Blessing Oladeji, CEO, Octave Analytics in response to government corruption is vying for the Lagos Central Senatorial seat on the platform of the Young Progressives Party, YPP. He spoke to LM’s Nkanu Egbe recently.
I think I went online and I tried to understand who you are; you happen to be in the tech environment, Octave Analytics, is that correct?
Absolutely.
Tell me a little bit about yourself, about Mr. Blessing Oladeji.
Okay, thanks a lot. I was born a little bit more than 40 years ago; I celebrated my 40th birthday in 2022. I’ve had what I describe as a scattered experience across different industries
Have you always been in tech?
At any point in telecom. I was with marketing in telecom. Then I was also in finance in telecom. I was doing application and software development for a Chinese company, and then I started Octave Analytics.
Essentially when you are talking about analytics, what we do is to help businesses pick out value from the data they generate. So, that’s what we’ve been doing for like six years until recently when I thought the decision. We cannot leave some critical decisions about our lives to some third parties that really don’t know what we need and how we need them. And it is important we get involved in making political decisions because they affect every ramification of life; they affect our children, the one born and the unborn.
So sometime in the year, 2020, during the general lockdown, during the lockdown, a committee of CEOs from private sector came together under the aegis of CACOVID. They put up a fund – they set up like a projected 120 billion naira fund to acquire palliatives for people because there was lockdown generally. And the people – their means of livelihood is on a daily basis – it’s by them going out and making money on a daily basis. That’s how they survive. It was going to be very difficult for them to survive.
So these guys came together and they gave the government – or they raised up to 30 billion naira worth of palliatives to be distributed across different states of the Federation.
What we heard was that our representatives in government took all of these palliatives, they warehoused them and some of them were already rotting in the warehouse until the EndSARS crisis when people discovered the storage and they looted the warehouse. So I was wondering that people who cannot give us food, something as basic as Indomie – a packet of Indomie is about ₦100 or ₦150 or so; people who cannot give food – something basic on the pyramid of needs, who cannot be trusted with things like – they cannot give us education, the quality of education, they cannot provide us security. So, it was on that note I was beginning to consider getting involved in helping make political decisions in a way that affects our lives.
And early this year, by the time the President signed the 2002 Electoral Act into law, and I looked at some of the clauses of the electoral act like the incorporation of technology; like the PVAs for accreditation. There’s a technology for the transmission of results. I know that this is just about the time that we can get involved with the affairs of our dear country.
Why YPP and not APC or PDP?
Thanks a lot. So as they say, the political party is just a vehicle to take you from one destination to the next destination.
So for YPP, essentially there were two main reasons for joining or for choosing the YPP ticket; number one, it was a lot more affordable. The YPP sold its senatorial ticket for like ₦3,000,000 whereas the APC sold its senatorial ticket for like ₦40,000,000. Then you’ll be wondering why a party that is selling senatorial tickets for 40 million naira has automatically filtered out some very competent people that don’t have deep pockets and that are not currently in government. So that is why you see that the people that are on those other party tickets are maybe former governors or many of them who have looted their state’s coffers dry. So they are of course easily going to be able to afford the 40 million naira to buy the party tickets as against people like us that, of course, work for our money and don’t have the intention of looting even when we get into government. That is number one.
Then number two is the fact that the Young Progressives Party is also attractive from the name, from the manifesto, from the missions and the objective of the party itself. When you look at it, the Young Progressives Party, is a party that was essentially set up for young people and for very young professionals like me who intend to also build a career in politics.
What are you offering the people of the Lagos Central Senatorial District? What is your legislative agenda?
There are seven key items on my agenda list, of course, when you get into government…because for a central opposition, even though you are representing a senatorial district, the outlook of your scope of engagement is the entire nation. It goes beyond the locality that you are representing.
But first of all, for us, it’s very important that we stimulate recruits to drive youth employment. Youth unemployment in Nigeria is something that is worrisome and the root cause is also maybe either lack of education, among the out-of-school problem that is ravaging the country. You know, in the north, maybe we are focusing on Almajiri (the young children that are out of school) and that is affecting the crisis, is affecting farming in the north and the crisis that you had in the north – the herders-farmers crisis and stuff like that.
But when you look southward when you come to Lagos state, the agberos that you have, the omo’tas that you have in Lagos state, it also stems out of our children dropping out from school, and this is also affecting the quality of young people that these people grow to become. So part of what we intend to do is to formulate legislating policy that will support productive activity among young people. We can create jobs and this is what I have spent my life doing for the past six years since I formed Octave Analytics. I formed Octave Analytics with an Australian friend before he divested from the company and what we’ve been doing is creating jobs for young people.
With Octave Analytics, for instance, we’ve seen people who went from a ₦40,000 job, today they are earning about maybe ₦1.4million in Nigeria, not from abroad, they are earning ₦1.4million in Nigeria here, it is possible. So at a point, I wanted to scale – I’m just talking about number one alone – at a point, I wanted to scale all of these but I realized that without having government power, there’s a limit to how much you can scale job creation for young people and those are some of the drivers for me to join active policies.
Beyond that, there is also a lack of transparency in Lagos state government where like the Lekki regional road, we don’t even know how much it cost to build those roads; for the road, we don’t know how much it cost the government to build some of these projects. There should be transparency, when you have an alternative person in government, you’ll be able to provide some level of accountability and transparency to the people that you represent. There are lots more, I only mentioned two.
The people of Lagos Central Senatorial District, which include Ebute-Meta, Yaba, Surulere, Coker-Aguda, generally, are the central area of Lagos metropolis. Let me ask you, have you studied the makeup of these people? I mean like the people in Mushin for instance, where you have a preponderance of say, out-of-school children. A place like Mushin is heavily populated and all of that – have you tried to see how you can connect with the population in that area, so that your programmes do not go over their heads?
The out-of-school children problem, if we don’t want to call it the agbero syndrome in Lagos, I feel it is evenly distributed. I am deeply connected with every part of Lagos Central. There is no part of Lagos Central that I have not been to. There are 62 wards. So I took it upon myself – even when my team go around to paste posters, I say, “Guys carry me along. Let me even have a feel of these people.” It is evenly distributed because it’s also institutionalized; you know the state government itself, kind of encourages it, because there is a return that goes across different hierarchies, maybe to some points, even to those that are in government.
We’ve been able to connect with these people and the programme we intend to create, essentially is going to be addressing these people, even including the people that are called “foreigners”. When I say foreigner, even the northerners that are bikers or okada business within Lagos Central are going to be impacted by some of these interventions and programmes that we intend to bring into the Lagos Central by the time we get into government. Because again, this is a legislative agenda at the end of the day, they’re going to come up as policies and laws and those laws eventually are going to affect everybody effectively unlike maybe the executive arm of the government that whose job is to do execution but for us is to make laws and those laws are going to cut across everybody without any exception.
So, you have been doing your campaigns. Of course, the general atmosphere for campaigns is that you have rallies, you go from one place to the other, you mount the box and then you have a crowd that comes to you. How have you been engaging your constituency?
Okay, so for us at Octave Analytics campaign organization, we have deployed a lot of technology to reach people as against the traditional way of connecting to people because, for rallies, we have to go to rallies for some town hall meetings; they are quite expensive. For you to bring people to those rallies, you have to pay; if they have to come to your office, you have to pay, maybe you mobilize them for coming to your office, if you go to them you also have to pay. Honestly, that’s completely not sustainable for somebody who is running his campaign on a budget.
So what we have done is that we have essentially built a platform, I’ve been working on this platform since January 2022 and it became ready sometime around July. We launched it in August. So what we are doing is that we are connecting with people directly. We are doing direct engagement with people using a robust platform which we have built. It’s a first of its kind, and this is also where you need people like us in government because even if you want the populace to have direct engagement with the government, with such a platform like this, you can have a one-on-one engagement either with the state governor or even the president of a country without it necessarily looking overwhelmed. Because at the end of the day, some of the feedback and the responses that we get from people can be aggregated into common issues that could probably need immediate intervention.
How can people access this platform and what kind of analytics do you have right now?
The platform is not available to APC and PDP but it’s available to any other political party because we also want to kick these people out of government, and so we are not going to release this platform to them – yet.
So if someone wants to engage with you, or if you want to engage with people, do people have to register with YPP? What are the modules, and how do you go about them?
It’s not a public platform that’s open to everybody, it’s a proprietary platform that my company built. Actually, that we have decided to deploy into politics, so you may decide to subscribe to the platform, if you’ve subscribed to the platform, then we’ll open it up to you so that you can use it to directly engage with voters within your own constituency. And it’s only people within your constituency alone that will be able to engage on the platform, not people outside your constituency. So there’s a little bit of delineation in the way we use the platform.
Isn’t that too restrictive? I mean, politics is, is a game of numbers, would you say that you have a critical mass that can give you the voter engagement that you are looking for? You need votes.
In this case, for this platform, this platform connects you to all the voters within your constituency. So if Oladeji Blessing is vying for the Lagos Central Senatorial seat and he subscribes to the platform, the platform is only going to give him access to voters in Lagos Central and not voters outside Lagos Central.
So you know, it restricts you only within the constituency you are valuable to; if it’s state government subscribing to the platform, it only gives you access to voters within your constituency alone and not outside the constituency.
Do you have any kind of analytics – are there figures that suggest that you are on the right path?
Yes, definitely. So with the platform, you can see all the people within your constituency according to different delineations. You can see how many people you’ve been able to engage so far. You can see the distribution of people you have engaged on a monthly basis. For those engagements, you can see the delivery rates of your engagement to know the effectiveness of the engagement; you can see the open rate. Because at times when you send messages to some people, they may decide not to open the message, some may decide to just acknowledge it and respond back to you, so you can see the delivery rates, you can see the open rates of the messages.
What we have not done is to be able to aggregate the responses into sentiments, to know – okay, from those responses, who are the people that received the message and respond back with a positive sentiment, who responded back with a negative sentiment.
So these types of analysis can help you to improve the platform, but again, this is the first edition of the platform and this is the first time that anyone is going to be deploying any tool like this for a political campaign.
So are you confident that you will be able to get the number of votes that will give you the senatorial seat?
I want to say today, there is nobody that is contesting for Lagos Central has the level of visibility that I have. As at today, nobody; Just go to the street and mention the name of other competitors or other candidates and mention their names, do a random sampling on maybe 100 people, you’ll see who’ll tell you that I’ve heard that name, he’s engaging me, he sent me WhatsApp message.
But you know the socio-cultural makeup of the people in your constituency, they actually lean towards what opinion leaders point to them. Let me give you an instance. Like Shitta, there’s a preponderance of opinion shifted in the favour of APC, not because they know the candidate but because that is where their groupings or their group leaders have said they should cast their votes. So how are you going to overcome that?
In 2019, with the structure that they have and the group leader’s instruction plus the bullion van they had, they were only able to amass 10% out of 1.3 million people on the voters register, they only ot 130,000 votes, that is just 10%. So with all the structure and incumbency power that they had and the experience they had, they were only able to muscle 10% of the votes of people on the voters register.
That is, they are not popular, so if you can give people a reason to come out on election day, you are going to win the election and we are connecting to all the 1.5million people on the updated voters register, everyone, without any exception, we are connecting with everyone.
Now, if we just get say a 20% of that alone, that is going to be 300,000, that is going to beat them any day, anytime.
So again, I want to assure you that we are a team to beat in this particular election and the journey is just starting now, we are going to be replicating this, we want to flush out the old regime of doing things in Nigeria and we also want to take out those opinion leaders that lead the people astray, we want to flush out their irrelevance with a very clinical and decency way of getting it done. That is what we’ve decided to do with this approach of voters’ engagement rather than going about the land bringing people together.
The unique selling point of our campaign, in this case, is that we are engaging all voters directly, not through a third party or not through proxies.
Mr. Blessing, I want to thank you for your time. I know that you are a very busy person, especially giving the responsibility of the project that you have taken up for yourself. I wish you the best of luck. Thank you very much for this time and do have a great excellent campaign.
