is because they cannot think outside the box.”
On agitation for power shift from Ibadan where he comes from, Adigun disclosed that “Politics is a game of number. Ibadan has about 60per cent of the votes in the state. If you go to Kogi State, if not by default, nobody can become governor in the state if not from Kogi East because they have the voting population. By the way, I have a very cosmopolitan approach to the issue of governance. It is not possible to concentrate development only on Ibadan. To do serious mechanised agriculture, you have to go to Oke-Ogun or other rural parts of the state. Once you do such things and people discover that farming is lucrative, they will migrate to rural communities to farm. This will help to reverse population drift.”
