From Idu Jude, Abuja
Bishop Samuel Omede is the campaign Director-General of Barrister Olumide Akpata, former NBA President and the Edo State Labour Party governorship candidate.
Omede spoke on various issues in this interview.
What are the chances of your candidate emerging victorious in the September 21 clash of the frontline Titans, PDP, APC, and your Labour Party?
Labour Party’s chances are beyond excellent if that is possible to get. I can tell you with almost scientific precision and certainty that given the hard work we have put in on the campaign trail as a collective team, the shining qualities of our candidate, Olumide Akpata, his deputy, Yusuf Asamah Kadiri, SAN, and the fact that Edo cannot wait to break out of the hell and unmitigated purgatory which both the APC and PDP represent in equal measure in the last combined 24 years of our nation’s history of misery, Akpata is the next governor of Edo State. And this is not mere ringside rave or political hype of our candidate in the ring. It is a verdict from empirical evidence on the streets, hamlets, villages, onshore and riverine communities, towns, and cities of all 18 LGAs of Edo State, where our incredibly hardworking candidate and campaign teams have stomped and canoed to in the last five months of solid, unrelenting campaigns.
Records have shown that diligent campaigns alone do not determine who wins elections, so how did you arrive at that depth of ultimate confidence that your party will win the governorship?
Reasons and rationales abound. Barring any mid-day darkness and treason of unprecedented rigging, the vast majority of Edo citizens and residents will tell you the same. That Labour Party will win the day and make Akpata the next governor of our state. On any question of a rigging conspiracy to impose an unballoted candidate against the wishes of the Edo people, I assure you that whether coming from APC or PDP or both, Edo is not Lagos or Adamawa. Edo people are not Abuja’s fools or PDP’s tools to be used to hammer a coffin together and discarded without consequences, because, by Jove, there shall be consequences. Dire consequences.
Here are some of the reasons. Our people’s backs have been pushed not just to the wall but through the wall by extreme hunger, unmitigated hardship, devastating misrule, flamboyant but empty Internet deceit, and claims of infrastructural development, most of which exist only in the imagination of the ruling PDP. So, they built or repainted a few highrises at Palm House (Edo State government secretariat hub), Oyegun civil servants building, and Edo Jobs center and equipped them with a hundred computers. Shining graves housing hungry workers, dying pensioners, and skyscrapers of unanswered employment application letters from teeming Edo youths, quality graduates, and distressed citizens of all ages.
Of Edo State’s population of nearly five million citizens, adult working age of over three million, and 2.6 million voters accredited by INEC for this year’s election, the PDP government here has less than 100,000 total workforce employed on its payroll. The majority of these workers groan under a minimum wage salary, tormented and ravaged by epidemic inflation from one payday to the next payday.
What happens to the rest of the citizens, who cater for them, and sustain the remaining 4.5 million people?
That is the question that the Labour Party is asking just like Governor of Abia State, Dr. Alex Otti, is coming to solve and resolve for our people as the next Labour Party miracle governor of Nigeria and Edo in particular.
So, be vigilant when the sitting PDP makes these claims of having built this or that fantastic sepulcher here and there. A state government embarking on fancy eatery enterprises and shopping plazas falls objectionably into the mould of what our own Peter Obi describes as a consumption mentality instead of a production philosophy for sustainable economic progress.
The Obaseki and candidate, Asue Ighodalo-led PDP signed and claimed some fantastic MOUs for a Gelegele Seaport, a 30,000 barrel Edo State refinery, an Auchi Airport project, and many more Alice in Wonderland development fantasies. All of these are operating in the coven and everywhere else except on the ground for Edo voters to see and enjoy.
They established remote, far-flung, conduit-located factories with sneak Chinese companies that employ mostly non-Edo indigenes on 19th-century slave wages with fronts, friends, and cronies as board directors and no public account audit of how these companies are being run, how they reflect on Edo’s treasury revenues and citizens’ wellbeing. These are the things they gloriously call infrastructure achievement. In contrast to these claims, what we have on the ground in Edo from year to year are havoc-wreaking floods, nightmares of impassible state and federal roads that lead into and out of all the major connecting highways to Edo except the Lagos express, massive youth unemployment, increasingly unaffordable and deteriorating education specter, miserable per capita income and workers salaries choked and strangled by the daily horror of hyperinflation.
Can you give details of what your party is coming to do differently from the previous government in Edo State?
Worthy of note, is that what Edo people have on the ground presently are traumatic crimes and insecurity, and in place of electricity, a blanket of iron darkness which even the sun and a million development MOUs of Obaseki or APC mass suicide economic policies have been unable to penetrate, resolve, or mitigate from year to year. What is even more saddening and which is a mockery of the good people of Edo is the verifiable and proven fact that all of these governance failures and woes are in the face of gigantic new revenues from both internally generated revenues, rising from #15 billion to #65billion today, and post-subsidy removal windfalls from the federal center after fuel soared from #197 per liter to #660, now heading to one dollar per liter or #1,300 in filling-stations and #1,700 in deliberately contrived black market auxiliary petroleum economy of the present APC Federal Government.
These are the harrowing indices of misgovernance, crushing underdevelopment, and hard-impact corruption, which Edo voters will be bleeding from when they go to vote against APC and PDP on Saturday, September 21.
These are the horrors of misrule and agonies Edo voters shall remember vividly when they step out of their homes to vote and bring to Edo Government House their guy, Olumide Akpata, with the power of their ballots in the coming election, the other two frontline parties, APC and PDP, shall be presenting candidates with distinctly strong incumbent backgrounds and backup.
People say the APC candidate, Sen. Monday Okpebholo, is coming into the race on a springboard of the proverbial federal might and ballot-tested troops with a war chest of funds led by two political generalissimos, Sen. Adams Oshiomhole, a former governor of your state, and Senate President, Gods Will Akpabio. On their part, they say the PDP of incumbent Governor Godwin Obaseki, who is now also battle-tested after eight years on the saddle, has vowed that this election shall be a do-or-die Armageddon for him and his party. Meaning that he would throw everything into the fight to win for their candidate, Asue Ighodalo.
With these calculations, do these factors not worry you and diminish your optimism that LP will have a difficult outcome?
No, they don’t at all because you have mentioned a few political masters from Abuja and Obaseki’s dozen commanders in Government House against the will of the renowned four million-plus democracy-tested and ballot-ready Edo people. With all humility, I take pride in telling you this. As Edo has been the cradle of African culture, you can say the same today without fear of contradiction that Edo is Nigeria’s cradle of modern democracy. Our electorate are about the most evolved, detribalized, enlightened, and resolute voters throughout Nigeria. You cannot intimidate or blindfold the average enlightened Edo voter with the smell of mint, glitter, or razzmatazz of power and pomposity or fear factor of incumbency power and federal might. If that is all APC and PDP have to offer or planning to bring to bear on election day, they will be severely disappointed.
Ironically, fortunately for the Labour Party and unfortunately for both the APC and PDP, directly given those incumbency factors and vote-buying war game amenities you mentioned, Edo voters have been asking the APC candidate: so you have so much money to bring in luxury buses to palliate Edo people’s crushing transportation needs? Why did you not bring them long ago before the election? They understand that they are just Greek gifts and gamblers’ charity for winning elections and not out of love for the people. They are asking Governor Obaseki and Asue Ighodalo: up and down our state, almost everywhere you go among our cities, communities, and villages across most of Edo’s 18 LGAs, including GRAs of the state capital, Benin City, deplorable roads, dilapidated public amenities, absent health centers and grinding poverty among the people is like an epidemic. Edo voters, therefore, understand that it is all emotional burglary of the people’s minds and exploitation of their enforced poverty for ballot jobbing.
How do you react to the population who say that the Governorship of Edo State, particularly in the year 2024, ought to have been ceded to Edo Central Senatorial District because the Esan people have been shortchanged from the number one seat of power for too long?
I have a three-dimensional answer to your question. The first is that I wish to reassure our Esan kinsmen of Edo Central that they have total understanding, love, solidarity, and support for their yearning for our candidate, Olu Akpata and the entire leadership and members of Edo South and Edo North Labour Party.
I further believe that at the next and nearest dispensation, our party will do everything under our powers and purview to support and actualize that yearning.
Two, remember that there was a free and fair primary for the governorship ticket of the Labour Party earlier this year. Election, especially democratic primaries, is about number and representation. Remember that there were three Esan or Edo Central governorship aspirants during the primary of our party for the governorship ticket. But recognizing the merits of capacity, competence, and character in Olumide Akpata over tribal partisanship, our party’s delegates representing Edo North and South senatorial districts overwhelmingly voted 336❓ ballots for Akpata to defeat the three Edo Central governorship aspirants who scored 7 votes each, totaling 21 votes. This was because in the Labour Party, what we recognize, as our national leade, Peter Obi frequently says, is that governance should be about competence, capacity, and character and not tribalism, provincial sentiments, or geographical origin.
Three, you will agree that our party, the Labour Party, has never governed Edo before now. PDP and APC have governed the state at various times since the return to civil rule in 1999. Is it not an irony that during all of those two and have decades, these two parties viciously did not consider that the power shift to Edo Central was ethical, due, and just? As a party committed to our motto of justice and equal opportunity, the Labour Party shall begin this valid ethical bargain in our political timeline when we take over our dear state as winners of this election. Take and mark my words somewhere. All we do today is to earnestly ask for the understanding of our Edo Central senatorial district to support us get our party into office to implement this bargain in the coming dispensations.
As a party and stakeholders, our candidate Akpata and we leaders, are committed to a meritorious power shift shortly.
