MORE STORY FROM EKITI STATE AS FAYEMI DENIES DEFEAT

Home About Us Advertise With Us Terms of Use Privacy Policy Contact Us TODAY Home News Metro+ Business Politics Entertainment Sports Technology Lifestyle Opinion Home / Politics / Read my speech again, I did not accept defeat – Fayemi Read my speech again, I did not accept defeat – Fayemi By Cherry Oyetoro on July 20, 2014@todayngr Fayemi new Ekiti State Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi has countered the widespread belief that he conceded defeat to his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenger, Mr. Ayodele Fayose who was declared winner of the June 21 governorship poll in the state.

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Ekiti State Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi has countered the widespread belief that he conceded defeat to his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenger, Mr. Ayodele Fayose who was declared winner of the June 21 governorship poll in the state.

In his first interview published after the election on Daily Sun, Fayemi asked anyone who thought he accepted the outcome to read the transcript of his post-election broadcast again. “Anyone who understands the English lan­guage well would know that that speech was not the concession speech that many people are talking about. Yes, I have said I won’t chal­lenge the election

in court and congratulated Mr Fayose, but that’s not tantamount to accept­ing the result. That’s about saving Ekiti.” The governor fielded questions on what went wrong in Ekiti; whether he had regrets for his policies and actions; his relationship with the All Progressives Congress (APC) National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and other compelling is­sues. When asked if he was disturbed by the outcome of the June 21 election, he said, “very disturbed indeed and worried for the future of elections in our country.

Nobody goes into an election to lose especially when you have put a lot into it. “When you have worked hard and earned the trust of the people, you should have every rea­son to feel confident you are going to be rewarded for the hard work and performance. I said in the course of the campaigns that this election, in my own view, would be decided on the basis of char­acter and performance. On those two grounds, majority agree that we were heads and shoulders above every other candidate in the race. “Leaving that aside, no candidate campaigned the way we did – touching every nook and corner of the state, towns and farmsteads alike. Most of the time we were on the field campaigning, PDP was nowhere to be found. We actually didn’t campaign like an incumbent. We campaigned as if we were the challenger, the underdog. “But I must also say we were not unaware of the desperation of the PDP hierarchy to ‘win’ Ekiti by every means possible. We saw the federal forces at play in the election and they were undisguised in their desperation. Election is a process. An elec­tion is not just rigged when you snatch ballot box or when you change result at the collation centre. Election could be rigged by the processes leading to that election itself. When security agents that are supposed to be neutral for example go round pick­ing party leaders the night before an election and party anchors on the day of election in a coordi­nated and choreographed manner with no charge levelled against them, clearly you had a pre-deter­mined end that you are seeking. “ It is not time to go into any great detail about what we found to be unacceptable about the process which is why I was reluctant to give this interview in the first place. But we have also promised that the infrac­tions will be documented and exposed because we owe Nigerians that.” On whether he accepted the fact that something went wrong with the APC in the Ekiti election, he said, “The election was not about Ekiti, it was turned to federal forces against APC in the state. If it was performance, head and shoulders we won the election and in terms of mobilization, in terms of campaign, in terms of issues. “As a matter of fact, the PDP candidate had no issues. He was reactive throughout. No issues, no agenda, no manifesto. The only manifesto was I am opposed to any policy issue Governor Fayemi has raised or is implementing. “I even give some credit to the La­bour Party candidate who, even though at the last minute, still came out with a manifesto of what he would like to do in office. That clearly did not happen in the case of the PDP so we were really the only ones with a tested programme that had been implemented across the state. “I have heard and read all sorts of “pepper soup joint” analysis about stomach infrastructure and people voting for rice and all that. Attractive as the analysis may be to some people, I don’t think it fully does credit to the Ekiti people. Really, yes there are tendencies of instant gratification that crept into Ekiti politics – particularly in the early days of PDP government in the state-but those tendencies are not so deeply ingrained as to imagine that our people depend on what they can eat here and now in order to deter­mine what happens to their future. “It just offers these elements a convenient explanation for the abracadabra that they inflicted on Ekiti State. But again, as I said, time will tell. We may find the op­portunity now that the party has gone to court, we would find out from their own side. But I think it is important, as I said in my broadcast, to docu­ment all these extraneous elements; the siege on Ekiti by the military and other security agencies, the role they played in instilling fear in the state. There are of course a lot of arm-chair pundits who have argued that the security siege was insufficient to explain the loss of APC. “Many of these pundits were not even in Ekiti during the election and had no idea what actually transpired. Two days to elec­tion, my colleagues who were coming for my final rally were stopped from taking off in some cases, mid-air in other cases and actually at the boundar­ies coming into Ekiti state. Ten days before then, my party people were attacked on account of the traditional sweep after the PDP rally. “I was tear-gassed and ordered to be attacked on the instruc­tion of the Vice President who was in Ekiti on the fateful day, the same Vice President who had boasted that Ekiti and Osun elections will be war front. Even after I lodged a complaint with the Na­tional Security Adviser and the Inspector-General, it was my own people who were charged with ter­rorism. “So, this was a very carefully orchestrated agenda driven by the forces, federal forces who have been saying to everybody’s hearing that they must take Ekiti because Ekiti, for them, was the gateway to taking the South-west. So there is noth­ing that happened that cannot be explained.” He was challenged about conceding defeat, but he said, “Did I really? We were left with two obvious choices following the announcement by INEC on the morning of the 22nd of June. One was to reject outright what we considered was clearly a blatant manipulation or to accept it. “There were a lot of grey areas in between those outright choices. It is convenient to many who want to re-write history to say Fayemi accepted the result. But all you need do is read the transcript of my broadcast and you would come to a very different conclusion. “With over 30,000 security agents in the state with clear instructions from the Presidency to do everything to place Ekiti in the president’s corner, it was a critical moment for the state and I believe it was more important to rescue Ekiti from bloodbath than to plunge it into one. I believe it was impor­tant to turn a new leaf and fight our cause with­out resorting to violence. “That’s what the Federal government and the PDP had planned for. That’s the verifiable intelligence I received. And as the Chief Security Officer of the state, I had to decide whether to allow Ekiti to be turned into a killing field by trigger-happy security agents already on instruction to mow them down for protesting the abracadabra inflicted on them. “Under the circum­stance, my decision was clear: peace now, justice later. And really, do we want bloodbath in Ekiti? Do we want our people to be slaughtered? Do we want Ekiti to become the trigger for truncating Nigeria’s fledgling democracy? We felt we have a role to play in protecting this democracy no matter how flawed it is and that’s why I did what I did. “Anyone who understands the English language well would know that that speech was not the con­cession speech that many people are talking about. Yes, I have said I won’t challenge the election in court and congratulated Mr Fayose, but that’s not tantamount to accepting the result. That’s about saving Ekiti. Anyone who heard me throughout the campaign would recall my consistent remarks that I won’t go to court for any reason, genuine or otherwise over the election. “I was only ensuring that my word remains my bond. When Chief Oba­femi Awolowo decided he was not going to court over the ‘moonslide’ victory of the NPN in 1983, was that acceptance of the election? In any case, now that my party has gone to court to challenge the election, the various infractions in the election would be subjected to scrutiny.” He was asked if his decision was not too hasty and if he had any regrets, he said “I don’t know what you mean by “too hasty”. I have always argued that for me, my politics is without bitterness. It is politics of principles and politics of service. “No sacrifice is too much to make for Ekiti people and I have always said it, from 2006 that I became active in Ekiti politics, I have always said that I would not govern over dead people and I would not allow the blood of Ekiti people to be spilled on the altar of politics. “The choice was simple, I could have done other­wise and my supporters were ready. I could simply say to them, you can see the manipulation because everybody was shocked that this was not our vote. Don’t forget, we have 226,000 registered APC members in Ekiti State. “We completed our party registration barely two months before the collection of INEC permanent voters’ cards and the continuous voters’ registration exercise was done. We used the same INEC polling units for our party registration. “The simple argument that is being made which defies logic is that at least 100,000 of APC members did not vote for their own candidate. If as INEC says, we have 120,000 votes in the election and we have 226,000 mem­bers in APC, I am not talking of sympathizers, “I am not talking of outsiders who love Fayemi, who are not card carrying members of the party, I am talking of party members who registered in Ekiti State, 226,000. So, you are either saying that out of those 226,000 members, 100,000 among them did not collect permanent voters cards or they col­lected but they did not vote for their candidate. “That is simplistic analysis of what you are saying and these people when they got to the field, when they got accredited, they knew one another, they knew who was APC, who was PDP, we were get­ting feedback on how many of our members were in each polling unit and yet the results in most cases were at complete variance with the evidence before us. So, it’s not enough to take the result de­clared at face value.