THE OMO OLOORE STORIES
STORY 10: OMO OLOORE YOUNG PERSON/CORPER OF THE MONTH AWARD
After I got sworn-in as a member of the House of Representatives in 2015, I came up with a program – The Oyo State Young Person of the Month.
The idea behind this was to encourage young entrepreneurs who were bootstrapping their businesses and making tangible progress. The reward for being selected as the winner for the month was N100,000. After the program ran for a while we then added another one – corps member of the month(For those serving). That way, every month we were doing both.
In November 2018, my team and I decided to do a follow up on those who had received the awards in the past and it was then we made an interesting discovery. We found out that most people were just following for the sake of the awards; after winning the awards some of them had unfollowed me. That was not the worst – some of them had even blocked my account after receiving the award.
The process of picking the winner(s) was very transparent and without bias as people voted and the person with the highest number of votes gets to win.
Then shortly before the 2019 elections as I was consulting, I discovered that all along, a lot of politicians were angry about the initiatives. Why were they angry? They were angry that I was giving that huge amount to young people who were not politicians nor had political inclinations.
They opined that the awards were given to people who hadn’t done anything to ensure my victory at the polls; and that, perhaps, these people who got the awards did not even have voter’s card.
In fact, some of the people who had complained bitterly behind me for all those years were those who surrounded me. Some of them were folks whom I was paying salaries monthly; yet they felt marginalized because some young business people got N100,000. I feel it was the amount of money that got many riled up.
This resentment from the political class had been on for so long and I did not know. At that point, I could not stop the program, I just decided that if I was re-elected into the House, maybe we could create a third category to be dubbed ‘Young Politician of the Month’.
Unfortunately, we lost and only two out of the numerous past winners reached out after the elections.Aye ooooooo😂😂😂
It was very discouraging to realize that while trying to be a decent young person in office by being supportive to young entrepreneurs and not only politicians ,I lost some political followers and sadly the ones I was losing political followers for were also not appreciating the gesture.
The people for whom you get into disfavour with the political class are the same people that would disregard all your effort.
People hardly put themselves in the leaders’ shoes – they do not feel that political office holders are human and feel pains too.
The people that you’re going out of your way to do things for are the ones who do things that break your heart. Be Wise
There are so many lessons to be learnt here for would be leaders,present leaders and followers.
DO NOT FORGET TO GO GET YOUR PVC
(join me every Wednesday at 6pm, as I share with you personal stories from my journey so far and the lessons I have learned from them)
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