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WHY I REVOLTED AGAINST FORMER PRESIDENT GOODLUCK JONATHAN

By: Kehinde Adewole

 

Honorable Bimbo Daramola was the lawmaker who led some members  of the House of Representatives, to scale the fence in 2014 when the, Federal Government under former President Goodluck Jonathan, wanted to prevent the then Speaker of the House, and now Governor of Sokoto State, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, from gaining entrance into the lower chamber. In this exclusive interview with African Mirror, he bared his mind on a number of issues, including his political activism.

Q:  We have been following your activisim for sometime and I recall an eventful one where you had to lead a group of your colleagues to scale the fence of the lower House in protest. Why have you brought activism into the politics?

A:  Whatever  I do in life is a function of where  my conscience is at that time. I am driven 96 percent and leaving a margin of 4 to accommodate the frailties and foibles of a human being. 96 percent of whatever you find Bimbo Daramola do is a decision of conscious effort. If I don’t feel right about it, I will not do it. But if I feel right about it, I will pursue it with every fiber of my being and every breath that is in me.

You have heard in Ekiti State, some people call me ‘Mr. Shoot me,’  because of the role I played in defending the mandate of Dr. Fayemi, and by extension, that of Ekiti people as expressed in 2010. Then I stood right under a very tense atmosphere and challenged gun-totting people, telling them that they could not commit that travesty. That happened during  the rerun between Dr Fayemi and Asiwaju Segun Oni then. The one you referred to in Abuja during President Jonathan era was another opportunity for me to stand up for democracy. That day, it was democracy that was in tatters, it was democracy that was in guillotine and the symbol of that arm of government at that time was the man they wanted to keep outside the House of Representatives. He is now Governor Aminu Tambuwal. I didn’t scale the fence for Aminu Tambuwal, but for what he represented which was democracy, unfortunately, today, nobody seems to remember. What I did that day was simply a dictate of my conscience.

Q: Would you still do that today if occasion calls for it?

A: Oh yes, I will do it again. I will do it much more, if the opportunity calls for me to defend the mandate of the people, to defend the weak, the less-privileged, the indefensible, I will do it again.  But I know too well that this is not an ego trip for me. This is not an unbridled enterprise, it is not as a result of vaulting ambition, it is more of an expression of what I strongly believe in.

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