APC LGA PARTY CHAIRMAN ADVISES COUNCIL CHAIRMEN TO TAKE THEIR FERFORMANCE RECORDS DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE

SAYS LASISI AKINSANYA OF IGANDO/IKOTUN LCDA IS A SILENT ACHIEVER IN NEEDS OF AMPLIFIER TO SHOW HIS PERFORMANCES WHILE COMMENDING CIVICS WEEKLY FOR DOING GOOD WORK FOR PUBLIC AWARENESS

Story by Ololade Barakat

The new Igando/Ikotun LGA Party Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Pastor Ojo Samuel ("Sadol"), has advised the council chairmen across Lagos State to take their performance records directly to the public via orthodox media trusted by the people. He observed that the idea of revolving information about their performances within the party groups' platforms alone had not helped to propagate the right mileage local government administrations have attained under the APC, "especially with regards to the purpose of creating additional local governments by the administration of then Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu -- now the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria", he noted.

He made this observation during interactions with the Civics Weekly magazine, parent body of The County newspaper, over the celebration of Senior Comerade Lasisi Akinsanya's first year of office in his second term administration. He described his Council Chairman as a silent achiever who needs amplifier to spread his regular project deliveries and the many intangible welfare programmes. He raised this point while fielding questions on why the performance of his Council Chairman as found by independent media investigations to be in sharp contrast to the subsisting general news of poor performance tagged to him.

Sadol also revealed that this observation was already a knowledge of the Chairman's in-house cabinet "because we jointly reviewed this at the start of this second term of office", as he said.

For a while lasting over a month, Civics Weekly had been in Igando/Ikotun LCDA to undertake independent media investigations of the project deliveries -- as ongoing and delivered -- by Akinsanya. This followed his eventual emergence as the Civics Council Chairman of the Year 2025. Although the media said he earned the honour on the crest of the year's theme which has "governance by compassion" as the undertow, the independendent investigations rather revealed that Comerade Akinsanya also made tremendous achievements in infrastructure deliveries with purposeful impacts derived from the direct needs of the people.

Speaking to all this, Pastor Samuel said: "The problem with the poor public knowledge of the impressive performance of my Council Chairman is communication gap as you rightly said. You said it all with that and I have raised it with him. Before now in his first tenure, do you know what I observed? My Chairman was working, but we limited the publicity to our social media within the party. We have series of groups that have their respective platforms within the party -- the APC, the Justice Forum, the TMM -- many of them on this my phone.

"So when we were projecting what he had done, we sent them to our inner-house social media. Doing this, it means we we are only speaking to ourselves about we already knew to have been done. We only revolve the information among ourselves while the public is not being carried along. And if the public are not carried along; no matter how good Asiwaju is doing, if the people are not aware, then he has done nothing. Even when they are seeing it like this, they deny -- pe kini? kilo se? -- much more now that truly you do not publicise it to them.

"So, I told him (Council Chairman), 'you are working but our problem is that we limit the publicity within the APC members. The public are not aware of what we are doing'. But I thank God that the narratives have changed in this second term. That is why the like of your media and others were around to cover this event of his first year. That is also why we are having this interview. The other times, nobody had ever come to me to request interview like this about our project deliveries and what we are doing.

"Again, part of the evidence of the change is what you have reported as the findings of your own independent media investigations, which informed his emergence as Council Chairman of the Year 2025. I didn't know of that before. I heard from the public first before I read about it later. This shows that we are now taking our performances to the people to know".

Sadol, who currently doubles as the outgoing Chairman of the Community Development Committe (CDC) for Igando/Ikotun LCDA, went further to advocate this advice to all the Council Chairmen across the state. "Let me say it is almost the same problem across the state which, unfortunately, has not helped to propagate the performance impacts of our APC as a ruling party the way it should be", he said.

He continues on that: "So, I want to extend this call to all other Council chairmen across Lagos State. We need to do more about the use of public trusted media to propagate the values of APC as a ruling party. They also have to take their performance records directly to the people. We can only do that by going outside of our party platforms with publicity of our works to let the public know. This is how we can earn the trust of the electorates.

"The reform policies of our Leader and President, Bola Tinubu have imparted lives more than the noise of hardship that dominates the social space. Outside that, I can say it with all intent of sincerity that no local council among the 57 we have has not made significant developmental mileage to justify the purpose of the local government creation by then Governor Tinubu in 2004 thereabout. Today, every election should be a walk over for us. But we fail to carry along the public as an important stakeholder in matters of governance of politics. These are the people who determine whether we continue in government or we go".