OLA AJAYI, IBADAN
DESPITE their political differences, Governor Olugbenga Daniels Thursday defended the former President, Olusegun Obasanjo saying it would be wrong to use him as a single person to judge the whole process.

Gbenga and basanjo

He said this as he called on people to stop blaming the system but that necessary steps should be taken to identify what was faulty in a system and find ways of removing it.

Governor Daniels said these at the first lecture organized by Egbe Omoluwabi in Ibadan Thursday.

At the meeting which had many sons and daughters of Yorubaland from Kwara, Osun, Ogun, Ekiti, Ondo and other states in attendance, the Oyo State Government shunned it as there was nobody that represented it there.

The governor was reacting to the guest lecturer, Prof. Akinjide Oshuntokun who said the Chief Obasanjo government bent backwards to accommodate other ethnic groups at the expense of Yoruba and that Yoruba people watched helplessly when their son was in the saddle and all their roads became unmotorable.

But Daniels said, “We must not use the example of a single person to judge the whole process.”

He explained that the issue of national conference would have been successful if the issue of third term bid had not crept in”

Daniels who was the facilitator of the programme said we should not castigate the political system.

Linking some bad eggs in our political system, he said we should not condemn the system but should find a way of dealing with the problem.

His words: “If a computer has virus, you don’t condemn the system but you find a way of dealing with the virus so that the virus doesn’t do much damage to the computer”.

Speaking more proverbially, the governor stated that in democracy, each person is entitled to one vote. And if somebody is stressing the need for education and about 500 touts are saying no, the touts would win”.

He said for the past two years governance has been shut down and everybody claiming to be a professional politician.

According to him, should we, because of calls that votes must count we divert our attention from good governance, is it because votes must count that we should spend billions of naira to register?, would the problems of this country disappear if the votes count?

The governor stated called on the Yoruba people to have a common agenda which he said, was the only way the zone could progress.

He added that he did not share the views of those who said the country would break adding that since they had been saying it in 1963 to date, the country had not broken up.

The guest lecturer strongly criticized the comments by some politicians in the South West saying that the zone must be in the mainstream politics.”Since 2003, no Yoruba woman has been found suitable for ministerial appointment in a country where Yoruba women have led in the acquisition of western education since the imposition of colonial rule. Even, in the distribution of ministerial positions, the Yoruba have faired worse than other ethnic groups. It is therefore open to debate if the Yoruba would have faired worse if they had not belonged to the mainstream”.