By Emman Ovuakporie

Hon. Israel Ajibola Famurewa, an engineer, represents Atakumosa East-West Federal Constituency. He was the Director General of the successful Gboyega Oyetola Campaign Organisation in the recently concluded governorship election in Osun State.

•Hon. Israel Ajibola Famurewa

How was it getting the mandate of the people when it seemed all hope was lost at the Osun governorship election?

Nobody gave the governor-elect any chance from day one. One, he had not been involved in much political activities; he had concentrated his interest and efforts on administration as Chief of Staff to the Governor, at least in the last eight years. So, people saw him more as a technocrat. But God gave him a very formidable team that actually worked for him and he eventually emerged the flag bearer of the party before proceeding to the main election.

We studied the constitution of the party very well and realised that we have three modes of primary: consensus, direct and indirect and, going by experience of what happened in Ekiti where select members of the exco turned themselves into playing God; extorting money from aspirants; we started advocating for direct primary.

While we were agitating for direct primary, we were working on delegates for indirect primary. So, we were preparing for the two while other aspirants were concentrating their efforts on delegates; buying them. They will just carry some people to go and take oaths. Taking oaths was so rampant then. They were giving people money to come and take oath .

How did your party receive it when you almost lost the governorship election when you had to go for a re-run? Did you envisage such a close call?

If you studied the trend of that election, especially after the primary, we knew it would be a very keen contest, because we had among the candidates a former SSG for almost eight years and  the party Chairman at the state level for eight years; such persons can’t be pushovers in the contest. Then we had Otunba Iyiola Omisore of the SDP, who moved out of PDP, the PDP candidate, the ADP candidate who moved out of APC and then we have ADC, Obasanjo’s party. And then looking at the membership of ADC in the state, we have former governor Oyinlola who had moved from APC to join ADC.

If people decamped, you will know that they are no longer part of you, but we had some people within the APC, they were with us in flesh but not with us in spirit. Some worked against the party while some were just lukewarm in their attitude. So, definitely you should know that the contest will be so keen such that whoever emerged victorious will be by just a slight margin.

We underrated the PDP candidate (Adeleke); we concentrated our attention on Omisore going by his antecedents and knowing the havoc he could cause from Ife axis, so the PDP candidate did whatever he liked in Ede. By the time we finish at the tribunal, the whole world will know what actually transpired in Ede during that election. We realised that there were numerous polling units where there was over-voting. Ede people cannot claim to be so sophisticated in election that they will record 40, 000 votes without one voided ballot. That was our experience, but despite what happened in Ede, we were leading until they came up with ‘we are not comfortable with this result, they should cancel it.’ In all the seven units that we had rerun, we lost just one.

But many people believe the APC actually lost the election

The opinion is that APC had lost its goodwill and  that the outgoing governor may not be enjoying the kind of relationship he had with the people before.

It depends on which way      you are viewing the scenario. If you assess the government in Osun, honestly, we performed. The only problem we have and we thank God we are getting over it, is the salary of workers. And you know that that state is a civil service state.

Considering the situation in Nigeria, we learned a lesson that all these campaigns and all these things don’t work again. What an average Nigerian wants is money. If you have your money on the day of election, you can…because of the level of poverty.

And they introduced something that was very funny and scary as well, forcing people to take oaths. Like in my polling unit – people that I can say they are my people – that I can say any time, any day I can knock their doors and say come and vote for our party and they will vote because of the relationship. I went there on the day of election and they were moving back, saying, “I have collected money and I have taken oath , I don’t want to die.” That was my personal experience.

Oath taking became something very rampant and popular. People were taking oath freely for money – for N5,000 or N3,000 in some places.

So, that was what played out. It had nothing to do with the popularity of the government or the performance of the present governor.

Do you think Oyetola has the capability to diversify the Osun State revenue base?

He has been in the private sector for over 30 years and he had the opportunity of working with our governor for seven and a half years as Chief of Staff. Actually, we call him ‘engine room,’ because has been the engine room of that administration.

I can see him working in a different dimension as a chief executive of that state. I know he has a lot of plans and one of the plans is to reorganise the revenue base of Osun without inflicting pains on the people. There are a lot of things we are working on, not only Oyetola alone.

International and local observers rated the Osun election outcome low in many ways, especially in the area of voter intimidation…

I will tell you what played out in the run-off election. The PDP were buying cards. Apart from buying cards, they started camping voters.

You know we had just seven units? They went to those seven units picking people and putting them in a place. We then said on the day of election there would be curfew . If anybody camps you anywhere outside your territory then you would not come in to vote. That was when people began to shout intimidation. We did not intimidate anybody!

What we did was that if you were not in your territory on the day of election, you would not have access to that place because we knew what they were doing – they were camping people. It is against the normal electoral system. If you want to vote, you should be able to vote without any inducement. So, we stopped those people from coming to  voting centres because ordinarily there was restriction of movement.