How I Became A Politician

  

 

Q: To be 70 is quite an achievement, especially these days when the average life expectancy is low. How does it feel being 70?
A: Honestly, physically, it is just like any other day. Being 70, 55, 60 or any other age I have been through, I feel almost the same. But psychologically, living in this country, I feel very uncomfortable. It affects my morale. Maybe it is because I have seen better times and I don’t want to see an ugly future, not necessarily for myself but for the incoming generations. And that is making me feel very uncomfortable and that is why I continue to ask if it is worth it to continue to live if things are going to continue to degenerate rather than improve. Minus the fact that the whole country seems not to be thinking of moving forward while others are marching really forward, which gives one a feeling of discomfort, I feel physically very good.

 

 Q: You talked about the past as if it was very rosy. Was it that rosy?
A: Oh yes, the past was so good. Let me start from the family level. I knew all my siblings playing together with the siblings of my parents’ siblings. When we talk about communal living, you could see many generations of your great grandfather and the children of their children coming together to play with you without any suspicion. It created the sort of happiness you cannot imagine. It was communal system at its best and that is the background from which I grew up. And leaving that and going to the primary school, the teachers in my community used to be the most respected in those days. They were the best educators, the best read and in fact, were the elite of the society. That reflected or impacted very reasonably on the lives of those of us who were privileged to have gone through them, so much that by the time we left Standard Six we were able do so much. I can confidently say that we were sufficiently literate enough in both the English and Yoruba languages. At least, we could read any literature written in both of them. We were also able to write well in both of them. That was the time we spent eight years in the primary school. Unlike those who are in JSS II now, we spent several years, which explains why they are no match to those of us who finished just the primary school. It moved on like that when we entered the secondary school and straight to the university. In those days, a lecturer would only come in and spend maybe, an hour with you. He, thereafter, left with specific references for you to consult in many other books. What you did was to go to the library, bookshop or friends in order to be able to find the references. From these sources, you were expected to form an independent idea of what the lecturer was trying to let you know. Nowadays, the teachers comes with handouts which, by rule, you must memorise in order to get a first class. In the process, literacy standard goes down very badly. Honestly, it is very worrisome.

 

  

Q: Was your foray into politics an accident or by design?
A: I’d say I played and grew into it. People of my generation felt a lot of neglect for our community. The reason was simple. My town, Ila Orangun, was always the farthest to the capital, the seat of government. When we were in the old Western Nigeria, Ila Orangun was the farthest to Ibadan, when we came to Ibadan too, Ila Orangun was also the farthest. Even now that we are in Osun State, Ila Orangun seems to be one of the farthest to Oshogbo. So, because of the distance between Ila Orangun and the seat of power in our opinion and perception when we were younger, we felt that Ila Orangun was neglected. In about 1974, we saw Ila Orangun as the largest population without electricity in the whole of Nigeria. We saw very many other communities that were very much smaller than Ila Orangun electrified, having all the good things of life. For that, we started as students to agitate and mobilise people for self development, protest to government and things like that. We graduated from that and formed ourselves into what we termed the Electricity Committee. We were working very hard and making all the necessary noise, mobilising our people to contribute money. In the end, the government was attracted to come and give us electricity. The money we contributed was handed over to the community to found the grammar school at that time. And I think all those led to my nomination into the Ila Orangun Management Committee, which is like local government council of today. It was a committee of 14 people. I served in the committee until the transition from military to civilian began. In 1976 there was an election to the local government council, my people called me to come and represent my own ward. I was elected unopposed into the Ila Local Council. From there, I was elected by both Ila and Odo Otin local government councils to the National Constituent Assembly which wrote the 1979 Constitution. It was about that time that I had an encounter with the great leader, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and many other leaders like Abraham Adesanya, Ayo Fasanmi, Shehu Shagari and others. So we started thinking much greater than we were doing when we were at the local level. From there, I joined the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN. That is how I came into politics. I wasn’t in it by intention because by training I didn’t work around what could be termed politics but I belonged to a community group. It became inevitable that I joined politics later on.

 

 

  Q: What you are saying is that being in it was a natural process of leadership?
A: Oh yes, it was.

 

 Q: How would you compare politics of those days to what we have now?
A: Politics of today is like trade, an investment which is like going to America, working hard to make some Dollars, taking advantage of the Naira having slumped badly, changing the Dollar into Naira and you becoming rich. Then you bribe people who now give primary election and pronto! you are a politician. Many of our politicians don’t even want to start from being councillors. They want to start as senators or governors and then presidency. So it is an investment now because after making a lot of money, you join politics to become a senator or governor or even president. Because it is an investment, you get there not with the interest of the people but for selfish interest to amass wealth. If you see what is happening at the National Assembly: ‘Oh! the money you could not spend last year, bring it and let us share it if you want us to approve your budget.’ ‘Oh! you are from this or that ministry. Well, if you want us to approve your ministerial budget, go and make such an input for us and when the budget is approved, you will also get your own share.’ That is what it is now. We are trading now, not politics. 

 

 Q: Is there any way we can change the focus?
A: The way out of it is for every Nigerian to see it as a responsibility on his or her part to make true democracy work. Only democracy can change it. There must be transparent elections. At the beginning, it might look impossible but before long, people will react and say, wait a minute, these people are selfish and we don’t need them. We want selfless people. They are very many in every community but when you want the community to improve, you must go for the selfless ones around. When you have selfless people at the helm of affairs, definitely, it will be better for us.

 

 

 Q: You talked about your meeting with the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo. How would you describe the experience?
A: It was a real experience, one that is very difficult to forget. First and foremost, when Chief Ayo Fasanmi met and delivered the message to me that Chief Awolowo wanted to see me, I felt like, who am I? It didn’t appear real to me and I said: ‘I can’t tell you when I will go.’ Then he said, ‘Papa wants to see you if possible today’ and I repeated that I would tell him when I would go. I had to tell my people first because the late Awolowo was more like an anathema to them. They were NCNC in the beginning and later joined NNDP. Because they had never been in Awolowo’s fold, I didn’t want to take his call. I needed to see how they would react to it. Otherwise they would blackmail me and by the time I came back, they would say that Awolowo had given him so much and that is why he is now coming to ask us to join him. So I met my people and asked if I should see him. They said why not and I went there with some of my friends from my community, including Major Adeniji and Dr. Popoola. So I told Fasanmi of the day we were coming. One thing was to my advantage. Before Awolowo ever sent for me, right from 1963, when I started reading about him, I read just about anything I found about him. First of all, I read his autobiography, Awo. I picked it from the bookshelf and read it. From that moment, I read everything about him. So by the time he sent for me, I had read practically all his works and many other writings about him. By the time I got there, I had prepared many questions on what I considered as many of the contradictions in his ideas. For me, they said he was a very difficult person and I was prepared to ensure that when I got there, the only way to make him realise that we too can be respected was to let him know that we were familiar with the contradiction in his ideas. The questions were such that I could point to some documents and say, ‘this is what you said here and it is contradictory to what you said in this other one.’ I wanted to know what led to his change of opinion.

He took one or two questions and said: ‘My dear son, put all the questions together and let me address them together.’ I did so but it took us some two hours for him to treat all the questions. By the time I left him, I knew that he was a great man. He was not only literate in the western sense, he was not only educated in law and economy, he was also a visionary: psychologist in the western, mythologist in the eastern sense. I could see that the man was not only educated, he was very spiritually rich. He was a man that needed to be respected and I will respect him for life.

 

 

Q: You also met the late Bola Ige?
A: Oh yes. I met Bola Ige in the Unity Party of Nigeria. I knew him by reputation a very long time because he used to be a political commentator in one of the newspapers then. He was also a political activist. I knew him by reputation but when we formed the Unity Party of Nigeria, I was to be a member of the party from my own area just as he came from his own area. We elected him state chairman of the party and I was a member of the executive council. I started seeing him in his real personality. I found him a different kind of character. I had the opportunity of studying him so deeply when I became secretary to the government. I met him after I had met Chief Awolowo.

Ige and myself went to prison for what the military described then as unlawful enrichment of the Unity Party. The gist of the case was that the chairmen of local government donated buses to the party at the local government level. They did it at the local level but because the military wanted Bola Ige and I, they didn’t go for those people, they came for Bola Ige and I. And they asked those people to come and give evidence that Bola Ige and myself conspired to influence them to use government money to enrich the Unity Party of Nigeria. And they sent both of us to 42 years imprisonment each. So after I left being deputy governor, I went to prison and I was there for three years before I was released. When I came back, members of my community wanted an undertaking from me that I would not be in politics again. I said no to that because I would be in politics for life. Then they were very unhappy. But I asked them not to worry and I gave them what I can call covenant that I would never accept elective or appointed position. So because of that, I never struggled to be governor or anything because my original purpose in politics was to get myself used for the benefit of the ordinary people, be part of the struggle because when you talk of progress politics in an African setting, it is nothing but struggle. To be part of the struggle all the time is what I wanted hence I chose politics, not to be in position or to be government officer, governor or president. That was secondary. It was my belief that one must always be part of the struggle to improve the lot of the people because it is when the lot of the people are developed that you can safely say that the country itself is developed. So my purpose in politics is to be part of the struggle to give the people a better deal and development of the society.

 

 

 Q: Twice you were rigged out in governorship elections, in Old Oyo State and Osun State. What really happened?
A: That of Oyo was well defined because an office was set up under Professor Adeniran, former minister of education. He had an office well-equipped with computer. You know, computers were very new at that time. The instruction was that as soon as the elections were completed at the ward and immediately after the counting, our own copy should go to Adeniran’s office to be entered into the computer. The result was actually out even before FEDECO would have time to see what the result was. And we knew we won 100 per cent in nearly all wards in Oyo State. But right there in the FEDECO office, in the presence of myself and Dele Ige, they falsified the result. The FEDECO people were changing the result. It got to a point where they brought in anti-riot policemen to push us out of the office. I was then the deputy governor and Dele was a nominee of Bola Ige as an agent of the party. Both of us were agents in FEDECO office but they used the anti-riot policemen to push us out of the office. They asked us to go home and wait for the result. So they falsified the result.

About the 2003 election, when I was governor, I attended a meeting with Obasanjo in Ota with Papa Abraham Adesanya, Bishop Gbonigi, Archbishop Ladigbolu and some Afenifere leaders. From that meeting, I knew that the election was going to be rigged and a few days to the election, I saw about 150 anti-riot policemen sent to Osun State but stationed in Okuku, the hometown of my opponent, Prince Oyinlola. I called the commissioner of police and told him what I observed and he told me that he had nothing to do with it but that they were sent directly from Abuja to my opponent. So it was Oyinlola who was deploying the police to do his service throughout the electioneering. So, where the policemen were used to intimidate people in addition to INEC people who were already ready to do the falsification, I didn’t even bother my head about asking people to take figures because I knew it was going to be rigged. I made up my mind that I was being relieved of a burden because service to me was more of a burden than anything else. I was not ready to serve in a do-or-die manner.

 

 

 Q: You are nicknamed ‘Otitokoro’, which means truth is bitter. How did you get the nickname?
A: Honestly, I don’t know but people say that I should not be saying it the way it is. Rather, I should be saying it in a ‘bend bend’ manner. But the truth is that when I see something that is not good enough, I say it is not good enough in the plainest language. When I see it as excellent, I say so. And I use superlative terms. That is me. To see something that is not good and because I want to please you, I say oh it is good, I won’t do that. When you do well, I will say so, just as I would say you didn’t do well when you fail to do well.

 

 

 

Did you Enjoy this story? you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Random Post

• January 12, 2010 -- Return Of The Police Terrorist (2)
• December 15, 2008 -- Ghana Leads The Way Again—Kayode Fayemi (5)
• November 3, 2008 -- Benin/UBTH Boss in Retirement Scare (0)
• September 22, 2008 -- FRSC And Our Dashed Hopes—Kanayo Esinulo (3)
• August 18, 2008 -- Boosting Nightlife (0)
• November 10, 2008 -- New Ministry For Niger Delta And All That…—Kanayo Esinulo (3)
• May 11, 2008 -- Omotola Goes To Kannywood (1)
• January 12, 2009 -- Akwa Ibom’s ‘Kid ‘Witches’ (10)
• January 12, 2009 -- Ghana’s New Man Of Power (1)
• June 9, 2008 -- Hunting For Talents (1)

No tags for this post.

Related posts

• No related posts.