Aregbesola: Why I’m Disturbed about Ekiti Election

Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State, in an interview with journalists in Osogbo, the state capital, said he nursed no worries about his reelection as he reeled out the successes of his administration being the basis of his confidence, amongst other related issues. Shola Oyeyipo brings the excerpts:

With your election a few weeks away, how prepared are you to prevent a repeat of the Ekiti experience?
Firstly, I want you to know that I don’t even think about it and that is the interesting part of it. I set about this being cautious of democratic norms. In the statement I made after the Ekiti election, I reflected that a genuine democrat must be willing and ready to embrace defeat as he or she will embrace victory provided the election is transparent, credible, free and fair. The real issue is not about you as a candidate but the quality of the electoral process. Once the quality is good and high, it is whatever the people say because they are the ultimate decider of who represents or governs them. Democratic choices are expected to be correct, good and right but it is not always that the choice is good, correct and right.

To answer the question, long before I assumed this office, I prepared so well for the office in a way that going by the normal run, I should not be working as hard as I’m working now for re-election. A commentator said something to the effect that I am one of the politicians that from day one began my campaign. From the day I entered this office, I started my campaign.

How many governors walk the streets with their citizens? I have been doing that since the first month in office. How many governors create interactive forum in Nigeria before me? There is none. I was the first governor that devotes close to ten hours of continuous engagement on a quarterly basis with the citizens. The people ask any question in a no-holds-barred atmosphere. The Ogbeni Till Day Break is a worldwide engagement because we take feedbacks from social media. The ‘Gbangba Dekun’ is another monthly community interactive forum where the governor sits with stakeholders in the community to ask or make inquiries on any issue.

These are the pictures of direct engagements that we are doing with the people that no government in Nigeria has ever attempted to do. We also have a carnival like procession in ‘Walk to Live’ where we just walk round the communities and it is engaging and popular because everybody wants to be with the governor.

Your question, however, is if I’m bothered about Ekiti; I don’t even think about it. As a loyal APC member, I was disturbed, but as a head of a government that has worked so well with the people, I don’t even see the effect. I look at my engagement with the people, the products of my government which have not left any home unaffected positively, and I said if election is about acceptance, popularity and the impacts you have made on the people, we are waiting for what the dictate of democracy would be. But in a credible, transparent, free and fair election, Rauf Aregbesola does not have any worry at all about what people will say about his administration.

In what ways has your administration been able to make the people feel the impact of governance?
Hardly is there any community in this state that we have not touched in terms of physical and social services. This is the first government that will say that there is no household – be it PDP, APC or others – which our programmes have not reached. There is none! I feed 300,000 pupils every school day at the cost of N3.6 billion a year. I have been doing it since 2012 and I have spent N7.2 billion on that. You can go to the schools by yourself and assess what the children are eating to be sure whether it is worth what we are saying or not.

I can tell you that nobody touches the money except those in charge. Long before we commenced the feeding arrangement, we empowered poultry farmers to produce poultry products so that the chickens and eggs the children consume are all sourced from them and that is the way they paid back to us because we are not going to buy from them. The students consume 15,000 whole chickens every week and it is served twice. They consume 300,000 eggs every week, one egg a week. They consume 400 tons of fish every week. They consume 35 herds of cattle every week.

We gave close to N600 million to the poultry farmers and also the fish farmers. The only people we buy from now are the cattle rearers. We had challenge with eggs supply because the totality of the eggs produced in Osun cannot cope with our demands, so we go to Kwara and Oyo States to make it up and we pick the real foods in the markets. The women, 3007 of them who cook the meals to serve the students take money from the bank. We gave the women a seed capital to set up themselves and start.

The bank pays them for the number of pupils they feed and the bank comes to us for settlement. With that, we have been getting a value to a large extent for the money we spend. They are fed that way every school day. Also, 1000 new farmers that we raised to produce cocoyam are in this; close to 500 O’YES exited cadets are equally empowered to outtake the cocoyam and give to the vendors. Also, tens of thousands are engaged in providing different items. From this alone, close to one million people are directly impacted from just one program, O’meal.

We have the second batch of O’YES cadets, the first batch of 20,000 had gone, the second batch of 20,000 is on and they are from homes. They work two or three days a week and they have the entire days of the week left for them to see what they can do with their hands and earn a living because they are taught entrepreneurial training, but they earn N10,000 monthly as cadets.

On this scheme alone, this administration has spent N9billion. I tell people what this type of scheme means for national government. You can’t say I don’t have 18 friends who I can give half a billion naira contract to, whether they do it or not, I would have still given it. But the maximum amount of that investment that will stay here will be less than 50 per cent. Yes, you will have the project here but there would still be capital flight because we are talking about direct impact on the economy.

O’YES has changed the paradigm. One hundred per cent of that N9billion is in this economy.  The programme has huge economic benefit to the state. You have in that scheme a directly injected N9billion to the economy that has no means of going out because a man earning N10,000, unless you promised to double his investment, has no business travelling to Ibadan with that N10,000 if it is not going to yield anything more. He won't go to Ibadan. Every bit of the money is better spent here.
Every O'YES cadet has a smart card and the issue of anyone handling or tampering with their money does not arise.

We are one of the few governments that develop a meaningful programme for elderly citizens’ care. We are not into a blanket social welfare scheme for the elderly. We have a package that did an extensive survey of citizens that are 65 years and above. We have them in our database. We identified those among them that are without any support. That is the first time any government will so do in Nigeria. We engaged a consultant, who is a professor of gerontology in OAU, Ife. He developed the programme they used and without sentiment or parochialism, they got elderly citizens that lack support, we called them critically vulnerable people who are aged and have nobody to care for them.

If we did not discover them, nobody will know such people exist in Nigeria because they are waiting to die and lack everything. We identified 1,800 of such people statewide. The selection was purely based on their conditions – no primordial sentiment. We didn't do the selection anyway, Professor Ogunbameru of OAU administered everything, gave us the list and the addresses and we have been giving them N10, 000 monthly since 2012.
Still along that line, before now the only usage of ambulances here was to carry dead bodies, whereas it is not meant only to carry dead bodies but the conception of it is simply as a morgue vehicle. We have ambulance points everywhere in the state now working 24 hours.

We are tied with the farmers and there is no farmer that does not benefit one thing or the other from the government. We are almost concluding a process in which all farmers in the state would have credit cards with which they buy their farm inputs by their doorsteps. They will buy on guaranteed credit and will pay back with either their commodity or they sell and pay back.

Is your administration in good terms with four critical sections of the state which are the teachers, civil servants, okada riders and students whose votes count?

Most people don't even know how to assess relationships. They assess it from complains they get from dissatisfied sections of a critical lot. It cannot be! It is impossible for humans to exist without conflict. The Yoruba have an expression which says the “teeth and tongue fight but they are always still together”. A sociologist would not therefore base his assessment of any sector on when there is disagreement. Let us look at what we have done and then situate our relationship within it. Though some people, for whatever reason do not just like you.

I was telling someone that what should concern you are not those who are opposed to you, especially as it gets to the run-up to the election. When you are still far from it, you may be bothered so that you can make it up. But when no matter what you do, that is their attitude, you just stay put. There are not less than 20 parties seeking power, democratically. If you have 60 per cent that does not mean you don't have opposition. The 40 per cent that doesn't want to see you and may cut your head if you are careless not only vote against you. If you have 60 per cent, you are home and dry. In a struggle with other stakeholders, six out of ten is a good number.

What we are doing is to ensure that each of these critical sectors doesn't have any basis at all to be opposed to us. Let us start with the students. We met a condition when we came in that students were given a bursary of N3,000 and they would not even get the bursary on time and it was full of scam. They brought it to me to sign and I said why do I have to sign N3,000 for anybody? It is best if we don't give this bursary or we give it meaningfully. We raised the bursary to N10, 000 flat. For medical and law students, it is N20,000 while our indigenes in Law school get N100, 000.

The school authorities give the money to our students in their system. I don't see how such students will hate us in the majority, I can't see it. Whoever now hates us has something else against us not for the fact that we have not done the needful. The increase wasn't solicited; we did it out of our own understanding of the reality of what the students are going through.
There was clamour for reduction of school fees and we reduced the fees from a huge amount to something that is comparably affordable. Also, we have been investing in developing the institutions much more than any administration has done in the history of this state. Yes, we are having some challenges with the lecturers but it is not peculiar to us but you just have to bear it.

For Okada riders, they have no problem with us. They may want us to do things for them as we have done to some other groups, but it not as if they said compared to others, these are the problems. The roads here are appreciated even by those who trek on them. Has any government succeeded in constructing 200 kilometres of road in all nooks and crannies of the state? There is no part of this state that we have not construct a new road and it is not just any road but roads with concrete drainage, with stone base and tick asphaltic cover.

When I get to campaign grounds, I say our roads have tribal marks. We now have special roads which when we complete some of them, they will be tourism attraction on their own. The road we are building in Gbogan, people will be coming to look at it because it is not an ordinary road. It is a road that took me time to conceive and design and we are taking our time to develop it.
So, when people talk about the cost of our roads, I just laugh because it is not good to be talking to people who don't know what they are saying. We have different types of roads. That road is going to be a reference point in road construction. We are changing the landscape and making the State of Osun a hub of everything that is good.

We also want to tell the world that the black man is a human being. I have two major objectives on earth. One is to help in the process of eliminating poverty because I hate poverty. I wasn't born poor but I feel bad to see people in destitution. Two is that I don't like how blacks are in the world today. As long as I live, I must be part of the process that will give the black man a good reckoning where they are because sadly, we are in the lowest part of non-civilisation. I have been everywhere in the world except the continent of Australia and everywhere in the world, the most depressing portions of it are inhabited by blacks. These are the two issues that motivate me.

Before our advent, the civil servants never knew that salary could be paid before the end of the month. For seven and a half years, salaries were never paid here before the end of the month. But from the time I assumed office, we changed that. Before the year ended, when I assumed office, I paid 10 per cent of their basic as 13th month salary and paid December salary before the end of the year, the civil servants were dazed. Since that day up until December 2013, I pay salary on or before the 25th of every month.
But as from January 2014, we ran into trouble which we explained to everybody six months before then. In July 2013, the federal government began a squeeze that they themselves know that nobody believed them. They said 400,000 barrel of crude oil is being stolen every day. We didn't know problem was coming. Instead of collecting N4.6 billion, they gave this government N2.6 billion, 40 per cent slashed.

We thought it will be temporary because after that month, they said the stolen crude has reduced to 20,000 barrel per day. When the oil being lost reduced, would you still expect a 40 per cent cut? From that July to now, the maximum allocation this state has ever received is N3.2 billion, which was in November 2013. I am not making up anything; I’m simply saying the truth.
Now ask me how was I able to pay up until December 2013? My people are called ‘Osomalo’ - they are very deft in the management of money and I took this from them. I had been saving through the Omoluabi Conservation Fund in which 10 per cent of all allocations must just go and rest, so I had money in and this was a buildup of money that we used to augment payment of salaries till the over N5billion was finished.

Quote:
As a loyal APC member, I was disturbed, but as a head of a government that has worked so well with the people, I don’t even see the effect. I look at my engagement with the people, the products of my government which has not left any home unaffected positively, and I said if election is about acceptance, popularity and the impacts you have made on the people, we are waiting for what the dictate of democracy would be. In a credible, transparent, free and fair election, Rauf Aregbesola does not have any worry at all about what people will say about his administration