The Director-General for Obi/Datti Presidential Campaign Council, Akin Osuntokun, has opened up on the challenges that characterized the paying of labour Party’s polling agents during the 2023 presidential election.
Peter Obi was the presidential candidate of the Labour Party and Datti baba Ahmed was his running mate.
Clarifying issues on payment of polling agents, Osuntokun said the Labour Party did not have the resources and wherewithal to pay all its agents.
Osuntokun made this known during an interview with Punch on Saturday.
He disclosed that some persons who acted as agents were not enumerated.
“That is the truth.
“We never had the money to do so.
“We had to narrow it down to where we can.
“We had a situation in which people that performed the role of agents, and polling agents were not enumerated.
“It was just their initiative to do so in most parts of the country.
“It is a fact that we couldn’t pay many of the agents.”
He debunked allegation that it was not paucity of funds, but its mismanagement,Osuntokun said: “Well, I don’t know where the information that the funds were available came from.
“Some funds were available but it was used to offset and didn’t go around the country.
“In any case, for anybody who is a party agent, should that be the concern if you truly love the party you are working for?
“Unfortunately, the Labour Party platform is a mixed flag.
“We have the likes of many of the people in the Labour Party who are there as machinery and things like that.
“They are not used to the idealism that the ‘Obidients’ represent.
“The Lamidi Apapa and Arabambi are typical of the Labour Party of the past.
“This is a problem.
“We have people with different motives.
“In the short period that we had to put everything together, there was no room to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
That’s total failure. So the courts were right when they delivered the judgement. Party agents are key but were taken as second fiddle by labor party. Politics is played by those who knows it and experienced not by neophites.