-What Guber Candidate, GBADEBO RHODES-VIVOUR Told CityPeople.
Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour is not your regular kind of politician. He is meek and gentle. And he likes to pick his words gently. Right now, the handsome Governorship candidate of the Labour Party in Lagos State,is the one a lot of people are talking about right now. He is a young man. He is just 39. He was born on 8th March 1983, in Lagos State. Gbadebo has always been an activist, public policy expert, businessman, architect, and politician. Recall that he was the convener of Nigerians Against GMOs (NAG), an organization that advocates against the authorization or introduction of Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs) into Nigeria. He has also been a frontrunner in advocating for the restoration of History in the school curriculum.
He delved into politics in 2007 when he contested for the Ikeja Local Government Chairmanship position under the umbrella of the KOWA Party. In 2019, he, however, clinched the PDP ticket to represent Lagos West Senatorial District at the National Assembly. He lost the election to Senator Adeola Olalekan (Yayi). Gbadebo headed to the tribunal to challenge the result. Citing incidents of widespread violence and discrepancies in the result, he requested a rerun, which wasn’t granted.
On the 10th of August, 2022, Gbadebo emerged as the Labour Party’s candidate for the Lagos State Governorship election after decamping from the PDP.
His nickname is GRV He is the current Lagos State gubernatorial candidate of the Labour Party for the 2023 election after winning the ticket at the primaries.
What is his background like? Gbadebo attended Nottingham University, where he bagged a degree in Architecture before proceeding for his Master’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston. The university awarded him a distinction for his Master’s degree thesis, “Traditional Revolution: Formalizing the Informal: a Proposal for the “Periphery Urbanite” Lagos, Abuja & Port-Harcourt,” which focused on building a network of recycling facilities and garbage collectors in those cities to turn waste into a significant source of income and employment.
His unquenchable passion for activism and politics led him to acquire another Master’s degree in Research and Public Policy from the University of Lagos. While still studying at MIT, he collaborated with the American and Chinese governments during the reconstruction of New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina and the Beijing Olympics, respectively. After successfully completing his Master’s degree in 2008, he returned to Nigeria for his one-year mandatory youth service.
He then proceeded to work for some architectural firms, including Consultants Collaborative Partnership (CCP) and Patrick Waheed Consultants, before establishing his own company to address the housing crisis in Nigeria by using creative and unconventional construction techniques to build Affordable housing in Nigeria. He founded Spatial Tectonics and serves on the boards of Alhuda Construction Nigeria and Delta International Commercial City Ltd.
Recently, CityPeople Magazine Publisher, SEYE KEHINDE spent some time with him to know how prepared the party is to take on the incumbent governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who is also seeking re-election on the platform of APC.
Below are excerpts of the interview.
The campaigns have started and you have been moving round the length and breadth of Lagos State. What does the feedback look like?
It’s been a very good experience”. It is an exciting one, because for the 1st time in my experience in politics, which I started in 2015/2016, we are seeing a situation where people are actually getting involved in politics, they are engaged. They are not leaving politics to politicians anymore. They are mobilising without being mobilised. They are using their own resources to print their fez-caps and tee shirts. Some have even gone as far as printing their own posters for the candidates. There is a general desire for ideology in politics. People are now interested in you showing cerebral capacity.
For the longest time in politics in Nigeria, it has always been about how you can just crack jokes and speak pidgin and yap your opponents.
It wasn’t about your policy, it wasn’t about your cerebral capacity, it wasn’t about empathy, it wasn’t about integrity. All that is changing now.
In Lagos, how do you think politics will play out?
Lagos State is the most cosmopolitan state in Nigeria. That is why any new thing, anything that is going to change and disturb the status quo, generally will start in Lagos State, at least in the south. That is what we are going to see playout.
How do you see the chances of other parties vis-a-vis the APC, which is the incumbent?
The APC supporters have plateaued. It cannot increase, it cannot get higher.
In fact, they will lose supporters now because the APC government has been a disastrous one in the last 8 years. We know what the dollar was when they came in. We know what the price of fuel was when they did Occupy Nigeria. We know what it is today. We know what the price of kerosene was, and we know what we were paying for electricity, so many prices have gone up. It has been a monumental failure.
So, the APC support base has plateaued and reducing and the horrific situation with the EndSars and the 20th of October, 2022 event, a lot of young people are not going to forget. Don’t forget that young people make up 60% of our population. They won’t forget in the nearest future.
That is where Labour Party comes in. Labour Party is the party of the future. It is the party of the now. It is one party where people that actually get up and believe in the dignity of Labour, people that are middle class, not by the money that they earn, but by exposure and education that they have make up the majority of those in Lagos. This is what a lot of people don’t realise. Lagosians will not have lived in Lagos were they not productive people. They are. This set of people are interested in ideas. They are interested in policy. The idea is to get them to come out. We can not leave our politics to be consistently determined by people that only think with their stomachs, because they are so poor. We need to get to people who are also engaged in work.
They wake up every morning, they are the ones in the traffic. They are the ones getting back home late because of traffic.
They are the ones under going multiple Tax. These are the people we need to get to come out to the ballot. These are the people we are working on.
What are the chances of the other top contenders?
I believe Labour Party is the opposition party in Lagos State as far as I am concerned.
How about the PDP?
PDP, unfortunately, the candidate that they chose, the flagbearer that they chose, has really been a letdown for them.
I don’t think he is going anywhere, to be honest.
There are also those who feel that the Labour Party has eaten into the traditional strongholds of the PDP in Lagos State. How true is that?
Well, I will agree with that. The foundational support base of the PDP in Lagos has been non-indigenes and as it is, that is completely gone, now, for them.
They are more likely to go with Labour Party. But also, there is the Youth votes that we are looking at, the votes of people that are upset about how things have been carried on. There is a new generation of voters that are looking towards disrupting the status quo. And I am the candidate that exemplifies that. You don’t want to replace a Mafia-style administration, with another Mafia-style administration. The young people want a complete departure from the norm. And I think Labour Party typifies that.
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