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Que: Good evening Sir, can you introduce yourself sir?
My name is, Prince Abiodun Abu, I’m the SSA political intelligence.
Que : Sir, we have seen you in ICC, what is your position in ICC and what exactly is the nature of your job here?
I am the director of volunteers here in ICC and the nature of my job is to make sure I mobilize all the volunteers across the state and understand their functions and make them understand the importance of the upcoming election, and how it is a must win, which of course I have been doing and I believe, with the number of volunteers we have here in Lagos if they all came out en masse something good will come out of it.
Que: Sir how can you describe the presidential election last week Saturday because we saw that APC didn’t perform according to expectations to the extent that the Labour Party defeated APC in Lagos state. We saw that the results were not encouraging, what do you think caused all these?
From my own point of view I believe some of the causes of this little crisis of which we are going to find lasting solutions to, is a lot of disagreement between members of the party, the aggrieved members of the party are much, starting from the ward level to the LGA level and to the state level. I for one, I believe they have every cause to be angry but it should be our responsibility to have meetings and talks with them and let them understand why they should keep their anger because of what we have at our front and also beg them so we can put heads together and work together, this issue that I am talking about, it has started from the party angle of it, the party did not do it right when we did the last party congress because i have never seen when a winning team will be thrown aside. If you look at the stats of those at the ward level that were thrown away, they are over 65%, so also if we look at that of the LGA they are about the same figure and at state there’s about 95% that was thrown off and bringing in new hands who have little experience in less than a year to elections, how could it work? This same people that were thrown away are the same people who conducted elections for the new state officials who came in because they were delegates, how can they have been delegates and yet they were thrown away, that is just one aspect of it. We have a lot of other aspects where people participate in some of our last elections in the local government and some other ones and they were not looked into. When we are doing elections, if you cannot give them the money they paid to buy form during their electioneering, if they were even called and talked to, it would’ve still gone a loge way but when some of these things are not done, they feel neglected. And the height of it, the election unfortunately we know what happened between our president and Emefiele when they decided to change money and hoard it away from the system, all to punish us, and so you put all these together, of course it will weaken our people. These are some of the things I noticed and I will like to appeal to those in higher authority to look into it and see how we can sit down together and talk over it. It’s a thing we can talk about before the next election and God will give us victory on the 11th of March.
Que: Sir we saw that in this campaign, we have the Lagos state campaign council in which the DG is Ganiu Solomon and we have independent campaign council which Hon. Tayo Ayinde is the DG, so what do you think they can do to talk to these aggressive members so they can come together and galvanize support for our governor come March 11th
Everybody is trying to put heads together and have decided that let’s all give ourselves the necessary support to make sure we can achieve our aim, our goal is simple, victory for Asiwaju, victory for Sanwo-Olu. It is the responsibility of the party to take up the challenge of what is going on, the ICC is just to complement their effort.
Que: Do you think Mr Governor needs to call all these stakeholders together and talk to them so that everybody can talk about their grievances before the election comes up on March 11th.
Yes, for now I think that is the best we could do but, it is so unfortunate because it isn’t supposed to get to this level because this is supposed to be the responsibility of the party. The party is supposed to have looked into all these areas and put up different committees of dignitaries among the party leaders who are supposed to look into these issues.
Que: Sir, we heard that people are complaining bitterly that the people that do not know how to do this work are the ones put on directorate and they are coming here collecting money, they don’t have support groups, they don’t have anybody and they’ve been lying and what we saw on Saturday was that these people couldn’t even go house to house to mobilize electorates to come out and deliver for Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu upon all what the man have done for APC in Lagos and Nigeria in general.
If I want to go into that area I do not understand what our leaders are doing at home what are the GAC members and chairman doing at home, there is no chairman that is too small to take responsibility of his local government, that is why Asiwaju has given us 37 LCDA to make this thing easy for everybody so if any local government chairman together with any leaders we have there, if they had come together to do these as one, it wouldn’t have gotten to this level. The directorates that are here, what I discovered is that they were cash crunched here and we know the cause, but what I’m saying is what we’re these leaders doing at their various homes, we have some leaders who are multi millionaires who are members of the DAC, who never gave one naira in their local government to support the election, what are they doing? Asiwaju has made deals and sacrifices for every one of us to be seeing and enjoying what we are enjoying today in Lagos state, so my major blames go to these leaders and the council chairmen.
Que: Sir, what do you think Mr Governor should do to avoid the crisis that happened not to repeat itself on March 11th, 2023.
what I am going to advice is, Mr governor should call them, talk to them and make them see reason why they should support at their various local government for this coming election, the election we just did was Nigeria election which the governor on his own carried on his head, running everywhere, why will the local government chairmen not carry this one on their head, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t carry it on their head because without the state, they cannot be. So they should carry the responsibility not on their shoulders but on their heads because the governor carried that of the federation on his head to give all
Que: Sir, lastly, you are the SSA to the governor, what efforts have you made to let Mr governor know the challenges you people have faced or have you decided to say nothing, or have you reported to another person besides Mr governor?
I work as SSA to Mr governor through the chief of staff so in most cases I channel my issues to the chief of staff to report to the governor, that’s what I do.
Que: what has been the response of the chief of staff to these issues, have there been any efforts from the chief of staff to be able to explain these issues to Mr governor?
Well I want to believe that some of cases I channeled through the chief of staff is why we are seeing the efforts today in trying to call all together, going from one local government to another, talk to the chairmen and the leaders, these are some of the things we discussed.
Que: Generally what are your advices for volunteers, support groups, the leaders of each council and local government concerning the upcoming election on March 11th?
My Advice is that everyone of us, all stakeholders starting from our leaders down to members, for all of us to put heads together, this time around we have to work and fight whoever we wants to fight with us to get our victory. We took a lot of things for granted thinking it was child’s play but we’ve seen it, all of us have seen that this isn’t child’s play so all of us are going to come out to work as a family and fight whoever wants to fight us ti achieve our aim.
