I won’t sacrifice the people to please any politician —Obaseki

Tribune Online
I won’t sacrifice the people to please any politician —Obaseki

The governor of Edo State, Mr Godwin Obaseki, speaks on his leadership style, the frosty relationship between him and his predecessor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, as well as his second term bid, among other issues. KUNLE ODEREMI and LAOLU HAROLDS bring the excerpts from an interaction the governor had with journalists.

WHAT’S your reaction to the plan by Pastor Ize Iyamu to return to the All Progressive Congress (APC)?

They have not approached me. As the leader of the party, I’ve not received any formal request. If you want to go into a party, you go through your ward. You ought to go through the leadership of your party, starting from your ward and say ‘look, I want to come in,’ and then the ward will now escalate it to your local government and say we have someone who has decided to join us and he’s going to be of tremendous benefits to us; he’s bringing money or bringing something to the party. I’ve not seen that; this is just newspaper speculation. He hasn’t called me to say he wants to join us.

What would you say are the gains of the Edo Summit so far?

Well, if you interact with some (people in) this state today,…the quality of thinking, this never used to happen. Edo people now look forward to something every year. Everybody comes together to talk about the state, talk about issues, to look ahead and look at the future, and try and understand why government has done what. So, it’s a platform to help us communicate with our people. But more than that, it’s a platform we’re trying to utilise to engineer governance; because at most times, government seems to exist on its own as government. But we have realised that it can’t work.

Government now wants to partner with the private sector. Our educational revolution, Edo-BEST, is working because we have a private sector partner. On our own, we couldn’t do it. In every area, for us to make the kind of impact we did, we need to have constant collaboration and communication with the rest of society. That old paradigm of government said, then it happened’ doesn’t work anymore. In any case, how much money does government have? If you look at the financial structure of Edo, next to crude oil, remittances account for a large chunk of our revenues or inflows as a country, right? Last year, reports have it that about $25 billion came into Nigeria as remittances. Given the size of our Diaspora, we (Edo) will easily account for 10 per cent of that inflow. So, about $2.5 billion would have come into Edo. How much is my total budget? Total budget at best is about $500 million a year. So, here is a government that is spending $500 million, but in that same economy, private individuals bring in five times what government has to spend. Any smart government would create a platform where it can continuously interact and understand what those people want such that that $3 billion that’s in that economy can quickly be grown and utilised for investment to drive economic growth. That’s the thinking.

So, the summit helps us to throw more light, create that communication, that bridge between what we are doing as government and the rest of the society. And also, most people don’t get to know what you’re doing as government. So, our plan is to first work before we begin to talk; because a typical model is that you come in…my 500 days, you just keep talking and begin to commission things, so that people would say ‘he is working’. But for us, we said no, let’s work, let’s evidence what we want to do. So, (we said) no politics for the first three years. After three years, when election is ahead of you, you can begin to make the noise and play the politics.

How far have you gone with the Edo fibre project?

I have one of the fastest WiFi. It’s out there; we have about 450 kilometres of fibre around this town, and it was dug in less than six months. We are the most connected city in this country. We are extending it to Ekpoma and then to Auchi, so that we begin to push and get a lot of our guys to go into coding, into ICT and see how we can get some of these jobs from India and other countries where a lot of technology work is being done.

If you win your second term…

When I win…

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When you win your second term, what and what should we expect from you?

We’ve laid a very solid foundation for growth. The country is in search of models that work. Lagos has worked, but people look at Lagos as an aberration: 16, 19 million people, port, a lot of private investment; so, it’s not like the rest 36 of us. But if Edo works; if we are able to drive IGR to be three, four times our receipt from Abuja; if we’re able to have a self-sustaining economy, it will be an example to many other states. You might find another 10 or 12 states that would say if Edo could do it, we should be able to do it. So, what I’m hoping is that we’ve made some significant investment in people (education), infrastructure; we’re building an industrial park down Sapele Road; it’s bigger than Agbara (in Ogun State).

What is significant about it is that the energy you need is already there. We’re working with the Chinese to build a river port. Hopefully, by the time we get the final things in place, Lagos is about five hours by water; so, on the Benin River, you can go into Lekki, take a boat. And that would be the closest port to the belly of the country. So, once you land, rather than truck goods 300 kilometres from Tin Can Apapa, you can barge them and move them here. Then, from Benin, you’re one hour from Onitsha, three hours from 70 million people. So, my second term is to consolidate on what we have achieved. By my second term, these children (current primary school pupils) will be going into JSS; so, next year I want to start by strengthening my junior schools, making them lift the hopes of the people who redesigned our educational system; for we’ve moved from the 6-5-4 system to the 6-3-34 system; but that has never really been implemented in real terms.

So, for me, my aspiration is that by the time a child goes through the first nine years of learning in Edo, you’re ready for life. Even if you don’t have an opportunity to continue, you would have picked out something from your schooling system; because your first six years will consolidate your ability to learn. Then the next three years in junior school will expose you to life. And you must leave school with a vocation. So, even if you don’t have the opportunity to continue senior school or technical school, you don’t end up being a tout or agbero, as the situation was here. So, at the end of the day, it’s about human capacity. Once you build the human beings, they make things happen. You guys are all earning a living today because you had good education. If you didn’t, where would you be?

Your main contender in the 2016 governorship election, Pastor Iyamu, said he’s coming back home…

Which home?

What value do you think he will add to the APC if he eventually joins you?

Well, when we sit down and have a conversation, we’ll see what he is talking about. You’re coming to join us, where are the areas of weakness you are coming to strengthen for us? He hasn’t had that conversation with me yet; but I expect at some point, we’ll have to have it (conversation) I’m the leader of the party (in the state).

One great achievement of former Governor Adams Oshiomhole was getting touts who used to disturb those who go to the South-East every time off the roads. But it is being said that the touts are staging a comeback. So, what plans do you have to avert the ugly trend?

He didn’t get them off the streets; I got them off. And the politics you are seeing, the fight you’re seeing today is essentially those guys fighting back. Once I came in, the first thing we did was to get them off the street. Before then, you couldn’t build a property. When I came in, if you were building, you would find some boys who would come and say they were the omo onile of this place, and you should pay – in GRA o! We dealt with that. Because of this Diaspora flow, they would sell one land to five, six people; you’re not here now, how would you know?

When I came in, I realised that for you to engender economic growth, to create an atmosphere for people to feel safe to bring money in, you have to dislodge them and look for an alternative for them. But some of them had become so stupendously rich that they would not even have a conversation with you about an alternative. Take my local government, Oredo; it’s like Etiosa Local Government (one of the richest local government areas in Lagos State). In 2016/2017 January, the total annual revenues of Oredo was N1.6 million; and the chief thug here, one of my cousin’s sons, celebrated his first billion, and one of these new generation banks came to give him a promotional car. I had to dislodge them. Today, Oredo, on a monthly basis, makes an average revenue of N80 million a month. So, what do you expect? Those guys are coming back because of the perception that, maybe, we can remove this governor so that we can have our freedom and peace again.

Edo, as part of the old Bendel State, was famous for arable crops like cooca, rubber, oil palm and rice. Why have you not taken pragmatic measures to re-enact that era in the agricultural sector?

The biggest problem we have in the South is that we have lost the culture of agriculture, particularly the South-South. With the advent of crude oil, everybody just left. So, for two generations, people haven’t really farmed on a scalable basis. So, what we are doing is working very closely with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), taking all the initiatives; rather than just be tokenistic and just mouth agric, we’re actually drilling down; what are the real issues? Agric is business and in every business there are risks. So, the first thing you want to do is to understand those risks and try and reduce those risks. So, what we’ve done with the CBN with commercial agric, is the anchor borrower programme. We put together a team, let’s do maize; let’s start from the short term; let’s do the grains. Let’s do maize, let’s do rice, let’s do soybeans. We’ve gone in; some of the old farm settlements we had, we cleared them, mechanised them. We’ve some of the young men, you want to do agric, come.

We’ll cluster ‘you and give you lots of five hectares each.’ And some of the young men have picked up; we’ve seen some traction, particularly in areas in the north, where we are doing rice. Today, we have about 12,000 hectares which we are working on across the three senatorial districts but the big elephant in the room are the vale crops, like cash crops, particularly crops like oil palm, cocoa and rubber. What we noticed is that a lot of our forest reserves have been badly degraded. We have about 630,000 hectares of reserves that were being handed over to the state. Today, less than 135,000 hectares are real forest. What we’ve done is that we have to save our environment. We go to a place that used to be a forest reserve and all you see there is elephant grass; that will never be a forest again. So, we decided to de-reserve and make about 120,000 hectares of such lands now available for oil palm. And we are doing it in a structured manner; we’ve gone out, we’ve done all the work we need to do. The goal is that within the next 18 months, we’ll have about 120,000 hectares of fresh land under cultivation, either for oil palm, rubber or cocoa. We have the largest plantations in Nigeria today; after us is Cross River.

The level of infrastructure development and the many innovations you’re bringing in through the Edo-BEST project is already obviously a quantum leap from what used to be, but we noticed that the teacher-pupil ratio in those schools is still very high. What are you planning to do?

What we noticed, here in the politics of our education, if you take the total number we have about 12,000 teachers, right? How many classrooms do we have? We have about a thousand basic schools; if you divide them, the ratio is not too off. It’s the distribution of the teachers, where the bulk of the teachers may not want to go to the rural areas, or they all want to be in certain schools. And because they are mostly female, many of them are married to powerful politicians; you can’t move them anyhow. That is part of the challenge. That doesn’t mean that we are not short; we are. The number we need to bring into the system isn’t that large. So, it’s about redistributing the ones that exist and then hiring a few more to get that balance. We’ll get there; the important thing is that we now have data to undertake this assignment. In the past, you could never do transfer, because by the time it got to the ministry, there’s just too much influence; everybody is saying don’t transfer my wife; do you know who I am? So, it couldn’t be done dispassionately. But now I look at it and say give me the data, call her for me, I have the number; where is your current post? I can intervene directly because I’m seeing data. That is the biggest benefit of that transparency it brings into the entire system.

So far, what would you say is your greatest achievement?

My greatest achievements are in two areas: first, I would say education; being able to pull back a system we thought was lost – being able to, within a short period of time, recover our education system. It’s really powerful; it has huge life implication across the board; and it helps us with social policy and many things. The second is the institutional reorder, where we’re now able to say, ‘look, first, this is our reality: we are only earning N100, therefore we cannot spend N200; and this N100 we are going to distribute it based on the promises we made when we were campaigning.’ We’re going to put so much in education, we are going to put so much in health and get the system to now begin to work. It’s the biggest challenge, even Abuja has it. The biggest problem Nigeria has today is the failure of government bureaucracy. That’s why you say I want to build a road, you can’t because there are all sorts of interests. Everywhere else in the world, they have interests, but they get things done.

What didn’t you know about governance that you only got to know when you became governor?

I had a pre-knowledge of having worked as a non-chairman of the economic team; so, I knew a lot. But what I didn’t know is that at the end of the day, people in the society really know what is going on. And if they see sincerity of purpose, they will support. The fear was oh, everything is bad; no, it’s not true. The reason you are having this pushback is that the taxi drivers…you talk to anybody, they would say this governor is working; because they know how much money the state earns; they had seen how governments had behaved in the past. So, for me, it’s really a pleasant surprise that as long as you’re doing things in the interest of the people, they really know that you are working.

What didn’t you know about Oshiomhole that you only found out after becoming the governor – considering how both of you started?

Someone who had been the president of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NCL) and governor two terms, why would being the chairman of a party make you play God? And then, I hope it’s not true, but the evidence is strong – I never knew he would be involved in anything related to compromising on the will of the people. I would have fought anyone who told me he could compromise to influence decisions otherwise. But everybody is complaining. So, for me, that is the greatest disappointment.

Is Edo committed to paying N30,000 minimum wage?

We’re already at N25,000; we’ll pay. You see, it’s not what you pay; it’s the productivity you get out of what you pay. I’d like to pay my teachers more because I can see they are working harder now. So, N30,000, as far as I’m concerned, is paltry. But what are you paying for? I’d rather have people who are giving me much more value, because that way you find out that there is a lot more growth.

Security-wise, how far has your government fared?

Generally, compared to other neighbours in the South-South, Edo is reputed to be the safest state in the zone for several reasons. But it doesn’t mean we don’t have our own challenges, particularly kidnapping, because Edo is very porous. Everybody comes in and everybody goes out; so it’s very difficult to police. But we’ve been fortunate to have had a series of good Commissioners of Police and what we try to do, working with them, is to ensure that the security agencies work closely together. We’ve made special intervention, like a strike force. You’d see the cars positioned everywhere with communication devices. We have a command and control centre which we are upgrading. So, with the collaboration with the security agencies and a bit of investment in the policing system, we are on top of what is going on in the city and in the state.

But what we also try to do is I’ve been talking to the Inspector-General of Police is that we want to be a pilot state for the intended community policing. We want to put some money working with the IG, using their template, to train a couple of thousand young men and women and see how we can get policing down and closer to the community; because policing is really about intelligence and deterrence. So, once we get more electricity in, things like making it compulsory for public and private businesses to have security cameras in their premises, all of those are things that will enhance security.

Nigerian Tribune

I won’t sacrifice the people to please any politician —Obaseki
Tribune Online