Otunba Olumide Osunsina is a chieftain of the Labour Party in Ogun State. He tells FISAYO FALODI in this interview that the people of the state are not getting good governance from the current administration
As a chieftain of the Labour Party, how will you define good governance as you would want your party to provide it?
Good governance, to me, is meant for the promotion of the interests of the majority of the people by those who are in power. What I am trying to say is that state resources must be spent for the benefit of the majority of the people because the money is a commonwealth. As far as LP is concerned, we want to ensure that the commonwealth gets to everybody. Even if we are constructing roads, we are going to build roads that will facilitate economic prosperity. We won’t embark on building grandiose roads. One can build roads for grandiose reasons and can also build roads for economic prosperity. The rural roads that lead to urban areas allowing the goods and services of farmers to get to town conveniently are the roads that have economic importance. The massive roads built for grandiose reasons in city centres don’t have economic value. Our main emphasis is on human development because when you develop human beings, such individuals can further bring economic prosperity to the state; that is one of the cardinal ideas of LP and it is basic: investment in human beings to further bring prosperity to the state.
What grass-root strategy is the LP using to get the support of the people?
Like I said earlier, the LP belongs to the people; it is the party of the workers. If you look at the hierarchy of LP, the hierarchy and structure are made up of people who have had robust experience in labour management. We are appealing to workers everywhere that the party that will prioritise their interests is the LP because the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress will not give them power. But the party that will properly represent the interests of people who work and earn a living is LP. So, the LP belongs to the workers both in the formal and informal section. If you look at the PDP and APC, you will discover that they have established names. So, it is only through a party like LP that workers can get the opportunity to establish their names too.
As an aspirant seeking to contest for the Ogun Central Senatorial seat, what do you think the current occupant of the seat is not doing well?
I don’t want to bother about individuals; they don’t mean much to me because I focus on what I want to do. I don’t know what the current occupant of the seat has done and I don’t know what he has not done either, but I know what I want to do. I have said it many times. I actually want to teach our young people how to become wealthy without resorting to any type of crime. I want to teach them that they can become very wealthy by just pursuing their dreams and my emphasis is on wealth creation. You don’t actually need money, but an idea to create wealth. Money will come if the ideas are viable. If you have money before the idea, you will lose the money. I believe that with knowledge, information and investment, we can turn around anything. So, what we are coming to do is to give people information, give people knowledge and also invest in them. When you have these three things, everything works out. Information is different from knowledge because if you have information without knowledge, you cannot process the information. What we are trying to do is to give people information, give them the knowledge and things will begin to happen. One method to do it is to engage the private sector because we believe that engaging the private sector is the best way to allocate scarce resources; it is an invisible hand that works magic. Government is the worst allocator of resources because it does not allocate according to the needs of the majority of the people. The private sector works fairly well; we are going to use the private sector and also use the power of the public sector to protect what we are going to do privately.
Can you mention three things LP would have wanted Amosun to put in place in his first one year in office which he did not do?
My position is that if I am the governor of Ogun State, my priority would be to completely revive the old schools that produced great leaders, including Amosun himself. Why does the governor need to build new structures? The schools are not the structures; they are the personnel and the environment that will actually train young people. I went to Abeokuta Grammar School and I had distinction in my final examination and I don’t see why the governor would want to build new schools. Amosun attended African Church Grammar School and he is the governor of Ogun State today. Why not just improve on what is on the ground? Building new schools is grandiose and elitist. So, if I were him, my first year in office will be spent on looking at what I have in education resources and improve on them and leave those schools as they are because you cannot replace Abeokuta Grammar School, you cannot replace Baptist Boys High School and you cannot replace Comprehensive High School, Ayetoro. These schools are brands that have been known forever and ever. I will also look at the hospitals because unhealthy community is unproductive. If you don’t have healthy workforce they won’t be able to perform their duty creditably.
