Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s principal private secretary, Barr. Seyi Adisa, who is the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for AFIJIO state constituency seat in the forthcoming election has revealed that his boss was surprised when he first discussed his ambition with him.
According to the 34-year old Awe-born politician, “When I entered politics, I said I was coming to learn because I foresaw the calling that I will be in government. Interestingly, when I told the governor, he was very surprised because like you said, he sees me as a gentle administrator. He was surprised, but also very pleased.
“He didn’t put me into it, I actually pushed my agenda to his knowledge asking if he was okay with it. Considering loyalty, one needs to ask what one’s boss thinks. As soon as I told him, he was at ease and he will continue to be supportive. Being there, he is always asking for progress report. It wasn’t his idea; it was my agenda that he supported.”
Speaking on why he is contesting legislative and not executive position, he said that “They all work hand in hand. It is true that as a legislator you make laws, but some of the laws we will make is to empower youths. We have in mind things like Employment Trust Fund and laws that will generally help Small and Medium Scale Enterprises thrive, create an enabling environment for them. Those are the kind of laws I want to pursue so that we can reduce unemployment among the youths. In addition to the laws we make, we also have constituency projects and I believe some of these projects will be geared towards the agenda.
“Also, I talked about participatory governance, such that you don’t have to wait for the executive to take action. We have to synergise using our own experience, helping local government chairmen. We also have a network of friends, the USAID, the DFID and other international agencies that are available if you know how to work with them.
He also spoke on his agenda for AFIJIO, a largely agrarian constituency.
“It is a large agrarian constituency and we have large unemployment. What I intend to do is extend the agriculture value chain. Currently, what we have is just production, we need to try and attract internationals and other businesses to come into Afijio that are in that value chain. It could be in the processing value chain, packaging, distribution, supply value chain.
“Once those companies come in and set up industries, we will get people employed as youth unemployment is a major issue for us. So, we want to use agric, which is our strength, to solve the problem. We also want to empower youths to start small businesses on that agrarian line. We want our jobs to match our strengths. We want to look at how youths could come together and form industries.
“For example, in Awe, we have a lot of chicken; it is not enough to sell the chicken live, we want to see if we can have processing labs where we can have the chicken cut, packaged. We want to use Agric to increase the number of jobs that our youths have, there are loads of youths that are unemployed and we want to use agric to bring out more jobs for the people.
