You are the deputy governor of Ekiti State and the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the forthcoming governorship election in the state. What is your agenda?
My agenda for the state, if elected as the governor on July 14, is encapsulated in what I called SHIELD, a continuity agenda that is designed to improve on what we have on ground and make it better. SHIELD is an acronym: S stands for security, sustainable human development and social welfare; H stands for healthcare; I stands for infrastructural and industrial development; E stands for education and enterprise development; L stands for leadership and governance; and the last one, which is D, has to do with development of agriculture and tourism. These summarise my vision for Ekiti and the people.
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Some governors seem to have caved into pressures from the Federal Government to drop the anti-open grazing law and make lands available for ranches and cattle colonies in their various states. If elected as the governor, what would you do to ensure that the law is sustained in Ekiti State?
There is a difference between ranching and colony. The word colony itself is irritating. What do you want to colonise? But ranching is an internationally-accepted approach and there is nothing wrong with cattle ranches. We are not saying no to cattle ranches and I want us to establish that. What we are saying is that there should be no place for colonies. They should not deceive Nigerians by playing with words. There is a difference between establishing a ranch and a colony. In a colony, you take over the whole place and say it is your own, but in a cattle ranch, Yoruba can be there with the Hausa and Igbo; anybody who is interested in animal husbandry or rearing cows can all be there in the same environment. So the land does not belong to any particular tribe. They can be given a space to operate and it does not have to be the Fulani alone. So, I am not against cattle ranches. As a governor, I can go ahead and support the establishment of cattle ranches, but not a colony.
You spoke about continuity and sustainability as part of your agenda as the next governor. What are the other things that you want to bring in that would be different from what we have in the Governor Ayo Fayose administration?
Well, under security, I talked about the deployment of ICT and cameras in all sensitive areas. That is not in existence in this administration. I talked about improvement on what we presently have on ground. Also, we should have what I called spymasters. We are going to employ some young people and give them the name, spymasters. They will be all over the places here: they are not carrying arm, but they will be there to give information. We have over 40,000 Peace Corps members in the state and some other para-military organisations. A good number of them are unemployed. Some of them can be employed as spymasters to give information on security issues. We are going to synergise with the security agencies to ensure that we have adequate information on time so as to checkmate occurrence of any event that would cause security lapses within the system. We will study the existing system, look at the gaps and fill them. Some of these measures I mentioned now are not on ground, but we are definitely going to introduce them.
There is what is called academic arrogance when it comes to leadership in the state, but how would you combine your academic constituency with your grass root relevance to bring about a departure from what used to be?
When people talk about academic arrogance, it depends on the individuals. We believe in the principle of Omoluwabi in Ekiti State. I am a homegrown young man. I schooled in St Matthew’s CAC Primary School, Ikere, my home town; my secondary school days were at the Annunciation School in my hometown. I only had the opportunity of going to the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State for my tertiary education. I can speak Ekiti fluently and I know the nooks and crannies of my town where the first 15 years of my life were spent. So, a 15-year-old boy should be able to know a lot of things. There is hardly any place in Ikere that I have not been to. I have friends in all the different quarters in the town and we do interact. Up till now, it is not difficult for me to interact with them, despite being a professor.
But then, it depends on you. Men of good character will not be proud; men of good character will not be arrogant; men of good character should be able to humble themselves to the level of interacting with the so-called masses. I used the word, so-called because we are all human beings. If you are going to govern and the people would not have access to you, then you are already a failure. So, accessibility is very important. The fact that one is well read does not mean that he should not be accessible to the people. I still relate with my age group in Ikere; I hold meetings with them because so many of them we grew up together. They call me by name, though they would want to respect me now as they call me His Excellency. We talk and we eat together whenever they come to my official lodge.
It depends on you as an individual. We are not arrogant in Ekiti. Somebody else can be arrogant, but Ekiti people are not arrogant. So, coming down to the level of my people is not difficult. There was a time I was passing by and I did a little bit of empowerment. I met a woman frying akara, just close to the Government House gate and I stopped over. We were going out very early in the morning and I discovered that most of the people on my convoy had not eaten and, as a way of giving them something to eat, I stopped over and I took akara from the woman’s pot, right from the fire. All the bread and akara that we bought were not up to N10,000 but I gave the woman N50,000. I told her that I hope the money would help her more in her business. She was very happy. So, because I am a deputy governor now, does that mean I cannot come down from my car to talk to that woman? That is arrogance. We were not taught that way. I am an Ekiti man and if I want to govern the state, I have to be an Ekiti man; not like somebody who is importing Obama [former US President Barak] or somebody else from abroad.
What is your plan on infrastructure and industrial developments in the state?
If you compare all the governors that had governed this state, you will discover that none has made so much impact like Dr Ayo Fayose in the area of infrastructural development, whether in his first term or in his second term now, through his legacy projects. Ours is not just about being able to construct 100 buildings, but in being able to start 50 and to complete them and make them projects that are meaningful and that can be seen as legacy projects.
Without adequate infrastructural development being put in place, there cannot be development in the other areas. Some people look at Ekiti State as a local place because they are not seeing there what they expected to see. I cannot imagine that in this age, if somebody graduates from the secondary school and he or she has never seen a flyover in the state but only needs to get to the neighbouring states before seeing one. You will begin to wonder, ‘Am I in another country?’
Besides that, some of these infrastructural developments are also indices or factors that attract investments and they encourage investors to come in. It gives us an outlook of a developing arena where business can thrive. This is because the more you have more of these facilities put in place, the more some people will be interested in coming to invest in this place. Good roads, dualised roads, either Grade A roads coming in to the state or inter-township roads: we have started with the state capital and headquarters of local government areas and we have done a lot of road expansion to make them good for vehicles to pass on. We still have a lot to do in that area.
What is your plan for the health sector?
If, as a governor, within the next four years of my tenure, if all I can do is to commission three or four hospitals or upgrade four or five health centres, I think it should be a complete job, rather than doing things haphazardly. You start one, finish it and equip it properly, even with personnel and equipment, before you say, ‘okay, let me go to the others’. If you know you can finish one at a time with the fund available, don’t start with four. No single government can complete everything. Do what you can do and make sure it is functional and not just applying cosmetic approach. In this government, we don’t do that and I am going to carry that spirit into my own administration when I become the governor by the grace of God. There will be no cosmetic approach; we give whatever we are doing the final finishing touches. We will start each project from the beginning and complete it. So, equipping the hospital is very important.
One other thing which is also related to health care is that our teaching hospital here also needs a little touch. Most of the things I am talking about equipping them with modern facilities also affect the teaching hospital. But more importantly, we have started that in this administration. When we came in, so many of the courses within the teaching hospital and the College of Medicine were not accredited and so we found it difficult to even train doctors. But as I am talking to you now, we have achieved a lot in terms of accrediting many of the specialist courses in the teaching hospital. I am also glad to announce to you that, after four years of stagnancy, even with the students not being able to move from one level to the other, the College of Medicine today, under the Governor Fayose administration, has been accredited by the relevant bodies. When I come in as governor, I want to assure you that I am going to sustain this because having a College of Medicine is not a joke. But it is also something that is going to go a long way in assisting our healthcare because you are going to have an avenue where you can train the doctors. The doctors are here and a good number of them will be brought in to work within the health sector. We are sustaining that because there is still a lot to be done to get full accreditation in all ramifications.
Apart from the Stomach Infrastructure project of the present administration, what are the key areas of the government’s credentials from which you may want to move forward, if you become the governor?
We have a saying in Yoruba that “Okun inu, eye ode” (“it is when you have strength within you that you will able to look good outside”). People don’t understand that Stomach Infrastructure is not just about giving rice and money alone: empowerment is part of it. Anything that can give you the opportunity to get food to eat is a component part of Stomach Infrastructure. Anything that you do to create wealth is also a part of Stomach Infrastructure, but people don’t understand this. It goes beyond giving rice and money: it deals with wealth creation.
Even at that, we have most of the governors in the other states that are already joining us, even from the opposition. Some people are already doing the same thing which they have criticised about. At least, we have seen Governor Andrew Obaseki and his predecessor, Adams Oshiomhole, eating corn by the roadside, yet they were the ones criticising my governor that he eats with the street people. Can you imagine them in the North sharing wheel barrows; giving shoe polish and bread to the mai shai (Hausa tea sellers)? This is because they knew that if they give out the bread and tea, the people can sell and make something out of it. So, for me, this is a continuity agenda: we have some programmes already in place and we believe that we can improve on them to make them more effective. That is exactly the area of focus.
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