Interview: Femi Solola, an independent candidate for Mayor

Last week Big Smoke went down to the African Community Centre in Greenwich to speak to Femi Solola, a local community activist who is running for Mayor on an independent ticket.

As a Nigerian teacher who became a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) when he came to London his story is actually a fair bit closer to many Londoners than the main challengers for London’s throne.

Certainly the lack of viable black candidates for the position of Mayor is something we have to address. God bless Ken, Boris, Brian and Jenny, obviously, but as a group they just don’t look like London.

Never having met someone who wants to run one of the world’s most influential cities and thinks they can do that without the backing of a political party I wasn’t sure what I was going to find. Would he be a megalomaniac?

In fact he was a charming and intelligent man with a good grasp of the problems he was facing to get elected, even if he was more wildly optimistic about his chances than the evidence perhaps justifies.

He displayed genuine pride in the work he’d done as a teacher and what he achieves in our communities as a PCSO. There was an interesting difference between the way he described his work off camera from when it began to roll and I wish I’d captured the more humble, rounded Femi as well as Femi, the candidate for Mayor.

This happened more than once where Femi came across really well informally but a little too stiff and, well, Mayoral when it came to the recording. I know that doesn’t sound like a bad thing but it is a shame that I didn’t manage to capture the more personable, charming Femi on film. Watch the video and decide for yourself.

We discussed the relationship between the press, the owners of the press and the political parties. We discussed the shape of London and it’s divides both social and geographic. He was an interesting and positive conversationalist and it was not long before I’d really warmed to him.

It’s a real shame that, up until this point, there has been little space in London’s politics for independent voices who have insights that party politics sometimes finds it difficult to reach. Should nice, community spirited, decent people really have to pull together the considerable resources to run for Mayor in order to be heard?

What should we be doing as a city to ensure that people like Femi (and not just Femi obviously) have a really valued voice?