22nd November, 2013
On 12 November 2013, Governor Adams Oshiomhole marked his fifth year in office. He spoke with representatives of select media houses, including TheNEWS, on his achievements
Congratulations on your 5th anniversary as the Governor of Edo State. The celebration was grand but your opponents may think it was a waste of state resources. What is your reaction?
I am the steward of Edo State. I have the privilege to be entrusted with the management of the resources of the state and the state is not made up of a few elite but also of people in the rural areas as well those in the urban areas. In terms of election, the people are more in number than the elite and so on the occasion of the 5th anniversary and my first year in my second term (as I have done over the past four years), it has become a tradition to face the people and tell them what has changed since November, 2008 and today. But more particularly between last year and now, so that they follow up the progress we are making. If you call that extravagance, well, that would be your choice of words, but I call it practical accountability, open governance.
In the trade union world, when you are elected, at a certain period you hold your meeting, you give report of your achievement and where you have challenges you explain it to the people. So I don’t see what was extravagant; I didn’t see people drinking champagne or eating three-course meals! Rather, I saw women under the sun and when we finished, a few people came to the Government House for lunch.
My complaint when I was in the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, was that politicians make promises at the beginning and in-between they don’t render account. For me, at the heart of democracy is the commitment to report to your employers what you have done with the tools with which you are asked to work and that is what we did today, and that what we have done in the past four years and God willing, we would do it over the next few years. And I want to lay a foundation that a future government would feel obliged year to year to tell the people what they did with their mandate.
Some critics described your signing of the death warrant as reckless…
I am sure you are familiar with the fact that the governor has the last input. When a criminal or a suspect is apprehended, he goes through trials, the charges are laid before the court and he is invited to come and defend himself before the prosecutors to establish the guilt, the judge makes up his mind whether the case has been proven or not. Where he is convinced, he delivers judgment and the suspect can appeal up to the Supreme Court.
If the Supreme Court finds out that 20 people were guilty of murder and they sentence 20 people to death and the governor, in line with the constitutional requirement, signs the sentences, what is reckless in that? When a reporter files a story, it goes through newsroom, the sub-editor, line editor looks at it, the editor signs up the paper, is that a reckless process?
When you were addressing the crowd, you spoke about copying certain processes from Lagos State, especially in the area of financial re-engineering. We want you to tell us the peculiar situation of Edo State in this regard?
Oshodi has been cleaned up; it was something for me that I could copy and I can say I went to Lagos to proudly copy what works and I came back to Edo to re-engineer our tax system and we raised our own locally generated revenue from about N285 million and at a point we hit N2 billion because we didn’t need to depend on Abuja to be able to do everything that we needed to do. It requires courage, clear thinking and a level of determination to be able to get the people to realise that citizens have obligation to the state to pay taxes so that, in turn, they can become real stakeholders to do the things that we are doing in Edo State.
If we are going to expand and carry out urban renewal like what they did in Lagos, you need to sometimes get rid of certain things in order to restore the right of way and expand the roads. There are a couple of things we copied from Lagos – land use charge, consumption tax. I’m sure that some of you at one time or the other have travelled outside Nigeria and even those of you who have not traveled, just watching debates in other countries, central to every election debate is tax policy, and tax defines the character of a government.
The left wing government would want more taxes so that they can take from the rich in order to provide a robust social safety net for the poor. Right wing parties believe everybody for himself and God for all of us. They can build private roads and send their children to private schools and fly private aircraft but for the government that is pro-people, you can fly your jet but you must pay.
Look at the intra-city tram which would have been done many years ago, it is now happening in Lagos. Imagine if somebody had made up his mind to do it 30 years ago what Fashola is doing now, life in Lagos would have been a lot more comfortable than it is now. But we recognised that the fact we failed in the past is no reason why we should fail now.
We want to know how much the state has borrowed to carry out these infrastructural developments in the state.
I don know about borrowing, I think the only money was the N25 billion bond which we perfected in 2011 and every month we are paying about N550 million to service that bond. Of the N25 billion, we have already paid back over N14 billion, which means the net we have will be under N10 billion.
Looking at the large crowd that followed you all through the campaign days and even now, would you say you have met the yearnings and aspirations of the Edo people?
Somebody told me that the relationship between a master and cook is judged by what happened to the plate. If you ask a cook if his master is very happy with him, maybe most of them would say yes because if their master is not happy they would have been sacked. But sometimes the best way to measure is to look at the plate and see what the master left in the plate. If the plate is still full, the master may have been diplomatic in not firing the cook but obviously he did not like the food. But if the plate is clean it means Oga enjoyed the food.
At the beginning of every application for a job, even in the press you stand before your editor to say, ‘I will make a good reporter because I read mass communications.’ And he interrogates you to know if you are fit. But at the end it is all rhetoric but he has to decide whether to give you the benefit of the doubt and he then offers you what is referred to as probational appointment and typically, it would be for one, three months or six months, after which if you satisfied the employer you are retained. So our masters, who are Edo people, had to decide by their votes that I have satisfied and performed so excellently that in the 18 local governments that constitute Edo State, we won. There is no precedent in this state; even the godfather, ‘Mr Fix It’, I unfixed him in his booth, village, local government and senatorial district! My main opponent in the PDP, Major-General Charles Airhiavbere, I defeated him in his polling booth and ward in Edo South where he comes from.
They placed adverts in the newspapers asking the Binis to vote for one of their own, playing the ethnic card expressly, describing me as a stranger because the Binis account for the majority of the votes in Edo State. They invoked a proverb that whatever a stranger does, he will go with it and even children were asking their parents that if I am going, will I leave with Akpakava road, all the beautiful schools and construction going on the state? So it didn’t make sense to anybody and that is why I am angry about Nigerians who are detained by ethnic sentiment. I’m not one of them because my own life experience has shown me that there is a level of performance such that ethnic sentiments will dissolve, giving way to more objective evaluation of our stewardship.
So I would say that I have more support today than I had in 2007 and when I walk the streets, they have even changed my name. When I see elderly people, older than my mum, calling me ‘Oshio baba’, I never thought of that name. I have a daughter who does not bear my surname but my first name (Adams) because she thought that my surname was too difficult to pronounce and sometimes too difficult to spell. But the good people of Edo State are proud to call my name because of what we have done. Whereas at the beginning, there were those who argued that those who are eloquent in criticising government (social critics) are never good on the job. They made reference to Frederick Chiluba of Zambia who was particularly unsuccessful. However, I made reference to Lula of Brazil who turned the fortunes of that country around.
So there were good arguments for and against my candidature. If Edo was to be compared to Brazil, I will say we have changed the fortunes of Edo State exactly the way Lula redefined the place of Brazil in the world economy.
How have you coped with the dwindling revenue to states, because some governors have openly complained bitterly about it?
Well, I honestly think that it is a shame that we should be talking of oil theft because the volume that is stolen cannot be stolen in jerry cans or drums but in vessels and I refuse to believe that the Nigerian Navy can be incompetent that it cannot police our waterways or the combined force of the Navy and the Air Force cannot even drop a knock out on top of a rogue ship. I have argued this in official quarters and I believe that this is a national embarrassment to talk about the volume of theft of our crude. It is not one of those acts of God; this is just failure of man.
I had one of those opportunities to meet security agencies and I said sovereignty of a nation is defined in terms of the capacity of the nation state to use the combined power of its armed forces to defend its territorial boundaries, including the waterways. As we confess to the level of theft, Nigeria is the only country that is going through that. We have demystified the state by conceding that small thieves are stronger than the combined force of the Nigerian armed forces. I do not believe that we can tell the world that we can’t control our inland waterways.
But basically, I don’t believe that we should accept that we should lose between 400,000 and 700,000 barrels of oil per day; it is scandalous and it is not sustainable. I am even more worried that the amount of environmental damage that is done long after the oil must have dried up, we may never have the resources to fix the consequences of the environmental degradation arising from the illegal refineries. Some foreigners with their Nigerian collaborators bring their ship here to cart away oil as if Nigeria is a banana republic. I wonder what they say when they get home. I think it is a national embarrassment.
When APC was formed we believed it would bring a change to the PDP government but the way they are going, we are wondering if PDP was a party of killers like Audu Ogbeh would put it, why is APC looking for PDP members to follow them?
PDP is not a tribe, that you should do the DNA to find out if there is something in the gene. Nigeria has been more or less a one-party state and there are many who are not convinced about the message or promise but they went into PDP, because that is the only game in town.
The beauty of a two viable alternative political platforms is that it offers the opportunity of people of like minds to come together, regardless of where you were before and Edo is an example. Before I got here, those who are with me now were either in PDP nor All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, and some in their private bedrooms grumbled over what was happening. They all used to pay political pilgrimage to Uromi for political blessing, not because they were convinced but that was the only way it could be done.
Once we opened a platform, those who were genuinely unhappy with what was going on there left to join the ACN, now APC, and those who are happy with the godfather remained with him. There have been people in this state who took advert and they said if you asked them to paint the face of God, that by the time they finished painting that face, what you will see is the face of the godfather and that was blasphemy. That is how far some people went with praise singing. I think that in every political party you would find some good and bad people. I don’t think that there is pretence that every person in APC is an angel, nor is there a suggestion that everybody in the PDP is a devil.