What is the major drive behind your ambition to become the governor of Osun State, bearing in mind that you contested for the same governorship seat during August 9, 2014 governorship poll on the platform of the Labour Party (LP)?
When you have a mission of making a positive change in the lives of the people and you are passionate about it and such mission has not been accomplished, there is nothing stopping you from trying. I have that strong conviction that I can a make a difference in Osun and that is why I am contesting again. I believe this time round, it has come to my turn to govern Osun State. When you look at my pedigree and what I have in mind to do, regarding all those good things that I have for Osun people, I don’t see anything stopping me or that can deter me from coming out. For whatever it is, I want to fulfil my ambition of governing this state.
Shortly before your emergence as the standard bearer of the ADC, you were one of the gubernatorial aspirants on the platform of the PDP, why did you decide to dump the PDP?
I decided to dump the PDP because I believe in my mission and vision. I felt that if I continued to stay in the PDP where somebody else has emerged as the party’s governorship candidate, there was no way I could achieve my mission in that party again. I don’t blame anybody because the best way the PDP believe it can choose its standard-bearer, it has used such way and somebody has emerged. If I should wait, what do I wait for? To be what or to be SGG or commissioner? I needed to move on.
How would you realise your ambition of winning the September 22 governorship poll with the ADC, being a relatively new party in Nigeria, most especially in the political turf of Osun State?
The party is new, but those of us that are the operators are not new. We are all known and we are household names in Osun State. Like the former governor of Osun, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, I and so many that believe in us are not new. We have stepped up our mobilisation and awareness drives and a large number of people have been spreading the agenda of the ADC to the people and I believe by the grace of God, before the election the party would have become a household name among our people.
There are fears in some quarters that the present condition of Osun State’s finance is very precarious, taking into cognisance the debt profile of the state said to be in the region of about N170 billion. How do intend to cope with this development if you eventually become the governor of the state?
With my experience and what comes into the coffers of the state monthly, including what is being generated as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), this state is not supposed to be poor if our resources are properly managed. What we would do to address the challenge you raised is what we call financial re-engineering. We need to make sure that we plug all the loopholes and we also tie up the loose ends by making sure that wastage is reduced. My research revealed to me that more than 80 per cent of Osun State revenue is wasting away, regarding that money that we are using for things that are not really important. If we are able to plug all these loopholes, prudent with the management of our resources and allow transparency and due process, definitely, we would have more than enough to run the government.
What is your agenda or blueprint for the growth of Osun if you emerge victorious in the coming election?
When you talk of education, it is a vital sector that needs to be thoroughly addressed; we are going to declare an emergency in the education sector. We have to strive and bring back the glory of this state educationally. We are to carry out far-reaching measures in the education sector, from the primary level to the tertiary institution. Secondly, we are resolutely committed to prioritising the health sector too. Since Oyinlola left government, free and qualitative health service has become zero. The medical service in public hospital is nothing to write home about and there are no drugs in public hospitals again. In a nutshell, these are essential services we will not toy with. Our programmes would be premised on two or three major platforms, because we want to create employment opportunities through our programmes. First of all, we are going to embark on a very massive agricultural development through effective mechanised farming.
We are going to deploy so many modern machineries to explore the agricultural potentials of Osun State. We have the arable land in abundance and other natural resources. All we need to do is to create an enabling environment and encourage our people, most especially the youth to embrace large-scale farming. This approach would create a lot of employment for the people and before you know it, we would achieve three or four major things from it. From this purview, we would succeed in developing our rural areas because you cannot practice agriculture in the cities, except you go to the farms in the rural areas. Facilities such as effective communication and electricity and other amenities would be provided in the rural areas to boost farming and also check drift from rural to urban cities.
Secondly, we would make sure that through agriculture, we would engage more people in productive activities, thus moving the majority from the poverty level to middle class level. Our main target is to create opportunities for more people to attain middle class level through farming. Similarly, our women would be actively involved in harvesting and marketing of agricultural produce.
Thirdly, through agriculture, we would increase our drive for food security by making varieties of food available to our people. That would propel us to our second major agenda, which is industrialisation. We would have created grounds for availability of more raw materials for agro-allied industries. This is because we want to go carry out thorough industrialisation of the state. We have a lot of prospects in this regard because electricity may not be our problem due to the presence of power or energy transmission station in Osogbo. We would encourage more people into the industrial sector and also attract local and foreign investors through incentives that would facilitate healthy growth of their investments. We would give them what it takes to go into full industrialisation because we have where we called Free Trade Zone. We want to develop it the way the Asians developed their industries.
My government would provide necessary infrastructure and electricity and we would go as far as providing blueprints for products to be produced, where machineries and raw materials for such products can be sourced and the marketing opportunities. This would have spiral effects on employment generation for our people, which is our ultimate goal. By the time we do that, we would attract a lot of investors, most especially local investors. The major problem our local investors is the start-up plan and logistics, but if the government can provide some of these things and also guarantee their access to loan facility for take-off capital in banks, then it would offer them needed assistance. That is our approach to industrialisation and it is going to work because Nigeria is tired of importation.
Contesting for election in Nigeria has become a capital-intensive venture, more so the office of the governor. The general speculation in town is that Akinbade does not have the financial wherewithal to really prosecute election for the governorship seat. What is your reaction to this insinuation?
That’s their impression, but I am telling you that they are wrong. Governorship election or any election should not be cash and carry. That is why we have not been able to get our footing in Nigeria, because anybody with money will just come and say how much would it cost him or her to get elected into public office. I have seen a situation where somebody just came and they gave him a list of how much to spend, including the purchase of vehicles and giving various sums of cash to political leaders. They instructed him on how much to give to leaders and delegates. They summed it together and said if he has the money, he has already gotten what he wanted, even without having any knowledge of governance or good thing to offer. But I want to appeal to our people to desist from selling their votes. Incidentally, nobody is coming to buy it cash and carry, even if they give you money, you can use your discretion to vote for the candidate of your choice and that is why all of us have to come out and let the electorate assess us. The assessment should not be limited to what we intend to do, they need to ask for the profiles of everybody, including our antecedents and weaknesses. There is the need to educate our people on the need to de-emphasise money by not selling our future for pittance.
What informed the choice of your running mate, retired Justice Olamide Folahanmi Oloyede?
In life, I don’t believe I have any choice rather than what God chooses for me. To me, Justice Oloyede as my running mate or deputy governorship candidate is God’s choice. God knows who I need and he knows what I want to do and the way I want to do it and the type of person that would assist me to do it. Everybody knows that I am an incorruptible and no nonsense person, who doesn’t give room for compromise. As chairman of tenders’ boards, I did my job thoroughly on merits. Look at my deputy; everybody knows her pedigree as an upright woman with exemplary virtues.
For more than two years, civil servants in Osun have been facing hardship on the payment of their salaries. Specifically, some categories among them have been on what the government termed modulated salary. What is your plan for civil servants in the state?
The case of Osun and the civil servants, regarding anybody that is coming to govern this state is like a woman who has a baby and the baby is crying endlessly and somebody wants the mother of the baby to do something for him. What do you think the woman would take care of first? Definitely, the woman would take care of her crying baby first. Our civil servants in Osun are crying babies that need first attention. For whatever success we want to achieve in terms of programmes and policy implementation in Osun State, we have to take care of the civil servants first. We would make sure that come December this year, the payment of half salaries will end. We would start paying full salaries to all categories of workers. The arrears would also be paid within six months and one year of our government. Both the serving civil servants and pensioners would be paid in bulk or in lump sum. We wouldn’t pay them their arrears in piecemeal so that they would be able to do something tangible with the payment. They have suffered a lot.
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