Hon. Sikirullahi Olawale Ogundele is the State Chairman of the Hon. Ladi Adebutu faction of the Peoples Democratic Party in Ogun State. Ogundele, in this interview with SEGUN OLATUNJI, speaks on the reasons behind the loss of the PDP in the 2011 and 2015 general elections in Ogun, the crisis rocking the PDP and the October 8 local government council elections in the state. Excerpts:
Your party, the PDP, has been in opposition since 2011. How has it fared in playing its opposition role in the state?
At times I go spiritual about it by saying that it’s God that wanted to show Himself to us. If not for that, so many of our people took that success for granted and mismanaged the goodwill of the party. Some turned themselves into tin gods. That’s why we spiritually lost at the polls. People got tired of us through our shenanigans, through our mismanagement of the success I’ve earlier mentioned. So, we give glory to Almighty God that we’ve been able go back to the drawing board to identify the reasons why we lost and some of our actions that led to that. I want to tell you that we’ve identified some of those problems and by the grace of God, by the time we start to fix in what we intend to do to correct some of these actions that led to our failure, things will get back to normal.
Despite the fact that you’ve identified the problems with the PDP in Ogun State, the party still remains enmeshed in crisis and now you have two parallel executives… (Cuts in)
As I’ve said in many fora, my emergence as the state chairman of the PDP would unite the party in Ogun State. It will become a unified party. I intend to run party administrative policy that would give room for an all-inclusive kind of administration. We’ve been talking to the aggrieved ones, the so-called parallel excos, the Bankole camp. I would want to correct an impression here that we’ve never had factions. We have people in camps. Our own faction has been authenticated to be the legally backed exco; that is the exco led by me, Honourable Sikirullahi Olawale Ogundele and all the shenanigans of Prince Buruji Kashamu have been curtailed. We’ve been able to match him. He believes so much in legal action and we took it up against him and we had the judgment and to God be the glory, the judgment has been working for us. So, all other camps, the Bankole faction and some of the reasonable ones amongst the Kashamu caucus, we’ve been talking to them and then we’ve been seeing results and with the coming local government elections, we’ve been able to accommodate them as vice chairmen and councilors. So, we’ve been working in harmony and all the steps and actions have been put in place and have really worked for the camps; our own camp and the Bankole faction. In any case, the party has never been factionalised. It’s been in camps and we are the only recognized and legally backed PDP exco in Ogun State and the OGSIEC has already identified with us by picking our own list of candidates for the forthcoming local government council elections as the authentic one.
Your own faction and that of Kashamu have been at loggerheads for a very long time. What has been the problem between the two factions?
We’ve been out of government for some years now. As I said earlier, we went back to the drawing board to identify the reasons why lost at the poll. I told you we identified some problems and we put up measures to tackle them. So, one of the problems we identified was that an individual took it upon himself to commercialise the party offices. We found out that getting party elective positions became a game for the highest bidder under the previous leadership. If you have money, you just purchase your ticket from the then leadership. We put up our best that we needed to change this. As I’ve said, we can’t afford not to be in government in 2019 considering the insensitivity of the current APC-led administration. We had the opportunity in the last elections but it was poorly managed. We identified some of the problems and we concluded that we could not continue to run a highest bidder’s game in Ogun PDP. We, the like minds, gathered ourselves together and we started to group some of our people who believed in that cause that we could not continue. We felt somebody should not just come and continually do business with our political future. So, we decided to part ways with him and then we regrouped and unfortunately, he didn’t like it. Normally, we expected a kind of resistance from him. So, at the end of the day, we got somebody else to lead us in the person of Honourable Ladi Adebutu. We looked for some qualities in that person that would be willing to lead us, a less controversial person, politically. Senator Buruji Kashamu has stepped on so many toes and we said the person that would lead us in 2019 must meet up with these requirements, that person must be less controversial, he must be very popular. There is no street in Ogun State today that you won’t find the impact of Adebutu’s family. We needed somebody who could lead us in facing the incumbent and get us back to governance and he must be financially buoyant. So, these are just the three main qualities that we looked for and we found all these qualities in Ladi Adebutu. So, we adopted him as our leader. He has since been leading us and we’ve been engaged in so many political encounters with Buruji Kashamu. We’ve held elections at the congress level, we won. We went to court and the outcome of the court is what is working for us now. So, I’m a very principled man. We looked for like minds in the PDP in Ogun who have suffered in the hands of Prince Buruji Kashamu. This person has told us from the beginning that he’s a business man. He’s indirectly telling us that he has come to do business and the question now is for how long are we going to allow him to continue to do business with our future? So, many things went wrong and led to our failure at the polls. The unpopular candidates who could put down so much money were given the tickets. Now, I want to tell you with all confidence that today in Ogun State we have a structure that can win all elections.
Some people have said that the rift between Adebutu and Kashamu have a lot to do with the 2019 governorship in Ogun State. Do you share this view?
No! I’ve just explained to you now that we looked for some personalities. There were so many people that we could have adopted to lead us but these three key requirements were very important for whoever was going to lead us. I said that person must be less controversial, must be popular and by virtue of the business of the Adebutu family, they are in every street in Ogun State, if not in the whole of Nigeria. I can confidently tell you that the family has about 450 agents across the state. So, this is a family that has impacted so positively in the lives of so many people in Ogun State. They have contributed immensely to the economy of Ogun State and the third one, the person that had got the financial muscle to match the incumbent. So many people have that money but they are not popular. We are going to use that name to get back to governance. Out of the over 40 elective positions, he is just one and even if he’s going to run for governorship, he’s going to run for one. The governorship thing is not coming up in the next three years. So, it can’t be because somebody wants to be governor that’s why we decided to bring up a faction.
