There’ll Be Consequences If Edo Guber Is Rigged –Omede

Bishop Samuel Omede is the Director-General of Labour Party (LP) campaign organisation for this weekend’s governorship election in Edo State. In this interview with ONYEKACHI EZE, he speaks on the chances of the candidate of the party, Olumide Akpata, and other issues

What are the chances of your candidate emerging victorious in this weekend’s election?

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, Barr. Olumide Akpata, his running mate, Yusuf Asamah Kadiri, is the next governor of Edo State.

Edo State cannot wait to break from the hell and unmitigated purgatory which both the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) represent in the last combined 24 years of our nation’s history of misery. This is not mere ringside rave or political hype of our candidate in the ring.

It is a verdict from empirical evidences on the streets, hamlets, villages, onshore and riverine communities, towns and cities from the 18 local government areas of Edo State where our hardworking candidate and campaign teams have stopped and canoed to in the last five months of solid, unrelenting campaigns.

You sound confident but you know that in Nigeria, diligent campaigns alone do not always determine who wins an election at the end of the day…

Barring any mid-day darkness and treason of unprecedented rigging, the vast majority of Edo citizens and residents will tell you that Labour Party will win the day and make Akpata the next governor of our state.

Rigging or no rigging or imposition of an unelected candidate against the wishes of Edo people, whether coming from APC or PDP or both, Edo is not Lagos or Adamawa. Edo people are not Abuja or PDP’s tool to be used and discarded without consequences because, there shall be consequences.

The PDP, which is the ruling party in Edo State and the APC may be banking on their previous achievements, what will be Labour Party’s selling point?

Our people’s back 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 buildings at Palm House (Edo State government secretariat hub), Oyegun Civil Servants Building, Edo Jobs Centre and equipped them with a hundred computers, which are mere shining graves housing hungry workers and dying pensioners.

Out of Edo State population of nearly five million citizens, adult working age of over three million and 2.6 million voters accredited by the Independent National Electoral Commission (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-tormented and ravaged by epidemic inflation from one pay day to the next pay day. What happens to the rest citizens, who cater for them and sustain the rest 4.5 million or more Edolites in penury and the grip of both PDP’s and APC’s genocidal economic policies?

That is the question that our Labour Party candidate, Akpata, just like our party’s wonder 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 State in particular. So, be vigilant when the sitting PDP makes these claims of having built this or that fantastic sepulchre here and there.

A state government embarking on fancy eatery enterprise and shopping plaza falls objectionably into the mould of what our own Peter Obi describes as consumption mentality instead of 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 a day 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. These are the things they gloriously call infrastructure achievement.

In contrast to these claims, what we have on ground in Edo State from yearto-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 State except the Lagos expressway; massive youth unemployment, increasingly unaffordable and deteriorating education spectre, miserable per capita income and workers salaries choked and strangled by the daily horror of hyper-inflation.

You cannot intimidate or blindfold the average enlightened Edo voter with the smell of money or razzmatazz of power and pomposity or incumbency power and federal might

What Edo people have on ground are traumatic crimes and insecurity, and in place of electricity, a blanket of iron darkness which even the sun and a million development Memorandum of Understandings (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 State, 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 Revenue. This is besides rising from N15 billion to N65 billion today, and postsubsidy removal windfalls from the federal after fuel soared from N197 per litre to N660, now heading to one dollar per litre or N1,300 in filling stations.

These are the harrowing indices of misgoverance, crushing underdevelopment and hard impact corruption which Edo voters will be bleeding from when they go to vote against APC and PDP on Saturday. 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 Olu Akpata, with the power of their ballots.

The two other parties APC and PDP would be presenting candidates with strong backgrounds and heavy financial war chest. Some people say the APC candidate, Senator Monday Okpewolo, is coming into the race on a springboard of the proverbial federal might, while the outgoing governor, Godwin Obaseki, has already declared the election a do-or-die affair. Are you not worried, and do you think Labour Party can withstand them?

With all humility, I take pride in telling you this and 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 money or razzmatazz of power and pomposity or incumbency power and federal might. If that is all APC and PDP have to offer or planning to bring on election day, they will be disappointed.

Fortunately for Labour Party and unfortunately for both the APC and PDP, Edo voters have been asking the APC candidate, so you have so much money to bring in luxury buses to solve the transportation need of Edo people why did you not bring them long before election. They understand that they are just Greek gifts and gamblers’ charity for winning election and not out of love for the people.

They are asking Governor Obaseki and Asue Ighodalo almost everywhere across most of Edo’s 18 local government areas of Edo State, including the GRA and the state capital, Benin City, there are deplorable roads, dilapidated public amenities, absent health centres and grinding poverty among the people are like epidemic.

Edo voters therefore understand that it is all emotional burglary of the people’s mind and exploitation of their enforced poverty for ballot jobbing.

How would you react to the call that the next governor of Edo State, should come from Edo Central senatorial district because the zone, particularly 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 the total understanding, love, solidarity and support for their yearning from our candidate, Barr. Olu Akpata and we the entire leadership and members of Labour Party from Edo South and Edo North.

I further believe that at the next and nearest dispensation, our party will do everything under our powers and purview to support and actualise 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 recognising the merits of capacity, competence and character in Barr. Olu Akpata over tribal partisanship, our party’s delegates representing Edo North and South senatorial districts overwhelmingly voted for Akpata to defeat the three Edo Central governorship aspirants who scored seven votes each, totalling 21 votes. This was because in the Labour Party, what we recognise, as our national leader 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, Labour Party, has never governed Edo State 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 this two and half decades that these two parties viciously did not consider that power shift to Edo Central?

As a party committed to our motto of justice and equal opportunity, Labour Party shall begin this valid ethical bargain in our own 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 out party into office in order to implement this bargain in the coming dispensations. As a party, our candidate Akpata and leaders of our party are committed to a meritorious power shift in the nearest future.