Governorship candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in Ogun State, Sina Kawonise, popularly known as SK, is a former university lecturer, Commissioner for Information and Managing Director of a national daily.He speaks with ABIODUN AWOLAJA on February’s governorship election in the state and sundry issues. Excerpts:

THE Labour Party (LP) in Ogun State was considered the most potent threat to the re-election ambition of Governor Ibikunle Amosun at a time. But recently, former Governor Gbenga Daniel left the party with his supporters. Does the LP still have the clout to stand up to the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the Osoba-led Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the governorship election?

The Labour Party (LP), by God’s grace, will form the next government in Ogun State. Why do I say so? Labour Party had potentials that were not exploited. When Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) was there, the party galvanised the normal politicians in the OGD political structure. He left and virtually all the aspirants also left with him, leaving only me as governorship aspirant. But then those of us that remained in the party sat back and said “Look, what was the original conception of the LP? Who were the original promoters of the party? The workers, the civil servants, the teachers, the artisans, members of the National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE).” In Ogun State we have 99 trade associations: hairdressers, welders, etc, all have their individual associations. So, we now sat down and said: “Look, these ones are not politicians” and we started engaging them, telling them: “LP is your own party.” And when you look at the structure of voting, 80 per cent of those who vote are from these groups. It is a matter of strategy and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

All we did was to go to them and tell them: “This is your own party.” LP was promoted by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC). The first party promoted by the NLC was the Party for Social Democracy, registered in 2003 and which transformed into LP in 2004. So, when you have that historical view and look at what the LP is actually supposed to be, the loss of the OGD political group was significant. But later, we filled in the gap by bringing in the people who are supposed to be the actual “owners” of the party.

LP is the party to beat in Ogun State. We are not making noise about it because those that we engage are not people who can identify with us openly: they are people in the service of government and the man there is going to victimize them. And they have no other party that they can support. Now to answer your question, LP is even bigger and better after the exit of the politicians that went with OGD.

One common complaint is that labour leaders always support candidates of other political parties, for instance, Ayo Fayose in Ekiti, during elections. Are we going to have such a situation in Ogun?

The labour leaders didn’t actually support Fayose. They endorsed Kayode Fayemi. Now, that happened because they only turned to the labour movement during election. What I did was to make the people realise: “This party is your own.  You cannot leave your own and go and be supporting the candidates of other parties.”

And what are my own antecedents? My own natural habitat is the LP. I am not an emergency member of the LP; it was the first party I belonged to. Now when I was to be screened as commissioner in the Ogun State House of Assembly in 2010, I had to obtain PDP card because it is a constitutional requirement that for you to be a commissioner, you must be a card-carrying member of a political party. So, I was not spirit, soul and body a member of PDP and of course when OGD’s loyalists moved to PPN just before the 2011 elections, I didn’t register in the party. LP is the first party I belong to because of my own ideological bent. Those who want to know my ideological bent should get a copy of my book that I made a public presentation of on August 7, 2014. It is a collection of some of my articles in the last 30 years. You can see that the ideological current running through it is social democracy. There is no way somebody like me would have belonged to APC or PDP. They are conservative; the difference between PDP and APC is that between six and half a dozen. So, I have been carrying the people along: it is not a matter of the NLC leadership coming to endorse somebody.

In one of your publications, you hinged your refusal to dump the LP for the PDP on the fact that the people had already been mobilised for the LP and that asking them to leave the party again was immoral. It looks like a question of integrity. But many would say that politics is not about integrity?

It is not just about integrity. Integrity, yes, because one of the things we need to do in the Nigerian system is to make sure that we infuse credibility and integrity into the system. That is not minor; it is major. And our people are actually looking for that person that is credible, that person they can trust and rely on, because one of the weaknesses of our democracy is that politicians make promises that they do not keep. So our people are now opening wide their eyes to see who is that person that they can trust. Two, our people don’t change easily. Once they have been attuned and mobilised along the lines of the LP, it is difficult to change them. And that is the problem that those who left the LP have. Very many of those who left are back in the LP, because of the problems in the PDP, working for the LP quietly. All they are saying is that “This is the party we are going to work for. SK is our person.”

By my staying back in the LP, our people got to know me more. They are saying that this is a man with integrity, a man who is credible. This fellow has courage and so on and so forth. So, very many of those who left are back in the LP because the place they went to is crisis-ridden. And then don’t forget that before they left, we had registered more than 200,000 people as ordinary party members. These ones never left for the PDP; those who left with my Oga, OGD, were just the normal politicians. The people who actually vote did not leave LP; it didn’t make any sense to them. So, it is matter of integrity, but it is also a matter of the reality on the ground, namely that the LP was already sold to our people and they are not accepting other options, especially given the fact that APC has failed and failed woefully, and the SDP is widely seen as a chip off the rejected APC block. In popular parlance, the SDP is to APC what the PPN was to PDP in the 2011 elections in Ogun State.

Many people look at Governor Amosun and say: “This man has transformed Ogun State; he has built so many roads and bridges.” What are the things you will do differently if voted for by the people?

Now, this is one government that simply does not understand the art of governance. It is a government that is grossly alienated from our people. One of the major problems of our political economy is that our leaders do development for the people, not with the people. The man is alienated from the people; he just felt that a project is prestigious and he started executing it. And our people simply do not identify with this project. It is only one project that he is doing: road construction. And mind you, none of the roads is new. What he is doing is just expansion of the existing roads. There is no new construction in Ogun State, whether federal or state government road. And you find them just in Abeokuta, two bridges in Ijebu-Ode, one bridge in Sagamu, and then Sango-Ota. All other parts of the state are not touched; even just asphalt overlaying is not done.

Our people just do not see any reason to identify with this project. They are losing their jobs; houses were demolished without compensation. No jobs were created and even the contract for those roads were given to foreigners, and those ones would even bring their own workmen to Ogun State. When we were in government, OGROMA was doing virtually all of the road construction and our people were the ones working there through direct labour. So, if you look critically at what Amosun is doing, it is what I call a facade, mere window dressing. It has no depth.

The road construction is, one, done at criminally inflated cost. Two, they do not bear any direct economic benefit to our people. He’s not creating wealth for our people, not putting money in their pockets. In fact, everywhere you go, you would just be hearing this song: “Ilu le o, ko s’owo l’ode.” (“The town is hard; there’s no money”). And there is no magic about it because the government is the biggest spender in this country. If government is not spending money the right way, it would not result in money in the pockets of our people.

So then, what am I going to do differently? We are not going to do development for the people. We are going to identify the needs of our people. Our star development programme is what we call Ward Development Council (WDC) where we are going to have seven persons in each of the 236 wards in the state. The first three political parties by the result of the coming governorship election would contribute three persons, because we do not want to do winner-takes all, and so that other parties can continue the projects if LP is no longer in power. The Muslim body would contribute a member and the Christian body would also have a member, and then the youth group and women’s group would contribute a member each, making seven. We are going to be taking out a minimum of 30 per cent from our IGR, which is currently put at N4 billion, and give to these wards, and that would translate to about N5 million every month in the hands of these wards.

What do they do with this money? If they need boreholes, they don’t need to come to the governor in Abeokuta to lobby for them. If they need a transformer, they get it by themselves. You find whole communities thrown into darkness now just because the transformer has a problem. They build dispensaries. By identifying their needs, executing the projects themselves and then of course monitoring and maintaining them, the people would feel a sense of ownership of the projects. That’s number one. Two, we find out that a lot of our people already have some skills; I mean, the vulcaniser has some skills, the plumber and all of them, but what they do not have is the start up capital. We are going to remove another 10 per cent of our IGR and devote it to micro credit through the cooperative societies. That way, we would be able to empower our people in a real sense and create jobs in an unimaginable way.

Does that mean that the people have not been empowered now?

There is no empowerment, no job creation. These facilities that we are talking about which will actually empower our people, are not being done. We are talking of removing 10 per cent of our IGR on a monthly basis. When you calculate it for four years, that would give us about N19.2 billion circulating in the micro economy of the state. That is if the IGR remains the same; and there is no way it is going to remain the same because those who have been empowered would be in a position to contribute to it.

And of course in terms of education, we are not going to continue the analogue system in place now, where government says it has spent billions of naira giving exercise books to students. We are going to give them tablet PCs that are not expensive at all. We are going to start from SS1 to SS3 and then come down to the JSS classes.

What about power?

Yes. In fact, that is very key to what we are going to do. Before we left government, we brought some micro power stations: 42 megawatts capacity in all. But this government got there and said they were obsolete equipment. We installed seven megawatts before we left and that is what they are using in Government House now. Yet the government said it was obsolete. Our target would be to generate about 150 megawatts of electricity in Ogun. We are just going to do micro power projects all over the place.

Amosun as the sitting governor has access to state resources, and in the PDP, there are moneybags like Buruji Kashamu. Can the LP withstand APC and PDP in terms of financial resources for this election?

I would give you a very brief history of Ogun politically. Big money does not win election in Ogun State. When Chief Olusegun Osoba became governor in 1992, there was no money involved. In 1999, he became governor again because the Afenifere leaders said “This is the person we want.” In 2003, OGD, who had some money, came and in 2011, PDP broke into two: PPN and PDP. PDP fielded Adetunji Idowu Olurin and PPN fielded Gboyega Nasir Isiaka.The PDP got so much money that it later accused one of the leading officials of the campaign of having stolen N400 million from the campaign funds. Before you could accuse one official of stealing N400 million, how much did you have to spend?

Don’t forget that Baba Obasanjo was in charge and we know what those guys in the private sector did by contributing money. And on our own part, we also spent quite a sizable amount of money. Now, Amosun that won that election, how much did he have? Remember what former Governor Osoba said: that during that election, they were able to raise N10,000 for each ward, not in each polling booth. That’s number one. Number two, Right Honourable Dimeji Bankole, the sitting Speaker of the House of Reps during the 2011 elections, we are told, spent a huge amount of money to win one local government; his own constituency is Abeokuta South. The man that defeated him, Honourable Segun Williams that is there in the House of Reps now, did not spend even N5 million. We are told that his friends contributed money for him to print posters. He defeated Bankole by a wide margin.

Number three, Honourable Ladi Adebutu, the son of a multibillionaire and himself a multimillionaire, reportedly spent a huge sum contesting the Remo federal constituency seat. The man that defeated him, Honourable Buraimoh of APC, did not spend big money. In fact, one of our leaders in Sagamu said that on the day of election, they were only able to raise N40,000 from Osoba. N40,000 to service 35 wards. How much did Senator Gbenga Obadara spend to take out, big time, Senator Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, daughter of former President Obasanjo, then representing Ogun Central Senatorial District? We have so many examples like that. What I am saying is that once our people make up their minds that they are going for change, no amount of money can sway them. They would collect your money but they would still vote their conscience.

The civil servants cannot be bought; they are not going to support this government that has maltreated them so much. The pensioners are not going to support this government because of what they have suffered in its hands. How much are you going to give to bribe the teachers? They are not among the people you would be distributing rice to in the name of stomach infrastructure. So, anybody peddling big money is not a threat. They would be making a lot of noise and raising a lot of dust but at the end of the day, it does not translate to electoral victory.

You mentioned change, which the APC is noted for. What do you have against APC’s idea of change?

We have just seen that it is a mere slogan; completely empty. In fact when you even look at PDP, you would see that it is much better. Look at all the APC states, they all focus on one project: road construction. Look at the billions that their poster boy, Fashola, has collected: if you go to the hinterland, you would see that nothing has happened there. There is no depth. So, our people have seen them for what they are. They rejected them in Ekiti State and you know that even the one in Osun is still being contested. You see, people have seen through them: the so-called change has no content, no soul. When we are talking of change, we are talking of paradigm shift. What I am trying to do in Ogun State is to galvanise the workers to take charge of governance themselves. We have no godfather in Labour Party; there is no big man breathing down our necks. The unions would be the ones to supply commissioners for that government. One of the unions gave me my running mate, something that I would not have been able to do when the big politicians were there. In Ogun State, LP is not talking of ethnic configurations but along class lines.

What about the Yewa/Awori agenda?

We have always said to our people in Ogun West: present a candidate that is acceptable across Ogun State. Our people have always resisted ethnic agenda. There was an interview I granted Sunday Tribune, I think it was in April 2014, where I said our people had never voted along ethnic lines. Nobody became governor of Ogun based on sectional votes. Chief Osoba won state-wide in 1992. In 1999, he also won state-wide. In fact, the only local government where he lost was Odeda in Ogun Central. OGD also won state-wide in 2003 and the only local government where he also lost was in Waterside, in his own senatorial district. In 2007, it was the same thing. Then we brought out two candidates in 2011: General Olurin from Ilaro, Yewa and GNI from Imeko-Afon, Yewa. Do you know what happened? Governor Amosun defeated both of them even in Ogun West, their senatorial district. So, ethnic agenda does not work in Ogun State: once our people make up their minds to vote for change, they do so.

And then you see that Yewa agenda has run into its own problem: SDP took its candidate from there and PDP also did. I believe in equity but I also believe that we need to study the voting behaviour of our people. This election is going to be determined by issues: who can put food on the table, who can bring about all-round development, who can tackle insecurity, etc. Our people are always looking for two things: the right platform and the right candidate. Now, APC has failed and will not get 20 per cent of the votes. SDP is to APC what PPN was to PDP. There is no party, historically, that broke into two and either of the two won election. So, APC is gone, SDP is not there; PDP is crisis-ridden and what is the alternative? It is the Labour Party. Many of those that left APC and PDP after their flawed primaries are in LP.