Osun APC tackles Adeleke on agric policies

…says citizens need action, not lies, fake promises

By Stephen Gbadamosi

The Osun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has advised the state governor, Senator Ademola Adeleke, to match his talks with practical actions on his agricultural policy, as “citizens of the state are no longer finding it easy to breathe under the harsh food inflation impacted by his ineffective and lukewarm approach to the well-being of his subjects.”

The party counseled the governor to, “for once,” implement some of the items on his litany of promises, “rather than raising the hopes of struggling citizens with his unceasing and uncontrollable penchant for creations of duplicitous and pedestrian committees.”

Recall that in his inaugural address, Governor Adeleke had set up a committee saddled with the responsibility of how his administration should fare.

APC said, “since then, it has been the culture of the government to set up spurious committees to shield its lack of focus and foresight, so much so that the governor himself has lost count of the number of the factitious committees that his government has birthed so far.”

In a statement made available to journalists on Monday by its state charman, Tajudeen Lawal, APC said “on Friday, Governor Adeleke, as usual, among others, announced the inauguration of an implementation committee on the recommendations of the food security committee where he also disclosed that his government took the agricultural issue very seriously.”

In his reaction to the development, Lawal, in the statement issued by the party’s Director of Media and Information, Chief Kola Olabisi, sympathized with Governor Adeleke that his plight in government had been that of movement without motion.

“He (APC chairman) reminded Governor Adeleke that a government which takes food security seriously would not wait till almost half a term of its tenure, and until it is revved through the Federal Government’s directive, before its chief driver would show genuine leadership in that regard,” the statement read.

Lawal told Governor Adeleke to “stop insulting the sensibilities of the people by hiding the failure and insensibility of his government with worn-out statement like ‘our government decided to first focus on bridging the infra deficit to strengthen connectivity between the rural and urban areas. We first focused on building the roads and bridges as a condition to empower the agricultural sector in the area of transportation and market linkages. We have made enormous progress in the infra sector….'”

The state APC chairman also told Governor Adeleke “and his cohorts that the five flyovers that his government is proposing to build across the state, which have refused to record an appreciable take-off, have no bearing with the connectivity of the rural roads as stated in his recent propagandist press release.”

“Of what agricultural importance are the proposed five flyovers that the Adeleke administration is promising the people of the state beyond self enrichment of some individuals who are close to the government?

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“A government which is genuinely interested in the advancement of agriculture would not wait till the middle of his tenure to tackle same headlong.

“For lack of knowing what to do, Governor Adeleke also stated that he has directed his commissioner for agriculture to hold meetings with the genuine farmers on their various farms.

“It is disheartening that a governor, who boasts of being the lover of the people, could only find his voice to direct his idle commissioner for Agriculture to interface with farmers just after when the state was declared as the poverty headquarters of the south-west and when food commodities had gone beyond the reach of the citizens of the state.

“The memory of the people of Osun State is not so short to have forgotten so soon how Governor Adeleke, in the recent past, went abroad to waste the state resources on what he tagged ‘scouting for investors’ in chocolate.

“How can a governor who is worth his salt go out to look for buyers of cocoa that is in short supply to the existing buyers at home even when he has not planted a tree of cocoa in his state?

“May we also tell Governor Adeleke that we, as a party, have lost confidence in the way his administration has been handling the distribution of commodities from Abuja which ideally should be made available to all and sundry, irrespective of political leanings.”