Senator Smart Adeyemi is a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Kogi State. He is also the Director General of Yahaya Bello/Onoja Campaign Council for the forthcoming November 16 governorship election in the state. He was also the senatorial candidate of the party in the February 23 National Assembly election, which was won by Senator Dino Melaye but annulled recently by the Kogi West Senatorial District Election Petition Tribunal and the Appellate Court, with fresh election coming up on November 16. In this interview with our correspondent, WALE IBRAHIM, in Lokoja, Adeyemi expressed satisfaction with the two judgments. He also spoke on his preparation for the coming election and other salient issues in Kogi politics.
he Court of Appeal in Abuja has reaffirmed the judgement of the Kogi West Senatorial District Election Petition Tribunal, which sacked the incumbent ssenator, representing the district, Senator Dino Melaye, for not being properly elected. What is your take on this development?
Naturally, you expect that I would be very happy at the end of the day, that the horse and its rider have been thrown into the sea. When you have been cheated, you have been robbed and there is respite for you. Naturally, I am very delighted. It is now a different ball game. All the loopholes to manipulate the results will not happen again. Dino is not a man that has won election before, just for the manipulation of the system. In this country, when you want to be righteous, when you want to be faithful, people would want you to look like a foolish man. You are not a foolish man; just that we have different upbringings, different moral and social foundation, and different orientation of life. When you have proper moral foundation, you will not get involved in anything that is unlawful. When you look at me and my opponent, we are of different backgrounds. What is Dino’s track record? Where has he worked before? What are his antecedents? What does he have to fall back on? Has he achieved anything to make him comfortable? People like him will do everything to win election. They will go to the extreme to win an election. But thank God that we have the judiciary that is credible, that is God fearing, that ruled according to the law based on the facts before them. The two judgements, the tribunal and that of the appeal court are not different.
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Now that fresh election has been ordered by both the tribunal and the appellate court, what measures have you or your party put in place to checkmate the electoral fraud that happened in the February 23 election?
You know in the first instance, Dino himself went to court to secure a judgement that the collation of results must be in Kabba, the headquarters of the senatorial district. When I was told he was in court, I said there was no issue for me to join him in court because he was asking for the obvious, according to the Electoral Law and according to the Constitution. So, why should somebody go to court in the first instance? So, I assumed that it was an exercise in futility; it has no meaning. This is because I expected that INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) would comply with the extant laws. They would definitely, because that was what the law says. At the end of the day, there was a valid judgement of the Federal High Court in Lokoja, compelling INEC to collate results in Kabba. And INEC was represented at the trial when the case came up. INEC never appealed the judgement. When I was leading Dino with over 30,000 votes, I went to INEC Headquarters in Kabba only for us to wait till eternity; nobody was in sight. The INEC staff were not in sight. No officials, except me and my campaign officials; my campaign directors and agents. We were told that they had gone to Lokoja. Then I said it was not possible. On their way to Lokoja, they stopped at a village called Oshokoshoko. That was where they parked and amended the result. They manipulated it. And when they were to announce the result on the 23rd (February), they announced it at midnight. So, we assumed that it was over. We assumed that since they had announced the result, there was nothing we could do again .We went to Lokoja, the result was not available until 25th of February. Why was it so? It was on the 25th they were able to perfect all the riggings and calculations. So, on that 25th, we were surprised, but as God would have it, the election was held on 23rd and it was dated 25th, which was against the law. From the result, of all the contestants, it was only Dino’s column that had alterations all through. They recorded exactly what I scored, his own was tampered with. They changed 6 to 8, 8 to 9 and so on. Who will vote for Dino? We are from the same local government area. We are all Yoruba people. Do you think Yoruba people will vote for somebody who is not representing them well? Yoruba value moral upbringing. In the Yoruba context, you will understand what I am saying; Yoruba will appreciate what you are saying, what comes out of your mouth, the way you parade yourself. Do you think our people, who are in the majority, would vote for Dino? The answer is no. Has he conducted himself? Has he represented us well? Would you say as a Nigerian that you are proud of Dino as a senator? How many Nigerians would identify with his utterances, his conducts? These are the things. It is only in Nigeria that you will lead people without antecedents. Before anybody would be elected to be in the Senate, the upper chamber of any nation, you must be somebody with proven integrity. You must be somebody with rich background. You must be somebody who has excelled in your chosen career. You are brought to come and serve the people. That is why they call it the upper chamber. That is why you must have succeeded in other fields before they ask you to come and run. The Senate is not for somebody without any rich background, without any record of service. I left journalism after serving as two-term National President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ. I led a professional body in this country. You won’t tell me I am unknown. So, when you find yourself in a position you didn’t prepare for or where you are not supposed to be, definitely you are going to mess it up. And that is what is happening to Dino. He found himself in the position he did not bargain for. The corruption of the system paved the way for such people to emerge. That is what happened.
INEC has said that the Kogi West Senatorial Election may like hold during the forthcoming governorship election, how prepared are you for the battle ahead?
Well, I am not a new person to our people. I am a man of achievements. I have served our people with dignity, with honour. They know that. Anytime they fix for the election, we are ready. No shaking. In the past four weeks, we have been receiving defectors to APC from other political parties on daily basis. In fact, we are overwhelmed. The defection is indeed great. People are joining our party from the east, central and west districts as everybody is defecting. Former local government chairmen and councillors are joining APC. Who is afraid? We are fully prepared for the election any time, any day. Election is not when you make noise on the internet. Election in Nigeria is gradually becoming an issue. Integrity and politics are been linked. For them (Nigerians) to elect you, you must be somebody of proven integrity. Gradually that is what is happening in Nigeria. Nigeria’s political landscape is evolving. Where is he (Dino Melaye) coming from? What has he done in the past? What are his records of time past? You can’t just bring anybody. They will ask you questions now. The electorate are more on top of their games and know better. It is not just ‘I want to support somebody’. They want to ask questions. I am well known and all my achievements are overwhelming. I do not see any senator in Kogi West that can be compared with what I have done for the people of the zone. This is a statement of facts. So, there is no problem. We are ready.
As the Director General, Kogi APC, Bello/Onoja Campaign Council for the November 16th gubernatorial election, what should the people be expectating?
Are you still asking me this question? What do we expect? It is total victory for our party, APC. There is a Yoruba adage which says: ‘if they say that it is a wild animal that will kill you, certainly it cannot be an animal like snail’. As it is today, the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) is no longer strong. Do they even have a candidate? This is because the emergence of their candidate is still being challenged in the court of law and it is when the court clears the air that we know their candidate is ready to contest. Have you seen them campaigning? Where are the billboards of the candidate? That tells you that something is fundamentally wrong. During the September PDP primary election, they were busy sharing dollars. We have them on video tape where they were sharing dollars. The fact of the matter is that, have you taken cognisance of who is going to win this governorship election? There is no other person than Yahaya Bello. I will give you the reasons. If the PDP is a party that knows what they are doing, they would have allowed Captain Idris Wada, the immediate past governor to pick the ticket of the party. This would have allowed them to come to Kogi West Senatorial District and put on the table and say that in the next four years, the governorship will be zoned to them. We have Yahaya Bello for the first time. The Igala have done 20 years. Let the Central do eight years in the interest of justice and fair play. It should be Kogi West next. Who told them that Kogi West will not vote for Yahaya Bello, who is our neighbor and our in-law? They are our friends and brothers. I am not saying the Igala are not our brothers, they are our cousins. When they speak Igala language, you pick a lot Yoruba words; we more or less are one. It is either we left them or they left us. But I know we have a meeting point historically. Having said this, who will win now? The majority of the people want to vote for the governor. The people of Kogi West will like to vote for Governor Yahaya Bello so that they will produce the next governor. But, if even it won’t come, this is the reality on ground now for the people of Kogi West. The second reason is that when you look at the aftermath of the primary election of the PDP, many of the key stakeholders are defecting to APC. Let me tell you that in the next two weeks, more members of the opposition parties are joining APC in their large numbers because they have seen that there is no headway for them. Some of the so-called leaders are also coming to join APC. That is the situation they have found themselves. I will not deceive myself; I am telling you the true. It will be a miracle if the major opposition party gets 25 percent in the governorship election. God is just with APC. I am with Yahaya Adoza Bello. Every component of Kogi believes in this government. We have not been robbed, we have not been cheated. In my senatorial district, the Omi Dam near where Ejiba Rice Mill was constructed over forty years ago, nobody utilized it until when Yahaya Adoza came. If this is what he can do for my people, it is okay because that rice mill will employ over 5,000 people.
More so, the Chief of Staff is an Igala and a Christian. In the time past, governors of Kogi always bring their in-laws, their brothers, their cousins, as Chief of Staff. Yahaya Bello has brought a man with different faith and different tribe. From the West, we have Mathew Kolawole as Speaker of the state House of Assembly, the Secretary to the State Government, Ayoade Folashade Arike, Asiwaju Ashiru Idris as Commissioner for Finance, Bolanle Amupitan as Commissioner for Women Affairs and Kehinde Oloruntoba as Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources. So, what else? We are adequately represented in this government and have a sense of belonging that we are part of this government. These are the issues. Forget those who make noise on the internet.
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The problem of this government is that it came to fight corruption, institutionalisWed corruption in time past. In Kogi, the stupid people they called stakeholders take money without working. They allocated money to their account on monthly basis under the PDP. I was a stakeholder then. I refused to collect then and I told them that somebody will come to ask you this question. And most of the influential people put the names of their children, sisters and brothers in the pay roll. How were they able to establish ghost workers? There were people who had been drawing salaries in the last five, six and seven years in different state capitals in Nigeria. And they said they were working in Kogi State. They now asked why taking your salaries from Abuja or Port Harcourt? All these are the children of influential people. So, when Yahaya Bello came, he was fighting corruption and corruption was fighting back. So, they employed people on the internet to pull him down and frustrate him from working. I hope you will appreciate that Kogi is the most diverse state, so diverse that you do not know who is an indigene of this or that unless you move into the interior. Such a state is so difficult and complicated to govern. That is the fact. But he has been able to manage all of us. Yahaya Bello is currently embarking on rural electrification projects in the Eastern Senatorial District. These are the communities of the former governor without electricity. How do you define that kind of a thing? Why would he (Bello) not win election?
Presently, he is constructing the whole of Dekina township roads as well as Ankpa, Abejukolo roads and a host of others. Agaza, Kuroko-Itakpe roads in the central senatorial district and Ejuku, Ponyan, Jege roads in the west are all under construction. As far as I am concerned, this government is better than the previous governments except that of the late Prince Abubakar Audu, who laid
