FEMI OLADEHIN: I Am Determined to Challenge Eti-Osa’s Status Quo

For Femi Oladehin, Eti-Osa (which comprises Lagos Island, Ikoyi and Victoria Island, the business hub of Lagos) is the richest federal constituency in Nigeria but lacks effective representation. He spoke to Segun James about his determination to change the status quo as he stakes his integrity and resources in the February 25 parliamentary poll

Given how politics in Lagos is structured, you need to belong to an entrenched political platform to attain a leadership position. How do you intend to get funded with a party such as ADC?

The truth is that a lot of the larger political parties are not exactly funded by individuals. This means that Lagos resources are always going to be used for the elections irrespective of what they tell us. We’ve spent the first six weeks prior to now effectively talking to individuals, people one on one, home-to-home, roadshows, and talking to people individually. Now, we realised that because of the resources that we had, we had to make a big bang in the last two weeks of the campaign, and that is what we have done. Today, I can assure you that everybody in Eti-Osa is talking about our candidacy. I think that for us, that was strategic and deliberate. And for the other parties, nobody is talking about them anymore because they are worn out. There’s nothing novel about them anymore. People already know them. But we are the new kid on the block and have a slew of credible candidates across the elections. I think that is one of the most interesting things we have done, the approach we have taken. We are just riding on the cortex of a new kid on the block with a pedigree that people can align with because we were strategic about how we went into them.

People in this constituency are not necessarily known for coming out on election day to vote. During registration, this area records the least number of eligible voters. How do you now see your chances in a place with so much apathy?

The apathy that we have in Eti-Osa is deliberate. It is deliberate because the main parties have always ensured that the candidates brought up as potential winners across the main parties were not credible. So it is simple: if you have no horse in the race, you are not interested in what happens. I have run elections in Eti-Osa as an independent third party for about four elections cycles now, where I volunteer to run elections. And what we find is that when people do not have a candidate that they are passionately backing, the tendency is they will stay at home. For the first time, we have two movements that are appealing to these same people we are talking about.

And you know one of them, a popular movement, the #EndSARS kids who are frustrated by the government’s heavy-handedness, who have pitched their tent with an individual, Peter Obi. And you have a second wave of people looking for credible candidates. And I think that has been the biggest experience. In my interactions with people, they’re like, ‘if you are contesting, if your governorship candidate is contesting, and if your senatorial candidate is contesting, I am going to come out and vote. And because I am already coming out to vote for Peter Obi, I am literally going to vote for him for president and the other seats in the elections’. So I think that what you are seeing, and you are this across the board. Let me give you some statistics, at the last governorship elections in 2019, Babajide Sanwo-Olu won the election with 725,000 votes. Lagos had 6.5 million registered voters at that time. And the next candidate was the perennial candidate who got 250,000 for PDP.

So the truth is that Lagosians have never had any candidate in those elections that they trusted, that they could spend their time coming out to spend an entire day in the sun and to pitch their tent. But if you recall what happened in the 2011 elections when former Governor Babatunde Fashola was contesting his second term, that has been the largest turnout of voters we have ever had in Lagos; 1.5 million people came out.

Those people came out because they had a horse in the race, somebody they loved and wanted to show the party, the APC or the AC at that time, that they were voting for Fashola and not for the political hegemony of Lagos state. So the truth for me is that Nigerians are wiser. The elite also now realise that you can’t allow people who cannot step up to represent you, to represent you, if they don’t have the capacity, if they don’t have the interest, if a godfather is controlling them, they are not going to represent you. And we see a lot of that in our interactions with people. People are tired and looking for a change, and I believe strongly that we can be the change they’re looking for.

What are your chances of winning this election?

I have a track record in my life, succeeding even when people don’t bet on me because I understand what it means to be an underdog. I qualified as a chartered accountant as a 16-year-old when everyone told me it wasn’t possible. I graduated from my MBA class almost to my 18th birthday. Again, people told me it wasn’t possible. I come from the school of thought where the impossible is nothing. If you don’t try, you don’t win. Look, I had a debate with the two other candidates, and that debate for me, I tell people it was a watershed moment for me individually.

Because on the day of that debate, it was three hours’ debate on the radio, it was very clear that they had nothing to offer Lagosians, absolutely nothing. Their ideas were very outdated, very surfacing, and had no rigour to the process. And I came out of that debate thinking, Eti-Osa deserves better than this. I am going to push my candidacy to the limit that I can. The response from people has been that, with you on the ballot, we are going to come out to vote first, and then secondly, we are going to show these people, these established parties, that the fact that we have been reticent in the past was because we didn’t have anyone we believed in. But now that we have people we believe in, we are aligned and can deliver. And for me if I look at my traverse across the entire government, because Eti-Osa is just one local government with one federal constituency, I am very convinced that I will win this election. I will be the news item on Monday when the results are released. Because people are going to say that this guy showed up and ran an Obama-like campaign, and before you realise it, he is the House of Reps member for Eti-Osa.

In politics, people make promises. What exactly do you have for the people of the Eti-Osa constituency?

Let me start by talking about my pedigree, and that is the way I have said to people. I have told people that I spent 32 years in the financial services industry. I have an easily verifiable track record. I keep my word, whatever I say, I am going to do, I do. I work for clients with the biggest organisations in Nigeria and have delivered on my word. The promise that I am making to Nigerians is, first, I am not a politician. I am an average Nigerian tired of how Nigeria has been run, so I am one of them. I am lucky that life and favour have put me in a place where I am generally okay with my life and happy. But it is selfishness that makes the elite think that the rest of the people don’t matter. And it is that selfishness that we need to eschew. We all don’t want to leave our comfort zones, fat salaries, and fat dividends to pitch our tent in the public space and say to them, ‘I can represent you. I can help you achieve your dreams’.

To go back to your question, when I look at the guys who are there now, Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s achievements is to say to you that he bought JAMB forms for people or facilitated the building of three classrooms, not three schools, three classrooms in Eti-Osa. The most affluent local government in Nigeria, the economic basket of the country that had the financial services, entertainment, and the most important sectors of the economy, are resident here. But the House of Representatives member is telling us that the highlight of his career was buying JAMB forms for people.

What I am promising the people of Lagos is a few things. One is effective representation. Representation means representing the people’s interests at the national assembly. I bring that experience to the table because I know how to negotiate. I understand how to build relationships with other people because you are one of 360 members, which means you have to build coalitions so that people coalesce around the vision you share, and then they can support you. I am very good at building bridges. Secondly, I will focus on the youths in Eti-Osa. During the #EndSARS protest, the people who came out to protest were not area boys or touts. They were young kids who were trying to make a life for themselves, who were tired of the harassment of the police and the harassment of the Nigerian state, of them and their livelihood. And one of the things I am promising the people of Eti-Osa is that youth empowerment will be a key focus for me. I am not talking of youth empowerment of giving them N5000 every month as stipends, no.

The adage says if you want to feed a nation, you educate the children. And what I am saying is that I am going to ensure that my focus is going to be on the education of the average person that lives in Eti-Osa, the average student, the average secondary school and primary school and ensuring that they get the skills that they will require. That is the sort of empowerment I want to focus on, ensuring that the government provides computers for them because we are in the 21st century and provides the right skills for them because, again, we are in the 21st century. The third thing for me is federal presence. Eti-Osa is probably responsible for a significant chunk of the taxes paid to the federal government. But in terms of federal presence, you could almost say it is non-existence because, again, nobody is pushing our cause, pushing our agenda in the national assembly.

All of them are in it for themselves. They don’t care about the people. And what I am promising the people of Eti-Osa is that I am going to push their cause in the national assembly to ensure that Eti-Osa gets significantly more federal presence than it is getting today; federal presence in terms of roads and quality of infrastructure that we have. You know, in Eti-Osa, most of the roads that were built were not built by the federal government. They were built by individuals and private companies building estate in an unplanned haphazard way. My role is to ensure that the policies that government puts in place ensure people do more of that but to their benefit as well. So if I build the road in Eti-Osa, give me an economic benefit for building it, in terms of reform, tax rebate or something. So for me, it is about strategic solutions to problems, and obviously, you know that one of the roles of the house of representatives is also what we call the oversight functions—ensuring that the arms of government responsible for specific deliveries actually deliver what they have promised. The truth is we have this budgetary cycle every year, where sometimes the clever civil servants continuously repeat the same project, but it never gets carried out.