Funsho Doherty, a chartered accountant and experienced administrator, is the governorship candidate of the African Democratic Party (ADC) in the 2023 general election. In this exclusive interview with Iniobong Iwok, he spoke on his chances; why he is passionate about repositioning Lagos, among other issues. Excerpts:
When are you going to start campaigning ahead of next year’s governorship election?
We have been doing that for a long time; we have visited several local government areas and met with people already. I have consulted and conducted town halls meetings. We met with communities, women, and youths. I have cross understanding of the electorate in the state and as you know, there are different campaign strategies that candidates deploy. Gathering people together in one place to have a big rally is one strategy, it’s certainly not the only strategy and we have chosen so far to pursue other strategies. One of the things that we have found is that, that approach of going round the local governments, community to community has been very helpful to us in understanding the concerns that people have. The concerns that Lagosians have actually are pretty consistent, when you go across the local government areas. They are concerned with things like the educational system, the fact that they do not trust their educational system; that they have to struggle hard to send their children to private schools, even when they can’t afford it. They are concerned about the healthcare system. The fact that they don’t trust the government facilities, the fact that in many cases when mothers have children that are here, they keep them at home for longer than they should. Sometimes, they go to traditional health facilities, etc. There is no trust in public health institutions and they have good reasons not to trust those systems. They are concerned with things like cost of living, it is a huge problem for Lagosians.
Many of those issues, you may say are national, but within the states they are very concerned about the cost of transportation. This is related to another problem that people have spoken about in Lagos; that is the Agbero’s problem. There’s no place, I’ve gone where people have not spoken about this problem and it adds to their inconveniences, it subtracts from their quality of life.
It makes their cost of living very high, because it impacts the cost of transportation, as you know for many moderating income earning Lagosians, transportation is a significant part of their overall expenditure on a daily basis.
These are the things that people complain about and we see it across the local governments and we have said that there’s a need for a change. There’s a need for a government that will prioritize the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
We have seen a situation in the past almost 25 years ago, 73 by the time we held the election under one ruling group; where we have seen a dramatic increase in inequality, in the concentration of the resources of the state in the hands of a few.
This is what creates this hardship, which people are complaining about, and we’re saying that we are coming with an agenda to transform that and build a government that cares for the people.
Some people say you are sponsored by Bola Tinubu to disrupt the votes of the opposition parties in 2023. How do you react?
Well, I mean, it’s completely nonsense, why would people think that I am being sponsored by Tinubu? It is part of this myth of invincibility that the present APC and Tinubu have, because you see a candidate that’s credible.
I come into this politics from the private sector; I have a 30-year record that is verifiable from the private sector.I ran three organisations as managing director and CEO; two of them were the national organisations which are still there. I led an industry group as chairman, appointed and elected by four MBS and CEOs.
So, my track record, my record of leading with Integrity is very clear and verifiable. This is not; you know it takes a lifetime to build a reputation. I have no intention of soiling that reputation in my entry into politics, because indeed it is the competence and the character that one has built and demonstrated in prior fields of achievements that have led me to now come and contribute this in the public space.
This is because, I’m sure you will agree with me, as many do that, many of the issues that we face today stem from a lack of leadership in the public sector space. There is a lack of leadership in terms of competence and character.
So, those allegations are baseless. Obviously, you have incredible candidates that people can see that people can rally behind. The first thing that the opposition would want to do, the first thing that the ruling party would want to do, is even begin to puncture the credibility of that candidate within us.
You can imagine where those kinds of rumours would be coming from, it’s very clear. I have never met Tinubu, I don’t know him.
What I see are the outcomes of the policies, the practices of the ruling party. As a Lagosians born, raised and bred in Lagos from a distinguished Lagos family of great history, it is unacceptable to me that the Lagos we live in today is what it is. I went to Primary School here, not too far from here. I went to Secondary School here. I went to University here, before going abroad for further studies and working.
Lagos is a shadow of what it could potentially be today. And the reason why that is despite the tremendous resources that Lagos has at its disposal is failure of leadership and self-interested government.
But the ADC is not visible around Lagos and doesn’t have structure. Don’t you think that may work against your chances?
First of all, I disagree with you that the party is not viable; ADC has been known it is not a new party. We have structure across all the local governments.
We are represented in each of these local governments and we have membership in each of these local governments and we are in those communities. If you go to those communities today and you ask people within those communities, what parties do they know? Who do they know, that is running for governor in Lagos State. Take the outcome of those polls, like we have done, and you will see that it refutes this thing that you’re talking about today. So, I think that we are in a new era of politics, the idea that unless you have a block votes of people within a community, which historically the ruling party have relied upon and refer to as structure that you cannot succeed, I think that myth is been disproven and would be fully disproven by the time we conduct the 2023 elections.
This argument that you are making about the party has been made about the Labour Party, and any party other than the two mainstream parties that we know.
I think we’re going to see a different outcome. Bear in mind; let us remember these statistics, because it’s always important to relate what we are saying to data.
You talked about this so-called structure on the ground that the ruling party has; all of this much talked about structure in the last election only delivered 700,000 votes.
In the governorship election, Governor Sanwo-Olu was elected with only 700,000 votes.
At that time there were almost 6.5 million registered voters in Lagos. What’s dominant about that structure? It means that for every one person who voted, five people stayed away and those people who stayed away many of them today are saying this is not a time to stay away.
Many of them are saying this is a time to get involved. I’m sure you have seen the extent to which people are insistent that they must get their voter cards, that they must participate. This is driven substantially by the youth.
We believe that you’re likely to see increased participation, and what is the participation that we are seeing? People are saying; we don’t care anymore about this notion of party and party, we want to know the candidates.
We want to see good candidates; the candidates that we believe in, and we would support them because we have experienced and tried what we have now for over 25 years.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. People are saying that we want a new direction and at the end of the day, the people’s will would be carried.
Importantly, you also know that the electoral process has undergone some significant enhancements that will be evident in this election.
The introduction of technology is an important one; in terms of ensuring that the will of the people, translates through to the outcome of the election.
The big part of this ground structure that you are talking about, has traditionally been used to manage the difference between the will of the people as expressed by their votes and the outcome that is reported when the results come out finally. That is likely to be different in 2020.
If you take this building block, which I’m speaking about sequentially and you put them together, you can see that the context, in which we are today, is a very different context.
When you study political systems across the world, things can remain the same for decades, but one certain pillar condition, foundational conditions, changes.
Things can change overnight and I think we’re on the threshold of a big change in Nigeria.
Read also: ADC’s transformational style of politics is changing the narrative – Ashiru
Do you have the financial strength to compete with the candidates of the two main parties in the election?
You know the issue with resources; you can never have too many resources, even when you think you have enough, it may not be enough.
You may ask the ruling party whether they have enough resources, they might tell you they don’t have, even though we know that they have a lot.
But you see there’s quantum and then there is strategy, there’s what the people want at the time they want it. When the people decide what they want all the money in the world will not change that house.
If the people decide that this is the option they want, it would be very difficult to use money to change that. If you look at the last few elections, you’ll see that the amount of money that has been spent has been going up; but the number of votes has been going down drastically.
Lagos, for example, which has the lowest by the way across the country; the participation is 15% in the governorship election. The national average is about 30%, isn’t it? The highest is probably about close to 50 or thereabouts.
The Lagos figure is like that, despite the fact that probably most money was spent in Lagos. Money will buy some people, but the majority of the people will not be bought by money.
The only question to answer, is that, the majority of people that we are talking about, are they going to come out on Election Day? That is the only question to answer, because for those people, it is not about money.
The other part where money is used traditionally is in altering the result in the collection process. There’s money that goes in there as well, but with electronic voting there’s a bit of checkmating in that.
What is left is voting-buying, which you may try to get rid of, and you probably may not get rid of it.
Electronic voting will not solve the problem of vote buying, but it is a small group of people who actually sell their votes and the reason why this works is because participation is low.
Our argument is that we are in a scenario now; we are likely to see a case where participation is going to be higher, people are going to come out and exercise their mandate. They are doing it from a place of passion and pain.
Is not something that N1, 000, N2, 000 or N3, 000 is going to make the difference for them; otherwise, they’ll sit at home. They are coming with a sense of pain and they will put out their interest.
