The Labour Party has alleged that the Lagos State Government is creating hurdles to prevent the party from pasting posters and billboards of its flagbearer Peter Obi in the state.
OsunDaily News reports that the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Abayomi Arabambi, who revealed this said many of the party’s supporters in the state are asking why posters and billboards of Obi aren’t in the state.
He alleged that agencies of the state government have directed that advertising practitioners should find ways of frustrating the party.
Arabambi noted that “We met a brick wall with most of these private advert practitioners. They said if they (the government) see anything belonging to the Labour Party they will ban their sites. For the advertising practitioners, projects that they will take 250,000 for, they will bill us N3m and when you bring the money, they will tell you ‘they have warned us not to take it.
“How do you threaten private advertising practitioners? Unfortunately, they (advert practitioners) don’t want to risk it because they pay money to the government so that they can continue to do business. If they see the Labour Party there (on the billboards) their licence may be revoked.”
However, OsunDaily News gathered that the Head of Corporate Affairs and Public Relations, Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA), Temitope Akande while reacting to the allegation told Punch that billboard points across the states had been leased to private companies.
He said political parties should go and meet private companies that have leased the points and discuss terms and conditions for using their platform, adding that their own mandate is to control the structures, not the content.
The LASAA boss submitted that “When it comes to billboards, we have given permits to those who run it as a business, we expect them to do their obligations as agencies.
“They (political parties) won’t come to us for the use of billboards because what we control is the structure, not the content. The content is controlled by APCON and the negotiation to use billboards sited anywhere is between the clients and the agency.
“They should go and meet companies and discuss terms and conditions for using their platform. Ours is that they (advertising companies) meet the agreed terms they have with LASAA on the service fees. They have approval for three years but they pay their yearly rent.
“We told them (political parties) to come and register with us but they have refused to come. They keep pasting posters around to litter everywhere and when we begin cleaning up, they will say we are not allowing them to paste posters, but they have refused to come to regularise their posters.
“To regularise their posters, they need to write to us formally, inform us where they intend to deploy their posters and we will define where they can put it so that other political parties can have their share of the space dimension, location, number of the poster per pasting.”
Giving his take on the issue, the Lagos state Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotoso told Punch that “The little I know is that the state is against the indiscriminate pasting of posters to deface the state, which I think is not good. But as a government, we have not said people should not do whatever they want to do that is legal for them to sell their candidate.
“So, anybody who thinks that the state government as an institution will go out and begin to remove people’s posters is preposterous, absurd and not reasonable at all.”
