Ismail Omipidan
Some say your principal is too gentle to be a politician, and that is why he lost the election?
If your definition of a politician is someone who believes in violence, lies and propaganda, then I tell you that Oyetola is not your kind of real politician. With my association with him in the last three years, I have come to realize that you can be a politician and still be true to your conscience. You can be a politician and still govern with the fear of God. That is what has happened as far as governance is concerned under Oyetola.
He doesn’t believe in desperation, and all these came to play not only in his governance of the state but also in the election. I’m sure a lot of people would have expected him to militarise the state because of his second term ambition and unleash violence on the state but he is not that kind of a politician.
Yes, he is calm. A state like Osun needs a calm and calculated leader because if you have a leader that is unnecessarily excited, you run into problems. Governing Osun requires a cool, calm and calculated human being that would think outside the box to be able to ensure you keep the state afloat. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the governor and his team had noted the need to diversify the economy of the state because we are desirous of changing the narrative of Osun from being a civil service state, to one bubbling with commerce and industries. That is why we focused mainly on three key sectors of our economy; Agriculture, Tourism and Mining, which we call it “ATM”.
With the investments we have done in the three sectors, especially mining in the last one year plus, we believe that Osun will no longer rely on the Federal Government allocation in the nearest future, and as part of efforts to help industrialize the state, we are partnering with the Nigeria Air Force to fix our airport. This comes with a lot of efforts. The Air Force is building an Aviation City in Osun, the first of its kind in Nigeria and Africa, and you know what this means. We are doing this without spending a dime.
I say this with all sense of modesty, since we came in, we have not spent 10 kobo on the Osun Airport project but work is ongoing there and in no distance future, we will no longer travel to Ibadan, Akure, or Ilorin to fly to destinations of our choice in the country. It would be very difficult to get someone as prudent as Oyetola.
There was a time we had an emergency to travel to Abuja and because it was an emergency, we couldn’t get a commercial flight that would accommodate us all at once, and they came up with the option of a chartered flight and the least they got was N10 million, the governor shouted that “ha, this is too much, ten million naira just to take us to Abuja?” We eventually shared ourselves into three; some went through Ibadan, some through Akure and some through Ilorin. I’m not sure there are too many governors who would sacrifice their own personal comfort because they want the state to grow; very few.