À political contending force in Kosofe constituency 2 who had been greatly involved in welfarist courses, giving succour to many, Hon. Samuel Olanrewaju Adebayo popularly referred to as SOA jostled for the earlier cited state Assembly seat in 2019 but stepped down for late Hon. Tunde Buraimoh, he did also stepped down for Hon. Femi Saheed in the bye-election and later at the recent All Progressives Congress primary to pave way for him to clinch the ticket as candidate for the 2023 election. In this interview with Sunrise.ng Adebayo ventilated his view on how matured Nigeria’s polity was, citing other climes where technological advancement has been able to reduce much of the consequent hassles.
How matured is Nigeria’s polity in your view given how the 2023 elections panned out?
On my own experience I can say concerning INEC, they really tried but INEC need some improvement for Nigerians to have belief in them. In advance clime they no longer use ballot paper thumb printing, with respect to the BVAS machine, they need to upgrade so that once you just thumb print immediately your data goes to the server instead of doing paper stuff.
What in precise term are you proposing?
I don’t think that is advance enough, so I will implore them to do more, maybe go digital to enable people see the results right on time instead of moving from one location to the other counting and collating thereby the untoward will be happening.That I think will really help a lot in fact that is fundamental to getting things right. Having travelled out of the country and seen how they handle their elections.
Are you saying this will as well help to tame the harassment and intimidation tendencies in our political experience?
Even issues of threatening opponent during campaigns does not arise, you go online debate on what you have in stock for the country and they thrash it out there.
What do you make of the call that ethnic and religious be jettisoned in politics?
That in my view is not really a problem in the other climes you see some people who belong to Catholic Church, they vote for their candidate, for some others who belong to the pentecostal same applies but I believe we need to mature politically to the extent that everybody has a choice this is a democracy and there is freedom of speech.
There should be freedom of choice too. Like someone that had lived in Lagos for the past 20 years and you are saying that he is not a Lagosian, that to me doesn’t play well.
Also because you have the backing and support or certain advantage over that of some people you don’t have to abuse other ethnic groups, we should understand that as Ibos or Yorubas we don’t need to divide ourselves, they are already dividing us so we don’t need to divide ourselves anymore.
We should rather unite together and vote the right candidate, because Ibo man can be the right candidate for us who will fix everything or it may even be an Hausa or Yoruba so we don’t need to be sentimental about it.
