Why we are sure of victory in next elections– Ex-Osun Works Commissioner Omowaye

Engr Remi Omowaye, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Osun State, is a two-term commissioner. He served as the  Commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology under Governor Rauf Aregebesola, and also the Commissioner for Works, when Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, the current Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, was the governor of Osun State. He is currently the Executive Director, Project Implementation, Federal Housing Authority (FHA). In this interview with GBENGA ADERANTI, he talks about how the APC is preparing for the governorship election in 2026 and the presidential election in 2027, Adeleke’s government, Aregbesola, and other issues. Excerpts

How prepared is your party for the forthcoming elections, especially the governorship election in the state?

In the official time table, INEC said, the campaign will start on March 11. I can tell you that we have put in place a team, and we are ready for the elections. Two other things will help us in those elections: the abysmal performance of Governor Adeleke; he has lost a lot of his strong political associates to us, you know, politics is local. A lot of his foot soldiers are with us.

Out of the three Senators, two of the Senators are with us; we have three House of Reps members with us. One of them is Oluwole Oke, who has won election for a record five times. We are prepared.

The leader of the party is doing a lot. We will go to the battlefield and win. The  Honourable Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, is doing a lot . I can say that we are fully prepared, and I know victory will be ours.

After the gubernatorial primary of your party, some of the contestants were aggrieved. What are you doing to reconcile them to the party?

Well, I don’t think any of them are aggrieved. Don’t forget that 90 per cent of them went to the president. Out of nine of them, eight of the aspirants went to Mr President, and they gave their commitment to work for the emergence of our candidate. Majority of them are fully with the party. They have collapsed their structure into the party structure. Yes, we might have one of them that has not fully come to our candidate; I know the leadership of the party is doing a lot to bring him on board, and to also reconcile anybody that is aggrieved.

You know, it is a contest; you should expect that some people will be aggrieved, but the leadership of the party, led by Adegboyega Oyetola, and our revered father, Chief Adebisi Akande , are doing a lot to make sure we ensure that we have a strong, formidable team.

In terms of membership registration, your party is rated 33rd out of the 36 states in Nigeria. Are you not concerned with this development?

That is not a big issue; the major challenge is the requirement for registration, the National Identification Number (NIN). Don’t forget that our party is a progressive party. If you come to a place like Osun now, we have a lot of old people that are our party members, some of them do not even have NIN, and we are in the process of trying to do it, to get them NIN. Don’t forget that  the internet penetration in Nigeria is not as high as people think, which has affected a lot, but you know we are the party to beat in Nigeria, the party is a strong party, with a big followership, a lot is being done to address the issue of people having problems with registration. That will be sorted out.

Some people have argued in certain quarters that the Accord Party of Adeleke is more strategic in terms of party registration. Some even expressed worries that your party is lackadaisical in this area.

That is not true. I come from Ilesha West. There is a provision in my ward for registration, and we have even decentralised it, even to the unit level. I have told you what the problem is. A lot of people are having problems with their NIN. That is being resolved, as a matter of fact, some of them are going to the NIN office to correct their NIN, and it is taking time.

I can tell you that these challenges are being handled, and we are seeing a lot of improvement.

You worked closely with the former Governor of Osun State, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbe, a man who is regarded as popular and charismatic. He is now a stalwart of the African Democratic Congress (ADC). Is this not going to affect the chances of your party in the state? 

There is no big deal; I call him oga because he was my boss. He has been gone for more than five years now.  For the 2022 election, he did not support us. We won in his polling unit. We won in his ward. We won in the local government. For the 2023 election, he also did not support Asiwaju. Asiwaju won his polling unit. Asiwaju won in his ward. Asiwaju won in his local government. That is to tell you that even when he was the minister, when he did not support us, he could not defeat us in his local government, let alone now that he is no longer in power. He is no longer relevant. I watched a video of him going to the ADC meeting in Lagos. I felt so bad for him because I feel that is not where he belongs. How many people were there? This was a man who used to command a huge followership in Lagos and Osun, but that has drastically reduced because of the political path he took. So, we are just hoping and wishing that Oga will retrace his steps and come back home.

Your party lost the last governorship election in Osun, at a time when many felt it was going to be an easy ride for you. What could have been responsible for your defeat then? What are you doing to prevent your party from losing the next election?

I’m not going to say a lot about that because it is gone. We have x-rayed a lot of things. The result announced was that we lost, but we did not lose that election. I will give you a typical example: the governor comes from Ede, and they were allowed to vote till 11pm. If you are allowed to vote till 11 pm, that means something was wrong. A lot of things happened in that election. If you will recollect, we won at the lower court because the BIVAS report showed that there was a lot of over-voting. For us, we have gone through x-raying our structure, and we have looked at areas we need to improve.

People of Osun can see what Adeleke can do; he has obviously failed them. A lot of the political structure he rode on in 2022 is no longer there for him this time around.

The audit of the workforce in Osun State was contracted to an audit firm; this has been generating a lot of debate of late. Adeleke insists that the period under review was under Oyetola, while the consultant disagreed with the government. What is your take on this?

This is simple; they gave the consultant a letter of engagement, and in the letter of engagement, they stated that the period of review should be from 2023 to 2024. Oyetola left in 2022, so there was a formal communication.

We should accept the fact that the Adeleke government is a government of deceit.

You were the one who brought this consultant; you gave this consultant a term of reference. You gave this consultant a letter of engagement, and you paid this consultant, and the consultant came with the result, and you are saying you don’t want the result.

In your letter of engagement, you said the person should work between 2023 and 2024. We had left the government, and when the person saw that a particular account was receiving over 30,000 salaries, wrote to you and you are saying you don’t want him, that only reiterates the fact that Adeleke’s government is a government of scam. If we were the ones who hired the consultant, people would have said we were the ones who prompted the consultant. Adeleke was the one that hired the consultant and the consultant pointed that there were about 12,000 ghost workers, from what they saw between 2023-2024, and this is 2026, you could not do anything, and you are now putting the  blame on those that left government in 2022, so you can see clearly that Adeleke’s government is a government of scam.

I doubt if the people from Adeleke’s camp will agree with this assertion… the governor, if you are going to accuse him of every other thing, at least he is constructing roads.

There is a particular road in Egbedore; they finished the road today, and it rained the following day, and the rain washed it away. Tell me, will you be happy if you are a resident of such a place?

A few of the road contractors in Osun that are doing the roads one was registered as fertiliser suppliers. One is registered as a cyber café, and they were awarded a multi-billion-naira project. These people do not have the expertise. Is that not a scam? If you award a road construction to a company that is registered as a fertiliser supplier, a road construction to a company that is registered as a cyber cafe.

There is a project, a flyover at Olaiya, ask them to give you the name of the contractor,  they cannot give you. We did a flyover project in 2021; we awarded it to a Peculiar Ultimate Consult. This is a company that has done flyovers in about six Niger Delta states in the South South region. The company that served as a consultant on our flyover that we built is a leading engineering consultancy company in Nigeria.

Ask them to name their own; it is not difficult now. They did a flyover project running into billions of naira without carrying out proper tests.

When we did the Olaiya flyover. We went to the best material testing lab in Nigeria. We did it at the University of Lagos lab. We did it at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, lab. We did it at the UniOsun lab. We went to Lagos Testing Material Lab, just because the governor at that time kept insisting that he wanted results from different labs to be sure we were doing what was right. But they have not done that.

Ask them to bring out the results of any of these tests they have done. Not only are we going to bring out all the results, but we are also going to bring out the pictorial evidence of all we have done, and we can mention the name of the company, we can give you statistics.

Look at our primary health care project. When we did our primary health care project, as at the time Oyetola came in as governor, in  2018 December, we had the highest maternal death rate in Southern Nigeria. That data sourced from the Federal Ministry of Health, by 2022, we were leaving, we had one of the best indices in Southern Nigeria.

What did we do? We revitalised 332 primary health care centres in Osun. Osun has 332 primary care centres. We have 332 political wards. We ensured that we put into proper use one per ward; that singular act reduced the maternal death rate drastically by 70 per cent. These data are there.

In 2021, there was a report that the number of people giving birth in our primary health care centres moved from 20,000 to 50,000. There are results; we are not just coming and grandstanding.

You know what Adeleke’s government did when they came? They just went to repaint those facilities and said they had also done so. I was the one in charge of the primary health care centres. I was the one who personally designed each of the primary health care centres.

We did a design, and we saw the result. But you came, and you went to paint and remove our plaque and put their plaque. It is something that is straightforward. If you perform, people will know; if you fail, people will know.

When we were there, there was this fund, we accessed, the Basic Health Provision Fund, in each of our primary care centres. When you got there, you would get basic drugs, but if you go there today, you won’t get drugs.

The sad thing that Adeleke did was when we were leaving, we noticed that we had a lot of gap in personnel, we had put in place a lot of health facilities, you can ask from anywhere in the country, it is always difficult to source health personnel for government health facilities, so we struggled to source 500 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, midwives, lab technologists, and all that. Governor Adeleke came and sacked all of them.

He said they were employed by Oyetola; three years later, he has not replaced them. Not only did he leave the health facilities dilapidated,  but he also did not replace the  personnel who worked there.

When Oyetola was the governor, things were so bad that we were getting minus allocation; now, you are getting three times, four times of the allocation we were getting, yet there is nothing significant to show for it, except substandard roads built by non-qualified professionals.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is fixing the Ibadan- Ife Ilesha expressway with concrete paving. What that means is that it will last 60-70 years, though the project is expensive, one thing we know is that, in the next 50 years, nobody will come and say I want to go down this road again, but you are spending huge resources to do projects that cannot last.

So that is our situation.

Some regard Adeleke as being liked by all and very charismatic. Would you regard it as a true assessment of the current governor of Osun State?

You must give it to him, one thing he knows how to do is to dance. He is a fine dancer. When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to Ibadan for Oba Ladoja’s coronation, he saw Adeleke, and he said ijo n’ko? (What about dance?). You won’t see a Delta governor and ask him ijo n’ko?. You won’t see an  Akwa Ibom governor or a Niger governor and ask him ijo n’ko? You will ask him how is work ? The president knows that he is not working; the only thing he knows how to do is dance. The president asked him ijo n’ko?

I don’t have a problem with the fact that he dances, no! My problem is that he is a colossal failure.  My problem is that since the creation of Osun we never had a governor as bad as Governor Adeleke. Personally, I don’t have an issue with him; he might be dancing, but what I want is the result.

Aregbe had wonderful programmes, but at a point, all fell like a pack of cards. Why is it that politicians find it difficult to sustain good ideas?

Continuity for us was not a problem because I served in both Aregbesola and Oyetola’s government.

There were a lot of things Aregbesola started that we continued.

A typical example is something that has to do with the Gbongan- Akoda road. We took it from I can’t remember the percentage, but I remember that by the time we were going, we had gotten to 40 something per cent. There is a popular circular road, it is called ona baba ona, and we took it to an advanced level; ditto Osogbo- Ikirun road. We did not abandon these projects.

There were lots of projects that were started by Aregbe that we sustained.

The area where we had problems was with the policies. There were some policies that the people didn’t want, and they were complaining.

A good example was the case of a single school uniform; the case of a change of school names. We had a lot of needless battles, and because people said they did not want it, we had to agree with the people.

They said they didn’t want the single uniform policy and the DSS were writing to us periodically to tell us that this single uniform policy was enhancing crime.

We would see that students were  committing a crime in another school, but you would not be able to identify them because they were wearing the same uniform. At the end of the day, we discovered that we lost the reason for having a single uniform, so we had to revert to the old one.

We also had a school policy system that was different from others in Nigeria. We were operating in isolation, we were having issues, and so, we had to go back.

We had divergent views on the area of policies, we said ‘oga when we made this thing, we thought it was going to work, but since it is not working, let us go back to what we used to have.’

But often, some governments at times usually have problems with continuing projects, not because they don’t want to, but because of funding.

Some support groups have promised the APC governorship candidate and President Tinubu 1 million votes. How feasible is this?

It is feasible because Osun is one of the most underrated states in Nigeria. Do you know that apart from Lagos and Oyo State, no state in Southern Nigeria has had that volume of votes for the presidential election like we had in 2023? Osun had 700,000, both parties; Lagos had 1.1 million, Oyo had 750,000, even the almighty Rivers had less than 500,000; Delta, and Akwa Ibom had less than 600,000. Osun did 700,000, even the almighty Borno did less than 500,000; most of these states in the north that they say have huge votes did less than 500,000.

What that means is that Osun is politically conscious. Osun is politically savvy, and with the situation brewing up towards the 2026 governorship election in Osun, I can predict that we will have close to that. I won’t be surprised because the consciousness is high in Osun.  I won’t be surprised if we produce 1 million votes for the president.

If we could do 700,000 in 2023, and the consciousness was not this much, I won’t  be surprised if we do one million in Osun now. Osun is a politically savvy state, and the president has done so much for us in Osun. I’m sure people will want to reciprocate by ensuring that they vote for the president.

There is a rumour that Aregbe tried to come back, but some elements within the party blocked him. How true is this?