By Mike Famiyesin, PhD

Dear distinguished delegates of the All Progressives Congress in Ondo South Senatorial District, I bring you the season's greetings in the name of our Lord Almighty.

As you are already aware, the destiny of Ondo South, once again, is in your hands as we journey towards the 2023 general elections. As usual, your home would have become a sort of Mecca to all aspirants coming to appeal to your conscience to elect them as the party's flag bearer in the forthcoming elections. The aspirants will promise you heaven and earth and tell you how they'd better your lot if you consider them for the slot. It's all politicking. It's normal.

Rest assured, distinguished delegates that whatever you decide in terms of whom you elect to fly the ticket of the party for the senate is capable of either making or further denting the collective destiny of the impoverished region in 2023 and beyond. We have a chance to halt the drift into a total abyss in 2023. But only you can make it happen now by giving the party the best out of the current aspirants jostling to have the party's ticket.

The question then remains thus: do you want our district to be salvaged and rescued from the current stagnation and morbid retrogression or do you want a total liberation and redemption that could usher in rapid transformation for economic growth and development to take place? The ball is in your court to do that which will advance our collective interest rather than our individual interests, which are mostly self-centred and less altruistic.

Against the foregoing, therefore, in exercising the discretionary power at your beck and call to elect a candidate for the party, which is currently in opposition in Ondo South, I implore you to take a judicious consideration of the person's antecedents, experience, accessibility, contributions to human capital development in the district, and most importantly, the three Cs of effective leadership must be duly factored in.

There's a consensus among various experts on effective leadership that the three cornerstones of leadership are competence, capability and character. In most cases, a leader has two of the three essential elements and lacks one or has one and lacks two, especially in a system where the leadership recruitment process is flawed or skewed in a society like ours. But when you are fortunate to have a leader who has the three Cs in appreciable proportions, then it's important to bring that person on board to serve. I shall return to that shortly, dear delegates.

Taking into cognizance the enormity of the task of rebuilding Ondo South in 2023 from its current ruins occasioned by atrophied leadership over the years, it is paramount to elect a senator who will be on the ground in Abuja solely for the long-suffering people of Ondo South. The candidate must be ready and willing to sacrifice his time and resources to comb every part of the country for the betterment of the youth of the region in terms of looking for productive ventures for them while also leveraging his contacts to advance the development of other demographics in the district.

Dear distinguished delegates, it's safe to bring to your knowledge, assuming you don't know already, that Ondo South is arguably the only senatorial district in Nigeria without a concrete federal government presence. Yet, our district is one of those that lay the golden egg - crude oil - that's been used to fuel the economy of this country over the years. What do you think could be responsible for this atrocious and callous serial neglect? Poor leadership and absence of a respectable voice to speak for the people.

It is no less important to put it on the front burner for your kind consideration when you go out to vote for who will fly the flag of the APC for Ondo South in 2023 that there is little or no infrastructure that can power industrialization in the region. The existing ones are decaying at the speed of light without any replacement or even repair. Those within the small and medium enterprise ecosystem provide virtually everything needed for their enterprises to thrive.

One of the fundamental fallouts of the absence of critical infrastructures in the district is the lack of job opportunities for our teeming youths while those with sellable skills have nothing to work with. It's a sad reflection of the absence of purposeful leadership in the district. I, therefore, admonish you, dear delegates, to choose the best for us. In doing this, I encourage you all to elect someone with a high sense of sympathy and genuine empathy for the people in addition to being genuinely accepted by the people.

Dear delegates, now that you know the trajectory of my epistle here, let me now direct your mind without equivocation to the best man among the contending aspirants who will do all the aforementioned because he has the three Cs of leadership - competence, capability and character- in adequate proportions. He is no other person than Boye Oyewumi. And this is without prejudice to the qualities of other aspirants in the race for the ticket.

Oyewumi is neither new to you nor new to our political terrain. He is someone who has demonstrated competence in all the areas where he has served either in the private sector or in the public service, the most recent being the one where he served as the chief executive officer of the Ondo State Development and Investment Promotion Agency (ONDIPA) with a trail of indelible footprints in the annals of the history of the agency.

Through the instrumentality of ONDIPA under Oyewumi's leadership, the business climate in the state has improved tremendously with the ease of doing business index, one of the best in the country. This is besides the myriad business interests facilitated to the state courtesy of the agency.

Now, when you are competent; you need to show evidence of it; the by-product of your competence is service delivery which is indicative of your capability to handle the responsibilities entrusted in your care. The bio of aspirant Oyewumi is a summation of competence and capability which you are all familiar with. The track records are there for anyone to peruse.

Dear Ondo South APC delegates, the people in the region are clamouring for a senator who will be accessible, sympathetic to their collective struggles and emphatic on the need to redeem and transform the region for the better in 2023 and beyond.

To get a leader who is sympathetic, accessible and emphatic, such a leader must have character, which in Yoruba cultural make-up, is a derivative of the aggregate Omoluabi ethos. Without exaggeration, Oyewumi embodies the three elements mentioned here because he is a typical Omoluabi who says what he means and means what he says without being condescending or unnecessarily off-putting. The clock to elect the best has started ticking away. Delegates, please give us Boye Oyewumi.

May the good Lord bless you all as you heed my clarion call here. Amen.

Mike Famiyesin, a University Don, hails from Odigbo LGA of Ondo State.