 Today we will discuss with the Commissioner for Information in Delta State Charles Aniagou on the just concluded Governorship elections in Delta State. And PDP assistance from the Governor that it is today will be a fire show from the President of the Senate, Paris-Anion and to others over anti-party activities. This is plus politics when it is in Aniagou. Have a good day. The Governorship candidate of the People's Democratic Party, Sharif Oborowari, was declared winner of the Governorship election in Delta State by the Independent National Electoral Commission. According to the results announced on Monday by the Resident Electoral Commissioner, Mondeo Udottom, Sharif won 21 out of the 25 local government areas collated in the state to defeat his closest rival, the All Progressive Congress candidate Ovier Omoagege. Sharif pulled 360,234 votes. Omoagege pulled 240,229 votes while the All Progressive Grand Alliance candidate, Chief Great Radha Oborow, got 11,029 votes. However, the Delta All Progressive Congress APC campaign council has rejected the result of the Delta State given a total election held on the 18th of March as announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INAG. Also, in a statement by its Director of Communications and Media Strategy, Ima Niboro, the council dismissed the result declared by INAG as a period victory for the People's Democratic Party PDP, which will be overturned by the share weight of evidence against it. Also, the Delta State Governorship candidate of the Young Progressive Congress YPP, Dr. Sonny Ophigge, has vowed to take evidence gathered from Saturday's Governorship and State Assembly elections to the international community for appropriate actions against Nigeria, not just Delta State. While joining us live to discuss this is the Commissioner for Information in Delta State, Charles Anyagu. Thank you for joining us, Honorable Commissioner. Thanks for having me. Good evening and let me apologize for not being able to join you yesterday. It was also a bit of a circumstances quite being on my control. I hope you will pardon me and forgive me for not being able to show up. On live TV, yes. Outside live TV, I don't know. You can discuss. I won't ask you to go to court. That's the point I was getting to. Anyway, it seems to me that everybody in Nigeria now is just so confident that if you win an election, whether by a crook or any way, you can just say go to court and all that. And in Delta State, they are also protesting. Other parties are protesting that the election was not clean enough. It was not good enough. It was fought with irregularities. It was fought with election, permit the word, malpractice and all that. What is your response to the complaints from especially the APC and the YPP? Well, I can tell you that the election in Delta was conducted loudly in conformity with the Electoral Act. And we are not going to ask anybody to go to court because we know the distractions that going to court brings to any administration. But if any of the political parties that lost in the course of the election chooses to take advantage of that provision in the Electoral Act that you could protest the outcome of any election in court, we will not begrudge anybody who chooses to do so. But what I can tell you is that that election was won fair and square by Sherif Oburoburi because there are many factors that have in the course of this deliberation. We will be able to look at those factors that loudly contributed to the victory of Sherif Oburoburi and which at the same time also led to the defeat of his closest rival, the person of Amua Gege of the APC. The YPP is more or less not in contest in that election. So I wouldn't want to waste your airtime discussing a party that was nowhere to be found in the course of that election. Perhaps in future to be the Labour Party candidate that came third in that election, even if it was a distant third who could begin to give that a thought in terms of the discussion. So I want to restrict myself to what happened to the PDP, how we won and how the APC lost. But I can tell you that the outcome is a very, very clear reflection of the desires of the people of Delta. The few areas where we had chemisties were largely triggered by the ambition of the APC candidate to want to first himself on their terms and of course he took steps that triggered some level of violence in some quarters, which was also quite minimal because the number of his prey wasn't that much. Largely, his own local government and then in the local government of our former governor, it was giving out and it took west. And so those were the two areas where we got reports of some chemisties. But at the end of the day, the outcome of that result is a true reflection of what the people voted and I stand to be corrected. Anytime any day we are very much willing to defend our result because indeed we allow the beaver, tango, the beavers walked with millions of the beavers. Like I said in the course of this discussion, I can tell you how we got our victory and how he secured his loss. Okay, but you did mention something that was really funny to me. In other climes, it shouldn't be funny, but you said that YPP candidate came, did not even come third in that race. But we've seen in Nigeria, the same Nigeria where a sitting governor right now came fourth. This is not even me. Okay, but I just didn't get that out. But it's the same judicial system, so I just need to point that out that any position in Nigeria, we don't know what happens in the course. Having stated that, doesn't it give you any problems if there's been an antecedent of something like this happening? Even the person who came a distant foot becoming the governor, doesn't it worry you that maybe when it goes to court some of the evidences they are claiming to have could affect your party's victory? Well, I must first of all admit that the judiciary largely have been able to leave up the expectation in a number of landmark cases and the judge that, like he said, the little faces that spoil the annals. In some other instances, you have some of these not too pleasant judgments, either because they do not flow according to the reasoning of members of the public or does not have substantial ground in law. And as such, you begin to doubt the ability of the judiciary to do the right thing. A very good example is what happened today. You could see what happened with respect to the reversal of the tribunal judgment in Oshun by the Court of Appeal. I can tell you that majority of Nigerians are happy because they believe that that judgment is in line with the yearnings and aspirations of particularly people in Oshun state. And so the same judiciary where you have individuals who possibly, who diverge judgment based on certain primordial sentiments or certain factors outside the consideration of the law, the same judiciary you also see who of the judges who indeed have been able to give landmark judgments, who are able to defend the judicial sector and of course turn it depends on our laws. So I would not want to begin to entertain any fear just because some judges at certain times did not progress in line with the thinking of members of the public. We do have hope in our judiciary. You cannot, like I said, the people get the leadership they deserve. You can't go into a rotten matter and begin to search for a heritage. Whatever decay you have seen in the judiciary also is pervasive in other sectors. It's a reflection of where we are found as a country. So if we are talking about the need to have fears, we need to have a holistic appraiser of our country in different sectors, whether it's in INEG, whether it's in the media, whether it's any sector, so that at the end of the day we begin to have a country that works. So to aside directly, we don't have any fears that we're going to defeat anybody who decide to challenge this victory of a bururi in court because the election was won fair and square and we're very much convinced that it was what the Pamwai produced that the Tapa brought home. There wasn't any element of any other extra liquid to boost the content of that country. Okay, during the electioneering a lot of things were thrown up. One of them was that your principle did not perform so well in every part of the state. Could that be the reason why the margin between your party and the APC was that small? Because I would call it small. For someone who was a VP candidate in the election to have someone, a rival rather, get so much votes in his state, his home state, and even lose in some areas. It's worrisome to some people. We thought that he was going to have like 100% from Delta State. So why do you think that this margin was that small? I don't know what you mean by small. Perhaps if you're a student of statistics you will understand that in this examination, in this election it's taken to be an examination, that the PDP is in the A region. If you score 360 something and that person is 200 and 40 something, that's over 120,000 difference. And so you can't begin to say small. Go ahead and do the statistics and you see the percentage and then the margin between the two. And so even if I want to agree with you, but of course without considering that that's a small number, you cannot expect an individual to score 100% in an election that is going to be contested because the person who is contested against you have families. He has a wife, he's going to vote for himself. He has those who have been working with him. There are persons from his village who perhaps want to also bring in some primordial sentiments. And so there's no way you can score 100%. For us, we did very well in that election, given the amount of propaganda that was unleashed on us by the APC and the Governorship Candidate which were leased to the whole lot of lies. One would have thought that they would even put up a better showing. We never thought that we were going to beat them this silly. Because where you have 25 local government areas and you win in 21 out of that 25, why do the mathematics? You discover that he did not even get up to 25% of the local governments in the state. So constitutionally, if they were to put it that way, without looking at the individual scores at the local government level, if the local government were to be counted in terms of where you win like it is in America, once you win a state, you take all the electoral college votes in that state. If our own system were to be a fashion after that particular one, you would discover that Ufioma Gigi only won in four local governments and in which case less than 25% of the number of local governments in Delta. And so he cannot begin to beat his test that he did very well in this exam. It's not even a weak pass. Ordinarily, if it were to be exam, like I said, he would require a serious repeat so that for him to buckle up and we're urging him to wait for 2027 so that at the end of the day, perhaps by that time, he would have turned a new lead because there are a number of things that he has done in the past that are counted largely for his abysmal performance in this election. I know you do remember the episode in the Senate, where for the first time in the history of the Nigerian Senate, the maze, which is the symbol of authority, was counted away by talks. Of course, you know who brought those talks into the Senate chamber. And that was why ahead of this election, because we know his ability to progress in that direction, we make sure that we ensure that we had no fewer than five able-bodied men in each of the polling units so that if anybody decided to cut away the ballot box just like they took away the maze of the Senate, that it would be impossible. And so that was what you saw in a number of the local government that they were not able to carry out those particular style that they seem to have developed in the course of time. And beyond that, many debtors were not also willing to have such a person that would have done such a thing and brought shame to our state to become our leader. In addition to the fact that Senator Dr. Atefa Yokowa performed very well across the 25 local government areas in the last eight years. This is also in addition to the fact that the candidate of the PDP, Sherry Fuburu, is in tune with the grassroots. He has been the speaker of the debtor status of assembly for close to CCS now. He has had a whole lot of grief on the 29 state assembly constraints having presided over the entire assembly where we have 29 members and without any banana peel. So you could see the reason why it wasn't possible for Ufiomua Gigi to put up a good show. So I don't want to believe that it's a small margin. It was imagine enough for him to feel ashamed of his outing which is why even shortly before the election result was announced he had to run back to Abuja. As I speak to him, he's in Abuja. He can't even, to come to debtor, he knows that when people see him he will be feeling shy. But we are calling him to come and join us. We won't laugh at him. He has done well by at least making sure that we are the contest. And so we'll let him come. There are positions that could be available for him now that he's no longer returning to the Nigerian Senate. Okay, well, let's talk about this trend on which you campaigned and which, like you said, gave you the leverage, gave you the opportunity to return to the House or to the State House because it's your candidate that is now Governor-elect and will be sworn in by God's grace on the 29th of May. But before, okay, after that we are going to look at the manifesto of Sherif himself. But right now tell me the strength on which you campaigned and why you think you got what you got. Well, in person, I have mentioned in a few of the reasons why we secured the number of votes that were got that of course made us to come up top in this election. IE, the amount of projects Senator Dr. Efany Okoh have carried out in the 25 local government areas which of course plays the PDP in good stead ahead of this election. Then of course I have also mentioned the quality and the ability of the governorship candidate. But most importantly, beyond the fact that we have done all this we came down to the grassroots. You'll recall that we didn't have a good outing with the presidential election because the Obedian movement really had a very good outing in data. And when that happened it became necessary for us to take a second look at what led to that. And we began a review. In the course of that review all political leaders of the PDP were asked to return to their wards, not to their local governments. Return to your wards, return to your unit, go and talk to the people. Explain to them where they got it wrong and the things that they may not have been able to understand. And we did that as once we spoke to our people like man talk to man, man listen. Our people saw that indeed that we deserve to be appreciated for the enormous work we have done in the last eight years and that the Guru will also deserve to be elected because of his charismatic nature and the fact that he is in touch with the grassroots. And so once that was done it was obvious that the victory will progress in our own direction. And we spoke to our people, our people listened and they compared the two candidates. They saw one who they do not even understand his own faiths. Of course you know whether you like it or not there are previous sentiments around faith and ethnicity. So good enough these two different gentlemen are from the same tribe if you may like and from the same Senatura district that's data center and of the Roboethnic Instruction. And so they scored equal on that front and but beyond that they also know you also know that data is also largely a Christian state and they saw one who at least is closer to Jesus Christ while the other one is further away because of what he practices. That became a minus for him. Secondly they also saw one who is not a Pandetan because all the few things that Senator Omoa Gigi managed as the deputy president to attract from Abuja he located all of them in just a portion of his village not even the entire village not even the entire local government not the talk of data center. So they have seen a man who is very very selfish. So even from data center people were scared that if he becomes governor he will only concentrate in his village and forget that there are other parts of the central Senatura district. All these factors combined with the fact that he has not also been a good leader in the APC. He changed the way almost every leader until he got this ticket to become the governor's candidate of the APC. I'm sure you listened to Cairo Ujubu about three days ago who is the chieftain of the APC when he mentioned that he was sure that Omoa Gigi would not win the election because the way he treated all of them in the party and so he couldn't have treated them that shabbily and expected that they would also come out to work for him. Besides our DNA in data if you examine it you will see the PDP bodily ingrained in our DNA except for the incursion of the Labour Party through the obedient movement and thank God that DNA has been restored by the victory of Sherif Ubolewuri. So my brother if he comes back tomorrow and see that he wants to have another election I can assure you he will score far less than what he got in this first election. Okay let's look at Sherif himself Ubolewuri who is the governor-elect what his plans for Delton's and the Delta State are rather tell us more about his manifesto and the things he believes in. Well first of all he has an agenda that could name more M-U-R-E and this agenda speaks to a number of issues that have to be done on meaningful reforms in a number of sectors in which case he's going to look at land administration he's going to look at how we also run our economy he's going to be in sustaining the many policies and programs of the Okowa administration because don't forget it's the same party and of course we belong to the same family that he's going to also ensure that they bring him more jobs more entrepreneurs through different scheme programs which today we are running so he's not only going to sustain it he's going to expand it and he spoke eloquently about such he's also very much interested in deepening the peace and the harmony that exists in the state today even as he's very much interested in expanding the economy big so that at the end of the day there are more private sectors coming in than there are at the moment and then of course you have also some form of expansion into the agricultural endowments of the states all these are part of the things that Oborowori addressed in the course of crossing the 25 local government areas one other factor which I didn't remember to mention earlier as to why Oborowori defeated Uwi Amo will give very very recently is that Oborowori had the time to visit these 25 local government areas three different times in the course of the campaign beyond that the political leaders of the three senatorial districts were enjoying and they truly carried out that order by the governor to reach out to the people in their wars who have 270 wars in Delta these 270 wars had interface with leadership through leadership of the party at the highest level Oborowori and Gege did not have the opportunity of doing that since he didn't do that there are many places he did not visit and those that doesn't know you are not likely to go and begin to look in your direction besides there are a wave of negatives around him including the fact that he had had a conviction of why he was in the US all those we made very known to our members of our society what I mean our society I'm talking about Delta today and so my brother you will understand that the manifesto of Oborowori we speak to expansion of the many programs that Okowa has brought to bear in the last eight years on the landscape of our state the fact that he is very much also willing to sustain a number of the lordable projects of the Okowa Land Administration in addition to his touch with the grass root is enough for Ovi not to have scored any reasonable vote in the course of this election and Ovi himself and his followers they know the only job pretending when you talk to them outside the public arena they will tell you that they know that it's going to be difficult they thought they could take some persons who never had any strong showing politically who defected some few weeks some few months some few days before the election they thought that they were swelling their arms but we knew that it was more like a good riddance to whatever you thought it could be and those people who left you know what they lost their unit not even just their world that tells you that the name we're not adding much value to the party so I wonder what they will be doing now I could see some of them jumping from one place to the other but you know some of them don't even actually have shame before you know now they will be running around looking for how they will give them one appointment of the other unless that's this month now you see some of them running back jumping from one political party to the other as if they are prostitutes but of course you know politically we have a lot of them in that time okay just before we wrap up let's just look at everybody is now concerned about education especially after what happened in the elections and we're concerned about our youths who are going to take this mantle tomorrow and we talk about education all the time what plans does or plans do Sherif have for education for Delta first of all Sherif in the course of moving around talked about the need to retrieve our curriculum such that it accommodates a whole number of programs that we speak to to this life of our people in our own administration we have been able to play a whole lot of emphasis and attention on the issue of technical education Sherif says he's also going to do that so that you have much more didactic system of learning where the students are able to have the hands on knowledge in addition to the theoretical knowledge but beyond that it's quite very very clear on his desire to fund the school system in such a way that you begin to sustain what we're having now let me tell you that it's only in Delta that even when the universities and high institutions were on strike for eight months our schools were running Adelboro Wood says he's going to sustain such that none of the schools have four universities in Delta four state-owned universities no state in this country can boast of that number we also have polytechnics in the different three-dimensional districts no states can boast of that we have College of Education in the three-dimensional districts and all of them were running even while others were on strike does he intend to does he intend to does he intend to does he intend to does he intend to make the budget for education bigger than what is obtainable right now and hundred percent it's not about making it bigger you know doing what works is most important let me tell you we discussed with our people because everybody is paying leave service to education to assume that you can have free education all through and at the end of the day you say education is free but equality is in the pit and what happens you say don't pay school fees you don't have the money to pay the lecturers you say don't pay school fees yet the classroom and worst of shape don't pay school fees no medical laboratory no science laboratory all the things that you really require for the purpose of having quality education are not in place because you don't have the funds to be able to fund it but what we did in Delta is to say keep your pay a little meet us halfway so that even the money you need to power the generators in the schools the money you need to clear the grasses the money you need to repair the electrical appliances in the schools the money you need to do a few other things including the temporary staff that you may need to hire that you should be able to have money at that level is now started with the burden of the payment of salaries of the workers in this case the lecturers and the other non-academic staff and at the same time engage in very very huge project that will require huge capital hardly like building of structures but when you say completely free you forget that that money you are using to declare free education also belongs to the son of the carpenter who has to pay for agreement by his parents to even learn carpentry and you just come and because some persons are privileged to go to school and you say their home must be completely free there must be a level of payment no matter how small such that the parents who also gave back to the child the society where the child will play and the government that is in control of what happen in the society will have a role to play because these three entities the parents the government and the society and shareholders they must be able to play role and not just to say that you are just budgeting and at the end of the day you don't have that money and you are not able to do other things like it is done in advanced society Okay, Ms. Daniego thank you so much for coming on the program today well, we are hoping when the time comes he will be sworn in and our eyes will be clear will be open and will be watching Please, please make sure your ear is also on ground and all the things that he is going to do I hope that he will do it for the benefit of people of Delta and Nigeria in general Thank you so much You are the person around him whether in or out of whether in or out of government at least you will be able to reach him to be able to say please you recall you made this promise please keep to the promise Thank you so much for coming on the show Thanks for having me Okay, we have been talking with the commissioner for information in Delta State Charles Daniego and we will take a short break when we return we will be talking about other happenings in PDP Stay with us