My experience will be a great asset to Ajegunle when I represent them in Reps –Taiwo

Hon. Kolawole Taiwo (HKT) is a former Deputy Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly; he is now the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State for the House of Representatives in the 2019 election. In this interview with PATRICK OKOHUE, he speaks on the last APC primary, President Muhammadu Buhari and what he will do differently if elected to represent his people of Ajegunle.

You are one of the aspirants that emerged successful in the last primary of the APC in Lagos State, how will you describe the experience at the primary?
It was not easy, it is something that one will just keep giving thanks and adoration to God that it came out better, even better than one imagined.

The experience was quite different from my past experiences, this is the first time in a long time that I will be contesting from outside, I always contest from inside,

but this time around I contested from outside and it is not easy contesting from outside, you will be fighting so many forces.

So I give thanks and adoration to God, I thank my friends, those that love me, those that I met in government, those I have had course to have dealings with, they stood by me, they are the pillars and I will forever remain grateful to all of them.

For the first time in this dispensation the Lagos State APC decided to go by way of direct primary to elect those that will run on their ticket…
It is not the first time, my first election in AD (Alliance for Democracy) was by direct primary, so it is the second time since 1998.

So, between then and now and with the developments in-between, how do you see this direct primary, will you say Nigeria is ripe for this experience?
Well, then politicians were fewer in number and they were finite, you can know the number of politicians that are in ward A or the number of politicians in ward B,

so you know who to talk to, we also had caucuses and you know the caucus to meet and talk to and if they adopt you all their members will know,

but this time around it is different, politicians are becoming infinite, every voter is now a politician and every politician now a voter,

so you are talking of a huge number of people and now many people want to get to power not necessarily for the same reasons we started it, then our intentions was to serve the people, we want to be known and we talked less about money,

but now people see it as investment, therefore they are ready to do anything and some of us cannot counter it by fighting and even the topmost leaders.

In some cases leaders in government will get themselves involved, so I can only thank God that I was able to get the ticket and I thank my leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for his leadership role in the party.

People say in indirect primary politicians have opportunity of seeing individual delegates and that delegates also have opportunity of mingling…….
Yes, because they are finite, let me give you my experience in 2015, there was a particular ward that when I calculated the money I spent on each of the delegate it was like N150,000, just one ward and you have like six wards to touch,

it is not a juicy story and to reduce the involvement of money in our politics direct primary is good, but we still need to do more in the area of security, because it can become really rowdy and unruly.

If you say direct primary is better, how do you deal with the issue of party leaders who are the ones in charge of the primary and may decide to favour who they want to favour?
Yes, those areas that needs fine-tuning. If it was not stopped since 1998, we would have gotten to a stage where you will not even need to worry, it will be like autopilot, secondly we may have also designed a programme that will make it easier.

Let me give you an example in LASU (Lagos State University), at the Student Union Government (SUG), they developed a software using their matriculation number as registration number and students were able to vote from anywhere they were,

there was no particular point of voting and at the end of the day the results were announced immediately after the election.

That is improvement, that is scientific support for election, assuming we have been doing it and we perfected our register and we now know our members and the members are finite,

we can come up with programmes that can allow everybody vote using their android phones, using their registration number as access code and at the end of the day nobody will need to cajole anybody or force anybody to be on a any particular line,

but we are yet to get to that stage, that is what we should be working towards and I know our party will get there.

You know it will even make the second election simpler, because when most of the party members say they want you and if your party has gotten to the stage where it has been accepted by the people, it makes it easier for the candidate to scale through.

So, I like direct primary in so many ways, from the selection of those that are going to conduct election from the ward level must be done in such a way that all contesting aspirants should have a say or none of them should have a say.

It should be done in such a way that those people will be apolitical, they mustn’t support any of the candidates and they must be ready to abide by the rules and dictates of the party.

If we are able to cross that hurdle it means the biasness is reduced to the barest minimum, then it will now be the voice of the people which will be better.

There is one other issue that has become of concern in recent time, it happened in Edo, Ekiti and it happened again in Osun State, the problem of vote buying by party supporters or supporters of particular candidates at election, how do you see this practice impacting future elections?
Inducement has always been there, but it has never been open, but you know those staggered elections are different from the general one, because those other states that doesn’t have business with the election,

they will come, like Osun election, Osun election will always be contentious because it is the last election before the general election and you know it has a lot of stories to tell, that is why everybody will want to win the election by force, but I know it will get to a stage when contesting election will not be a do or die again.

We are in a developmental period, we must pass through it, like I said earlier, when we contested election in 1999 it was not because we wanted to make big money, but to represent our people and make a difference, we want to fulfill our promise,

but suddenly it changed, it became an employment, you know that if you are elected a councilor you will be given a car, if you are elected a House of Assembly member you know you will get a car and you can build a house and live a good life,

those are the motivations, but it will get to a stage when those things will start dropping again, the real reasons for election will start coming out. Take for instance;

if you listen to the comment of people now, you hear people complaining about the economy, people that doesn’t know anything about the economy,

they talk about the roads and all that and very soon people will start having consciousness about the major reason why they are in government, things will start changing.

You know we are lucky, I always tell people that I give thanks to God for giving us President Buhari, people say Buhari is weak and all that, look no president will carry fire on his head, no,

the job of the president is not to carry fire on his head, his greatest work is to sign things and before he signs all those advisers and ministers around him must have perfected it,

the president is supposed to be a symbol, a symbol of incorruptibility of Nigeria. We are talking of anti corruption, and he has really exhibited it, if it were before SSG will not be sacked for reasons of corruption, not in Nigeria ,

sacked because they found him wanting for some contract awards, he awarded the contracts to his personal company and didn’t do the job, they sacked him, if the president is able to get to the stage of sacking the number three to him in the executive,

this government has also sacked the DSS boss for committing an error and there are so many people that have been charged for anti corruption reasons, but you know corruption will fight back.

As for me I always thank God, when you talk about economic meltdown I tell you it is not limited to Nigeria, those that were more affected are the oil producing countries and it is almost general, particularly we that depends solely on oil,

even countries with more reserve than Nigeria are in trouble, it is not easy to get out of that problem and that problem has spilled over to political you know politicians like to resists things like that.

We are also lucky that we have the kind of vice president that we have, he is not ordinary, he is from Lagos and one of Asiwaju’s think tank and he has really exhibited it, so we are lucky as a nation and things will get better.

Coming back to your ambition, you were in the House of Assembly for 16 years, you were Majority Leader, Deputy Speaker and you were on your way to becoming Speaker when you lost election, I also know that you attracted quite some projects to your constituency, what more do you want to do now that you are still aspiring to go to the House of Representatives?
Thank you very much, I have met this question severally in my campaign and I always tell them that I won election when I was 37 years old and I am yet to be 60, so I am still a young man, so I cannot retire, the retirement age is 60 years,

if you want to look at it from that angle. But, seriously I love what I am doing, I have been representing my people for quite some time and I believe there are still several questions to be answered.

During the campaign I gave some examples, when I was Majority Leader I ran after Anti-Trust law, I went to America got some material on Anti-Trust,

but when I came back to Nigeria I gave it to our legal unit and they said no, anything Trust is in the exclusive legislative list, I still want to do Anti-Trust, that is the only tool that we can use to check the corporate world.

Those Allied and Company laws they are not really catching anybody, they talk more about the registration of companies and all that, but registration of company itself is on trust,

when you want to register a company to deal on a particular product they will not even interview you, they take your money do the search on your name and if the name is available they just register it for you, it is on trust. So there must be a check on it.

If you listen to what is happening in some developed world, especially in America, few months ago there was this America company that was fined about $9bn on anti-trust activities.

It will help to check activities of companies and help them to be more trust worthy. You will buy a recharge card before you know it they will say your money is exhausted, is there any means of checking it, do we have any law that can check that?

So, we need an Anti-Trust Commission, to ensure organisations abide by the agreement that they entered into with the country.

That will affect my own constituency, I am from Ajegunle and I know we need things like that, because we have the population, we suffer for it the more.

If you go to Ajegunle now you will see those women doing Anti-NEPA association, you don’t need to do that, there is supposed to be a commission checking to ensure that each person is doing what is supposed to be doing, if they don’t it is those people that will take them to court and charge them.

It is a tool that will be used to be checking the corporate world, because the corporate world does things with focus only on their gains without considering the effect on the people.

That is one law that I am going to pursue at the National Assembly and I pray to God that He will give me the grace to get there and do it, because it is going to assist our country.

Secondly, if you look at my area it is the only area in the country that you can call a mini Nigeria, there is no tribe in Nigeria that is not in my area.

The other day I was talking about indigeneship and citizenship, people don’t know that the constitution does not recognise indigenship, it is only citizenship that the constitution recognises,

but anywhere you go you still see it playing out, why don’t we sit down and discus it and we can only discuss at the green chamber, let us look at ourselves eye to eye and discus the indigeneship thing.

Why is it that it is easy for anybody to come to the West and contest election, but it is so difficult to do the same in the East or in the North, let us discus it, secondly even when you want to, it is almost impossible.

Let us look at America, their law says if you have lived in a place for six months you can vote and be voted for, but it is the same America that puts the clause when it comes to their presidency, they say you must be born here.

The experience of the last election shows that we need somebody that was born in an area, even if you are an easterner you must be born in Ajegunle for you to be able to contest,

your birth certificate must read Ajegunle because if you are an Ajegunle person if they give you money for the development of Ajegunle you will not take that constituency to fund projects in your village, because your number one village will be Ajegunle.

Quote
If you look at my area it is the only area in the country that you can call a mini Nigeria, there is no tribe in Nigeria that is not in my area. The other day I was talking about indigeneship and citizenship, people don’t know that the constitution does not recognise indigenship, it is only citizenship that the constitution recognises, but anywhere you go you still see it playing out, why don’t we sit down and discus it and we can only discuss at the green chamber, let us look at ourselves eye to eye and discus the indigeneship thing.