Lesson No. 3: Party Monitoring of Government Policies

The party must develop mechanisms for monitoring how our public officers are performing in office. Anti-people policies may not immediately lead to the impeachment of our political office holders but definitely can mobilise public opinion and the wary electorate against us during elections.
When we implement policies that detract from the social welfare of the people, we are sending no message other than one of incompetence and mediocrity. It is the social welfare programmes of Ogbeni that made us the winner of the election. This is what made the emergency generousity of PDP in Osun during the electioneering campaign to be ineffective and fruitless. Had the people been too hungry to comprehend our political statements, definitely things would have gone the other way. The need for continuous balancing of developments vis-a-vis immediate human desires cannot be under-estimated. A Chinese proverb says: give food to a hungry man and you have shown him God. On no account must the government allow the people to sleep hungry otherwise there would be mass disillusionment of unquantifiable proportion. This is what Aregbesola has been trying to prevent through his food security programme.

Lesson No. 4: Deficiency in Politics of Stomach Infrastructure
Quite a number of our leaders in APC condemned Ogbeni that he was only tarring roads but failed to tar their stomachs. Some civil servants formed themselves into bulwark of opposition due to the policies of Aregbesola which blocked the loopholes in public finance by which State money that would have been used for public development found its ways into private pockets and thereby producing emergency millionaires among civil servants. Such civil servants would rather canvass for politics of stomach infrastructure by which State allocation and IGR would be shared among government officials and chieftains in the civil service. The money saved from these efforts by Ogbeni Aregbesola has boosted the internally generated revenue of the State from which
1. 13th month salaries were regularly paid at the end of every year to civil servants,
2. free and qualitative education is being guaranteed to the children of the civil servants and the poor, and
3. increments in salaries of civil servants are being implemented.
I sent out some of my lieutenants to listen to public conversations in public buses, markets and other places of public patronage weeks preceding the election. The reports indicated that the general populace who were well aware of the chicanery and selfish campaigns of these retrogressive elements within the civil service, was resisting the unfortunate agitation to vote mediocrity and backwardness.

Lesson No. 5: Leaders must Carry Followers Along
No policy is a success if not bought into by the masses for whom probably it was formulated. This is one fundamental lesson derived from the Osun election. Aregbesola, through all fora, media and events explained his policies to the people. He did not engage in sheer banalities without beneficial interaction with the people. His “Gbangba Dekun” television programme, where he explained his programmes and policies to the people, has commanded the largest audiences in recent history of public interaction by any government. It is through such fora that the people were effectively informed about the efforts of the government aside from being witnesses to physical infrastructural developments which they can personally relate with and take cognisance of.