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abujagirl
Guest
The letter fest is still on in Nigeria, Hon. Michael Opeyemi Bamidele a member of the House of Representatives has joined several other Nigerians in taking advantage of the season by penning down an open letter to Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti state.
Read the letter to below:
Your Excellency,
I have taken my time to read through your new year message of January 1st, 2014 in which you, among other things, expressed your concern for security of lives and properties in the State while calling on “all stakeholders, the people, the political elite, traditional rulers, e.t.c.to put all efforts to ensure Ekiti State records a free and fair 2014 election that would be a model to other States and a reflection of the honourable people that we are”.
Your Excellency, I feel compelled at this point to write to express my concern, like many well-meaning stakeholders in Ekiti State, over your seeming capacity to say one thing and do the exact opposite.
To begin with, putting yourself in my shoes, how would I and my constituents believe your professed commitment to protection of properties if I made statutory payments to the Signage Agency under your office to mount 16 billboards as an elected Representative to wish people who elected you and I into office a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year on the 22nd of December 2013 and, in less than 48hrs thereafter, your political appointees had destroyed all of the billboards while you conveniently looked away? Or how can I and the two young widows and 3 children as well as relatives and kinsmen of late Folusho Ogundare, my supporter who was killed in a most gruesome manner on the street of Emure-Ekiti on November 3rd, 2013 and in respect of which 9 members of your Excellency’s 2nd term campaign team are still in police custody, believe your self-acclaimed commitment to protection of lives and other rhetorical claims in your new year message?.
If you really ask me, your excellency, I fear that you, probably without knowing it, constitute the greatest threat to the realization of a free and fair election in Ekiti State in 2014 owing to your seeming allergy to any form of opposition as well as the intransigence of many of the political gladiators you surround yourself with in Ekiti and who seem to have finally boxed you into a corner.
Your Excellency, how, for instance, will you explain the fact that you and your cronies are the only elected and appointed public servants or statesmen who can air their views and programmes on the Television (EKTV) and Radio components of the Broadcasting Service of Ekiti State (BSES)? Their refusal to air paid advertorials and programmes due to what has been termed “order from above” is clearly in violation of known guidelines of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), thereby denying the populace of the needed information aside from Government propaganda.
It is a fact known to many today that the reason you have deliberately chosen to deny access to critical stakeholders and manipulate information dissemination through the State owned electronic media is so that you can actually rule without being criticised. You want the world to hear that you are the best Governor Ekiti State has produced and may ever produce. Yet, you don’t want Ekiti stakeholders to have access to the media through which they can review your performance and, where necessary, critique your policy and programme implementation procedure. You are the only one who can talk in addition to the few ones you still manage to trust among your appointees and collaborators who merely re-echo the things you say.
For instance, the State today has come under a huge weight of debt due to your indiscriminate and excessive borrowings within the last two years with a lot of misplacement of priorities in the application of borrowed funds. To me, the issue is not about whether or not the Government could borrow money to finance investments and developmental projects. Not at all. Rather, it is about the extent, rapidity, sincerity of purpose and due process compliance standard in the disbursement, which could have prevented the high level of wastages, owing to inexperience and deafening corruption, as well as unprecedented level of capital flight currently going on in Ekiti where career civil servants have almost all been rendered redundant because all manners of self-acclaimed Consultants are made to take over their ministerial responsibilities. No accountable Government would short the doors of its media, funded by Tax Payers money, to critical stakeholders and to public opinion.
As I always say to you, Mr. Governor, you have tried your very best, given the extent of your experience and political exposure since the best that any man can be expected to give is his best. God Almighty knows, my family members sincerely believe, my associates carry the faith and all those who are familiar with my antecedents are convinced that the only reason I would choose to run for governorship at this time is because I, most definitely, can do much better than your best. Not because I am a magician, but because I am better equipped and with a deeper and much more scientific understanding of what is to be done to bring about a new and united Ekiti where more can be delivered for less and without the future of the State and her people being mortgaged to local and international finance capital.
I know what it means and, by God’s Grace, I have what it takes to, beyond rhetoric, govern not from an Olympian height but from an all-inclusive perspective where the workers (at State and Local Government levels), those who taught us and are still teaching our children, the traditional institutions, the academia, the youth, the women, the civil society, including organised labour, religious and community leaders as well as private (formal and informal) sector participants will be made relevant to the decision making process and implementation of Government policies and programmes.
In sending you a copy of this open letter, Your Excellency, it will be, primarily, for the purpose of encouraging you to do one interesting thing that I find most amusing about your style.
Read complete letter from Premium Times
Read the letter to below:
Your Excellency,
I have taken my time to read through your new year message of January 1st, 2014 in which you, among other things, expressed your concern for security of lives and properties in the State while calling on “all stakeholders, the people, the political elite, traditional rulers, e.t.c.to put all efforts to ensure Ekiti State records a free and fair 2014 election that would be a model to other States and a reflection of the honourable people that we are”.
Your Excellency, I feel compelled at this point to write to express my concern, like many well-meaning stakeholders in Ekiti State, over your seeming capacity to say one thing and do the exact opposite.
To begin with, putting yourself in my shoes, how would I and my constituents believe your professed commitment to protection of properties if I made statutory payments to the Signage Agency under your office to mount 16 billboards as an elected Representative to wish people who elected you and I into office a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year on the 22nd of December 2013 and, in less than 48hrs thereafter, your political appointees had destroyed all of the billboards while you conveniently looked away? Or how can I and the two young widows and 3 children as well as relatives and kinsmen of late Folusho Ogundare, my supporter who was killed in a most gruesome manner on the street of Emure-Ekiti on November 3rd, 2013 and in respect of which 9 members of your Excellency’s 2nd term campaign team are still in police custody, believe your self-acclaimed commitment to protection of lives and other rhetorical claims in your new year message?.
If you really ask me, your excellency, I fear that you, probably without knowing it, constitute the greatest threat to the realization of a free and fair election in Ekiti State in 2014 owing to your seeming allergy to any form of opposition as well as the intransigence of many of the political gladiators you surround yourself with in Ekiti and who seem to have finally boxed you into a corner.
Your Excellency, how, for instance, will you explain the fact that you and your cronies are the only elected and appointed public servants or statesmen who can air their views and programmes on the Television (EKTV) and Radio components of the Broadcasting Service of Ekiti State (BSES)? Their refusal to air paid advertorials and programmes due to what has been termed “order from above” is clearly in violation of known guidelines of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), thereby denying the populace of the needed information aside from Government propaganda.
It is a fact known to many today that the reason you have deliberately chosen to deny access to critical stakeholders and manipulate information dissemination through the State owned electronic media is so that you can actually rule without being criticised. You want the world to hear that you are the best Governor Ekiti State has produced and may ever produce. Yet, you don’t want Ekiti stakeholders to have access to the media through which they can review your performance and, where necessary, critique your policy and programme implementation procedure. You are the only one who can talk in addition to the few ones you still manage to trust among your appointees and collaborators who merely re-echo the things you say.
For instance, the State today has come under a huge weight of debt due to your indiscriminate and excessive borrowings within the last two years with a lot of misplacement of priorities in the application of borrowed funds. To me, the issue is not about whether or not the Government could borrow money to finance investments and developmental projects. Not at all. Rather, it is about the extent, rapidity, sincerity of purpose and due process compliance standard in the disbursement, which could have prevented the high level of wastages, owing to inexperience and deafening corruption, as well as unprecedented level of capital flight currently going on in Ekiti where career civil servants have almost all been rendered redundant because all manners of self-acclaimed Consultants are made to take over their ministerial responsibilities. No accountable Government would short the doors of its media, funded by Tax Payers money, to critical stakeholders and to public opinion.
As I always say to you, Mr. Governor, you have tried your very best, given the extent of your experience and political exposure since the best that any man can be expected to give is his best. God Almighty knows, my family members sincerely believe, my associates carry the faith and all those who are familiar with my antecedents are convinced that the only reason I would choose to run for governorship at this time is because I, most definitely, can do much better than your best. Not because I am a magician, but because I am better equipped and with a deeper and much more scientific understanding of what is to be done to bring about a new and united Ekiti where more can be delivered for less and without the future of the State and her people being mortgaged to local and international finance capital.
I know what it means and, by God’s Grace, I have what it takes to, beyond rhetoric, govern not from an Olympian height but from an all-inclusive perspective where the workers (at State and Local Government levels), those who taught us and are still teaching our children, the traditional institutions, the academia, the youth, the women, the civil society, including organised labour, religious and community leaders as well as private (formal and informal) sector participants will be made relevant to the decision making process and implementation of Government policies and programmes.
In sending you a copy of this open letter, Your Excellency, it will be, primarily, for the purpose of encouraging you to do one interesting thing that I find most amusing about your style.
Read complete letter from Premium Times
