By Chukwudi Nweje
Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, the Labour Party (LP) governorship candidate in Lagos State, in this interview, decried what he called the selfish business style governance in the state.
Among others, he gave an insight into how he would run Lagos if elected the governor in 2023.
The Obi-Datti / LP mega rally was held in Lagos and parts of Nigeria on Saturday, October 1, how do you assess the rally and what message does it send to Nigerians?
The rally which was held all over Nigeria shows that the LP has become the official opposition party; it shows that the Nigerian people have taken over the politics of the country and now the people have decided that politics should not be in the hands of politicians; the people now know that power resides with them. That is what LP and the Obi-Datti movement is about. The movement is about changing the status quo from an era when politicians were in-charge of politics to an era where the people determine the politics. The people you saw at that rally were neither mobilised nor rented, they came out on their own to express themselves and show support for a candidate and a movement that they believe in. For me, I see a new kind of politics, a politics driven by integrity, capacity, and empathy substance. Nigerians are tired of people who use their position to accumulate wealth or have ties with people of questionable character. Now the people are saying that they want someone with integrity, a candidate that does not carry ‘baggage’ and a candidate whose antecedents could be verified by the people. This is the powerful message that Nigerians sent to the political elite at the Obi-Datti rally.
Incidentally, October 1 also marked the 62nd independence anniversary of Nigeria. In your opinion, how has the country progressed?
Nigeria has performed poorly as a country in the past 62 years of its independence. We have retrogressed from the little progress we made. For instance, if you had N1million seven years ago, you could get an equivalent of almost $4,000. Now you could barely get an equivalent of $1,500 on the same amount. Today, we have a situation where businesses are suffering, the price of diesel has gone up even though Nigeria produces crude oil. In 2015 when the All Progressives Congress (APC) came to power, Nigerians had hoped that the party would solve all the challenges that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) could not solve in the 16 years it was in power and that Nigeria would become a productive country; we thought that we would stop paying subsidy and that the country’s refineries would start working. But the APC government has worsened the unpleasant situation they met in all parameters. Youth unemployment, housing deficit, inflation, the strength of the currency, number of out-of-school children, banditry, terrorism, and insecurity that we thought was too bad under the President Goodluck Jonathan administration we now know was child’s play then. People could barely travel by road again. The worst is that the country has become so divided because we have a president who does not have the capacity to bring the people together. The president is so ethnic and divisive in his approach to everything. The APC has reversed all the gains Nigeria made during the PDP era from 1999 to 2015 and the country has taken a serious nose-dive. We are celebrating independence in relation to looking forward with the hope that the country can move forward from its status quo and mediocrity.
The APC came to power in 2015 on the strength of three campaign promises – security, economy, and anti-corruption – almost eight years down the line, how do you score the administration on these areas?
The President Muhammadu Buhari-led government has failed in all three areas. Look at the damage in terms of insecurity, Fulani herders coming down South, governors of the Southwest states of Nigeria had to form Amotekun to protect their states, look at what is happening in the Middle-belt? But rather than tackling the insecurity situation, the government is busy pushing for the Water Resources Bill, the RUGA and other non-essentials. These are the things that led to how divided Nigeria is because some groups are treated mildly while another group is massacred. The government might have recorded some wins against Boko Haram but the general feeling across the country is one of insecurity and that reflects on foreign direct investment (FDI) because nobody will invest in an environment where they don’t have the assurance of safety from the government. Farmers have left their farms and that has affected the prices of foodstuff leading to inflation, transporting food across the country is not safe and this has affected the cost of transportation which in turn affected the price of foodstuff. If you look at the economy, the numbers do not lie and the economy under President Buhari has performed very poorly compared to President Obasanjo and Presidents Yar’Adua and Jonathan’s governments if you look at the indices; then if you look at anti-corruption, you will see that there is no war against corruption because whatever you did, once you join the APC, your sins would be forgiven.
At 39, you are one of the youngest candidates going into the 2023 general elections; you contested for the position of a local government chairman in 2016 at about 30 years under KOWA Party, and in 2019, you contested for the Lagos West Senatorial seat under the PDP, and now you are contesting for the Lagos governorship under LP which is relatively a new party, what chances do you think you stand against the APC that has been in power since 1999?
My chances are not so much about how I intend to dislodge the APC. The people are the ones behind the LP movement; the party is about the people, look at the logo of the party, it is about the people – Papa, Mama and Pikin – it is not an accident. Look at what happened during the rally on October 1 that was not a rented crowd. When the APC and PDP hold their rallies, they give out money to the local governments to mobilise people, they bring buses to convey people and afterwards they pay the crowd to go back home. But the LP Obi-Datti rally only gave people a time and venue, and they showed up, which is powerful.
What made the difference?
My experience is that Nigerians view their leaders as their bosses and kings, which should not be the case. Nigerians hire the politicians to work for them, so the politicians should be servant-leaders; that is the only way they will work for the interest of Nigerians; for a servant-leader to emerge, the people must put him there; he must not buy his way in because if he buys his way in, he will not work in the interest of the people. So for me, the way a person emerges matters a lot.
Fortunately, the new Electoral Act allows the transmission of results directly from the polling unit to the server; with the new law, we can actually monitor what is going on at all the polling units simultaneously, as opposed to before when the results were carried from the polling unit to the Ward collation centre to the local government centre and then to the state. It is in this process of moving the result from one place to another that all the magic happen; it will no longer happen and that is why I say that everything is coming together; what we have to do as a party now is to make sure that our agents are well-trained and we also monitor the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), we must also ensure that every registered voter gets his/her voters card; there is a lot of manipulation going on, especially in Lagos State where a registered voter’s name sounds like he/she is from a particular part of the country, they will say that the voter’s card cannot be found. For LP, what we are doing is to make sure we galvanise the support base that we have created and ensure that we protect our supporters when they come out to vote.
Talking about supporters, many people associate the crowd around LP with the person of its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi. As Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, the governorship candidate in Lagos State what is your support base like?
I had the most opposition votes in Lagos in 2019 after Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Politics is about keying into an interest and Peter Obi has built a brand over a period of time – a brand of integrity and doing the right thing even though it is not popular – naturally there are people that will key into that brand because it represents their own interest. I left the PDP and joined LP because I resonate with that brand, and I am not scared to take a chance. Nobody could have seen what is happening with the Obi-Dient Movement when Peter Obi left PDP; he took a chance that appealed to a certain demographic that does not necessarily come out to participate in politics. But people are now inspired by the integrity and values Peter Obi stands for. I cannot claim to have the same followership that Peter Obi has but I know that in selling myself and carrying the party along and meeting people that resonate with Peter Obi, they will know that they have somebody that resonates in that mould in Lagos State in the person of Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour.
What is your assessment of the APC government in Lagos State?
The APC government in Lagos State has perfected the art of state capture, a state capture that focuses on milking the state for the interest of one man and his family and cronies. Lagos State has become like a company run in the interest of a few proprietors and it is not run transparently and they are not accountable to anybody. Unfortunately, people try to compare Lagos with other states in Nigeria but Lagos had always been independent; it was a city-state even during colonialism, it was a protectorate before the amalgamation. Lagos used to be one of the best places to live; as in 1966, Lagos was on the same list as New York and London. But for the last 15 years, Lagos is ranked as one of the worst places to live, constantly close to war-torn countries. The APC government in Lagos has failed because in over 20 years in power, it is not able to achieve what Alhaji Lateef Jakande achieved in four and half years.
What is responsible for Lagos State’s fall from being one of the best places to live to become one of the worst places to live?
The only thing I can think of is greed because greed stifles everything. When a state is run for a few people to make a profit as opposed to the quality of life of the people or creating an enabling environment to allow businesses and people to thrive but more to constantly looking for businesses to compete with and those you can increase their taxes or shaking people down to collect more money from them, it stifles growth. You can also see that the state has created this social class called ‘agberos’ that have on their own become the fourth arm of government and they go about harassing people because they are backed by the government. This is not in the interest of the state. There is no other greater depiction of this than what happened during EndSARS when BRT buses conveyed thugs wielding machetes to attack peaceful protesters in front of the State House with the governor sitting there and none of the thugs was brought to book.
There are calls for Lagos to be granted a special status state…
(Cuts in) I absolutely agree with that. Lagos State is the commercial capital of Nigeria, it is the state where we have the ports and residents of Lagos pay the price of the inconvenience of the traffic on the Amuwo-Odofin due to the trailers going in and out of the ports. This is the same thing that happens in the South-south, they take the crude oil and leave the communities with the negative effects which are polluted water, degraded environment, destruction of the aquaculture, and other hazards.
Your Master’s Degree thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Boston was entitled Traditional Revolution: formalizing the Informal, a proposal for Periphery Urbanite, Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt; if elected governor, how would you put this into practice in Lagos?
This thesis was actually about how to stop wasting waste and how to generate wealth from waste; after our human capital, the biggest resource we have in Lagos is the waste we generate. Waste is not something that should be wasted or just dumped in landfills, it is inefficient for today’s age, we should be generating power from waste that is organic, and we should be recycling plastic as opposed to leaving them to clog our drainages and causing problems of flooding.
What would be your priority areas if you were inaugurated as governor come May 29, 2023, and where should Lagosians expect to begin seeing changes within the first 100 days?
My priority areas in the first 100 days would be on urban planning renewal of the state; this would be tied into the transport system and housing. I would also focus on education and healthcare and incentivising growth in relation to companies and businesses. I would look at the comparative advantages of the different local governments and incentivise companies to set up there, youths in those local governments would be trained for free to acquire skills so that they would be employable because the employability skills set of our people is low. We must start teaching our people how to produce things, it should not just be about buying them and that is why Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of LP keeps talking about moving Nigeria from a consumption economy to a productive economy. At MIT, the motto of the school is ‘mind and heart’, in other words, it is not enough to think about something, you must make it with your hands.
What is your message to the electorate?
I will tell the electorate that we must all take politics seriously and that we cannot afford to leave it to the politicians. We must begin to interrogate the character of those that seek our votes because we can only hold them accountable every four years elections come. We must let the politicians know that the electorate hired them to serve the people and their interests and not to serve the interests of their fellow politicians and their friends and cronies.