My work will campaign for me – Gov Oshiomhole

In this interview, Governor Adams Oshiomhole describes the challenge of governance in the last four years, and looks forward to the electioneering season which will come up in July 2012. He granted the interview in the Government House, Benin City. Excerpts:

You have been in Government House for over three years. What is the experience like, changing from Labour leader to being a governor often faced with ultimatums and strikes by Labour unions?

In the NLC, the focus was on the welfare of the workers, the welfare of the people. Job security and civil liberty.  In all of that the focus is on the people.  That is what defines the struggle at the Nigeria Labour Congress.

In government, the people are the primary focus in terms of the welfare of their rights.  Their privileges, their right to good quality of life and I think for me nothing has changed.  As I have argued elsewhere those who really have difficulty are people who transfer from being businessmen and women where the focus is on maximizing profit for the individual, family or business, and where the tactics of achieving that is basically, to exploit the workforce and appropriate the difference between what you pay them in wages and the value of what they actually contribute and that is labelled as profit which is reserved for the owners of the business.

The only thing that is fundamentally different, in my view is that whereas as a union man, you dictate, negotiate, demand, you give ultimatum and you go on strike to press home your demand, as a governor, you have the executive capacity to carry out your wishes, rather than waiting for people to persuade you. You do what you are convinced is right.  I think to that extent, that is for me a qualitative difference.

For example, Edo State was the first state to pay the minimum wage, if I were in the NLC, I might be pressurising Edo State to try to make my state to live by example, but as a governor, I did not need to be persuaded by anyone, I was convinced about it and I told my union people, I am in a hurry to be the first to implement it to show that it is implementable. That for me is a constructive difference; that you can do it if you are convinced about it.

I have personally experienced the menace of flooding in Benin City. How have you been able to address flooding in the state which previous administration could not solve?

To be honest, every fact of life in Edo State had decayed. In most parts of the country, people look forward to the rainy season and in some parts, people have to organise prayers for God to send them rain but people of Benin City in particular never looked forward to the rainy season, because of the havoc it usually wreaked on the people, because there were no drainage. The one constructed by the Dr. Samuel Ogbemudia government, surface drainage and underground, a very good network, in addition to the moat dug by our great, great grandfathers; all these were not being maintained.

Benin is only city with that comprehensive moat which provided for both security as well as flood control, but over the years governments allowed the drainage to be blocked, and no effort was made to de-silt it. The moat was compromised by the people and government for allowing people, including sometimes, government agencies converting the moat to waste dumps sites.

Others who considered themselves powerful even decided to build houses on the moat.  All of these taken together with lack of investment on infrastructure, that was why persons lost their loved ones during the rains. That was how serious the situation was.  People had given up on Edo.  The official position was that what can we do, we don’t have resources, all kind of explanations.

The same situation was prevailing in other sectors. The one you will not see by the road side was the situation in our public schools.  Almost 95 percent of our public schools had witnessed situations where pupils were sharing classrooms, primary one, primary two, they are packed in one classroom. In most cases the students sat on the floor.

That was the situation and this was everywhere including in Benin City, the capital.

Our Central Hospital was built in 1903 and since then, there has been no major intervention other than piecemeal token refurbishing and unco-ordinated temporary structures added here and there.  When I visited the hospital, I told the director that even for a healthy person, if he walks into the hospital and spends five minutes there he is likely to require medical help.

In the rural communities, most of them were not accessible which is one of the things, I am happy about that I got involved in politics.  In Edo Central, it is common to find people with surface tanks to collect water, rain water, during the rainy season, which they hope to rely on during the dry season.  Although several bore holes had been sunk, billions of Naira was allegedly spent to provide water for the people who were told borehole could not be viable, even though they had been paid for.

This was more or less the situation. In other words, Edo had been an unviable entity.  From being the heart beat of the nation, one whose citizens were respected, if you remember the old Bendel and Midwest, from that height we came so low that we are now being reported only in terms of armed robbery, other very negative violent crimes.  But the good news is that it is not an act of God, it is the result of many years of misapplication of public funds and leadership that had not factored in the people as the essence and primary purpose of governance.

What are the methods you have adopted to turn things around to make the situation better than what you met?

I think the first thing is to try to understand, how did we get here? You rightly reminded us that the last time Edo people witnessed development was in the era of Dr. Samuel Ogbemudia, ironically, as a military governor.  But coming from Edo State, he had a kind heart and common passion to build up the dream of the founders of Midwest region.  You know this was the only state that was democratically created.

Governor Oshiomhole

A referendum was conducted and people voted for the creation of Midwest region.  I think Ogbemudia might be inspired by the appreciation of the vision behind that agitation which our people massively bought into, voting for the creation of Midwest State and therefore worked so hard to realise the dream.  But thereafter, in trying to identify  how we got here, we started having one military government after the other, who were not from this state, who were posted, like the way they will post a Brigade Commander, who arrived without a purpose.  They did not have immediate or long term interest.

What makes a democracy superior to military is the power of the electorate to reward and punish public servant or political office holder, by electing and removing according to their judgment of your performance.  Which is why we identify roads, erosion and flood control, de-silting drainages and rebuilding the health centres, introducing free ante-natal health care for pregnant mothers as well as free medical health care for children up to the age of five and reinventing the public schools and building them to a standard primary or secondary schools in Edo State and I will take you out to visit any private school of your choice, and I will show you the public schools.

Community development
We are reconnecting the rural communities with electricity as well as roads, so that when we ask our people remain in the rural area, we are not saying remain in prison or jungle, they will be there and they can have access to electricity, they can listen to radio and watch television.  Those of their children who are knowledgeable with some effort they can access the internet and they do not have to come to Benin City to access the internet.  For boreholes, we realised that the problem was insufficiency of equipment. We decided to import heavy duty bore hole rigs to drill water such that there is no terrain in Edo State today where we cannot get water.

In Ekpoma and Iruekpen where Prof. Osunbor comes from we now have water, and several other places.  These are areas over the past 35 years, there were water tanks but no water and now we have proven that there is water because scientifically it has been established that there is nowhere on this planet where you can’t get water.  One terrain could be more challenging than another but the technology exists to deal with it because even in the desert you can get water.

I read in the papers that the current internally generated revenue (IGR) in Edo State is N2 billion per month.  It sounds like a fairy tale.  Please tell us how you went about this because other parts of the country may want to copy from you by looking inward.

I assumed office on November 12, 2008 and we saw our average earning from the federation account crashing from an average of between N4 and N5 billion a month to N1.6 billion a month with a wage bill of N2 billion and internal generated revenue of an average of N285 million.  So when you added the IGR with our share of the federation account, our net receipt was about N1.9 and yet our basic requirement to run the bureaucracy was about N2 billion.

This meant if I did not do something, Edo State was going to continue in what has been known in the past, namely not being able to pay salaries because before I assumed office, it was quite common that for two, three months, workers in the public sector in Edo State were not paid because the money was not there.  But for me, coming from my background there is no way I can approach workers, to say, sorry because of some reasons, the pay day is not sacrosanct.  For me the pay day is sacrosanct.

It has to be respected and enforced.  I was troubled at that point.  You know as they say necessity is the mother of invention and I had to look at two things, first, why must we spend N2 billion to run a small bureaucracy? Two, why are we earning so little from internally generated revenue, N285 million a month?  When you start questioning, you begin to understand and that makes you to first discover that there were lots of wastages in our system.

Expenditure pattern
Eighty percent of our total earning was being devoted to recurrent expenditure and only twenty percent of the budget was for capital project, which explained the decay in various sectors of the economy of the state.  So how do you deal with that?

First we believed we have a team of young professionals.  A multi-disciplinary team of young men and women, mostly of Edo State origin, not necessarily living in Benin City; people who have made it and are making it in their private lives. First we must reorder our structure of expenditure, we must put more money on capital project and less on recurrent, but how do you do that without carrying out retrenchment?

Now we went into the specifics. Each of the elements that constituted the recurrent expenditure, subhead by subhead and we discovered that the real cost was not on workers salary, was not as a result of the wage bill. It was generally described as goverhead.  So the first year we saved N5 billion on cost of running government.

We aggressively addressed the second question, why are we earning only N285 million.

There is something curious about Edo State, after, Lagos, Abuja and probably Port Harcourt, this state has the highest number of banks and branches of banks in Nigeria.

We tried to understand why are banks locating here; if, as everybody seems to feel that this is a civil service town.  As you interact you begin to discover what you might call invisible but viable businesses, here and there, because of the way the Nigeria economy is largely informal, it is informal because of weakness in our information management system.

As we investigated more and more we discovered that a couple of things were possible, so we first corrected the deficiency in the Pay As You Earn, we enforced the law.  We had challenges with that, workers did not think a union man, should enforce that law.

The good thing is that I can be accused of having organized several strikes and I will be guilty of those accusations, because I have organized too many, I cannot even remember, right from the age of 16, 17 years, I will be causing trouble.  In all my union training and all the union literature I have read, including literature on governance of the left or of the right, the practice of democracy, or progressive, taxation is common.  So I have never led strike against taxation.  But, who pays what, the law can be made in a way as to favour the rich or the poor. But there is always a tax and states live on tax. But you must pay tax.

We found a lot of people here who occupy 3000, 4000, 10,000 square metres of residential accommodation.  They pay next to nothing.  Even to process a  C of  O costs N25,000.00, express,  N50,000.00 for a property worth maybe N500 million, N1 billion. People are running private schools, one pupil pays N300,000 per annum and the school is paying only N10,000, over all to the state.  Someone has a very big private hospital, where their consulting fee is a minimum of N1,000, just to see the doctor and what he pays to government is N7,000 per annum.

We saw that there were people who were given government land for farming which was converted to private use.  They become landlords. We saw that banks, all these guys with double breasted suit, talking about accountability and corporate social responsibility, ninety five percent of them are tax defaulters, they falsify their records, under declare their earnings and therefore defraud the state.

We had to get people to carry out the audit and the laws are very enabling to empower public authority to investigate any body, including the deposit you pay to the bank. It is possible to establish what you are worth, and through this we are able to improve our locally generated revenue from that paltry sum to an average of N2 billion which we attained last month.  But we are not celebrating.

Cleaning up the system
I think we ought to be able to do better, if we can clean up the system and get even more aggressive.

People were surprised because government has never announced they have money in the past, this is the first time a government says, they have N13.5 billion.  It is a very small money and some of our neighbouring government earn this in ten days.  But when you recognize that our monthly earnings from the federation accounts at that time, was about N1.6 billion, N13.5 billion represent almost nine months of total earnings from the Federation Accounts.

In my first year budget, we decided to put seventy percent of the total capital budget to deal with the flooding and roads in Benin City rather than going to every senatorial district, local government.  If we do that we won’t be able to build any road.  Some people criticised me that we were only working in Benin.  I said fine, but the good thing is that Benin is our capital and there is no hamlet in Edo State that does not have its people living in Benin.

Even my village as small as it there are my village people who have been living here for so many years.  If you touch Benin City, you touch a fair representation of every hamlet in Edo State.  Even politically, there is nothing wrong with that.  So I know I have a four year tenure, subject to God. I can plan that this is what I am going to do for the first year , second year, this is what I will do, third and fourth year.

Explain your plan for deflooding Benin City.

One thing in management, is that you just don’t throw money at a problem.  The first thing is to try to understand the problem and to get value for money you must carry out certain studies.  So I was clear that to deal with the problem of flooding in Benin we needed a holistic approach. We commissioned a foreign consulting firm to revisit the Benin City master plan, they carried out some studies and came out with what we now call, Benin City water storm master plan.  They have been able to establish the number of water basins within the city and where to channel water to.  So when we are building a road, or constructing drainage, we know exactly where the drainage will lead to.

We are taking the first bold steps now of dealing with one of the basins and we are dredging a modern canal spanning, totally over fourteen kilometres, and the first canal is about seven kilometres.

We can now channel the secondary drain into the primary drain.  If we are constructing any road, we will channel it into the primary drain, and the water will flow to the river.  We also insisted, as a matter of policy, that every road must have drains on both sides.  Having looked at the habit of our people, who throw all sorts of things into the drainage system, we also decided to cover the drains on the two sides of the road and then convert that to walkway so under the walk way, you have a flowing drain.

We have manholes you can open up and de-silt if it gets blocked, so basically that is what we have done and that is what we are doing right now, and you will find out that there is no one road in Benin we are doing that does not carry drainage, walkway and even street lights.

Will your coming from Edo North be a problem in your bid for a second term?
No. First is that Edo people have been extremely kind and generous to me even the first time because the only thing  I invested in this project is  my reputation as a labour leader. They trusted us that those qualities they saw that if I get involved in governance I will make a difference. That was all I invested. It is that power of support that enabled us to overwhelm the godfather and his rigging machine down the drain.

Three years four months down the road, we have demonstrated that Edo state is working again and so for me therefore the campaign is being done by those contractors working in various parts of the state and because they are working in every local government, the campaigns are going on by what people see. Just give me two minutes, we will go to one or two places on project supervision and I want you to listen to people’s comment, I will not say anything to anybody and you are likely to hear people say, forget about campaigning for 2012, carry go, Osho baba we are for you.

There is nothing our opponents are going to be able to point at that they achieved.