In this interview with WALE AKINSELURE, Director General of the Peoples Democratic Party Campaign Council for the Ondo governorship election, Dr Eddy Olafeso, accuses APC of using state money for the poll
The Peoples Democratic Party lost Saturday’s election…
(Cuts in) Well, it’s all over, but the other aspect of reviewing exactly what happened will linger for a long time. The party is not taking it kindly for such a charade to be considered an election and being done in public glare. I think there must be a mark on it by the party, and the candidate already said he’s heading to court. You know, even where they won, they still manipulated the whole process, and nobody is relying on IReV anymore. They have resorted to self-help everywhere to just make sure they obliterate and annihilate us. But it’s not over yet.
So, in your assessment, why exactly did the party lose? Is it all manipulation, as you have claimed?
It is about money politics. It is that vote buying has acquired a new dimension that is unheard of, that somebody will lay online almost N20bn of state money for an election apart from the criminality and the distortion that it can bring about people that have been entirely very pauperised. It’s obvious now that they are using poverty as a weapon for election manipulations and that’s exactly what transpired here in Ondo State. You would have expected that we would all be very concerned that people are going to bed hungry, children can no longer resume school, parents cannot even go to work anymore just because they cannot afford it. And then suddenly they throw caution to the wind and have appropriated the state resources as their own. The criminality involved is exactly what we are investigating.
A former Governor of Oyo State, Adebayo Alao-Akala, once said election in Nigeria is about being smart. Why was the PDP unable to match the APC during the election?
The reality is how can you be smart to the point of, as a member of the opposition, raking in almost N20bn for an election and you know it runs contrary to the whole electoral process? We didn’t distribute money for people to vote for us. You know that on the average if you mount an ‘okada’ to go for an election, there is no way you can get there without having in your pocket N1,000 or N2,000 that will take you to and return you to your home. We desired to get as many of our people out to vote. So, assisting in transportation and logistics of arrival at the polling unit is what we considered our responsibility. We didn’t know that APC would take whatever is left in the public coffers to win at all costs; this is for the seat of a governor who was there for a year and didn’t do anything.
Are you saying PDP did not buy votes?
Strangely, even when you report that people are buying votes, the police will look the other way and say they they are not supposed to move closer to the place. I had cause to report two or three times why people were voting and showing their ballot paper, which is against the electoral law. They said open secret ballot but that was not what happened that day. We saw it openly. It was like an open market, buyer meets seller, seller meets buyer and negotiation was good. We witnessed all that, a very ugly moment in our history and what can we do?
The APC seemed to present a formidable force compared to the PDP, which looked divided going into the election. Don’t you think that was also a major factor in the PDP losing the Ondo election?
It was not a factor in our campaign. We started the campaign on July 4 and we campaigned until November 14. We took our time to go through the 18 local governments, through the 203 wards and as many of the units as we could visit of the 3,933. We brought down everybody, members of the PDP Governors’ Forum. Our two leaders in the South-West are very united and it was a common front. No, it had nothing to do with whatever was going on in our party at this moment. There is no direct effect. There might be some remote connectivity in this regard but I don’t think it played out. We did our best. Forty-eight hours to this election, if you are a resident of Ondo State, you know whom the people wanted to vote for until the money influence and in this extreme poverty, N10, 000 means a lot, a world to so many people.
So, your hope is now in the court for justice?
Well, we have to go through the process. Even if, no matter what, I still believe, along the line, there will be the hand of the Almighty, that there might be someone out there in the judiciary who will say, ‘No, enough is enough.’ We are very hopeful of justice.