Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State Governor, on Sunday, held a social media chat with a cross section of social media personalities and online communities, particularly Edo youths. It was his first social media chat since he assumed office.
The Excerpts:
100 Days In Office
When I made my mind to be governor, I started focusing on the key priorities, don’t forget I spent several months campaigning, making promises, and telling people why I was seeking office. So the last 100 days has been interesting, because government house is familiar, I have been here for the last nine years, but the last 100 days I have had to play a different role, I have had to make the decisions and not advise on what decisions to be made. I have just found out that I have to work much longer hours than I had anticipated, I thought I will close early, I mean I will close at 5 or 6 in the evening and have time to play Golf, is Sunday evening, and we are here, , so it has been interesting, it has been a lot of work, but it has also been very convincing, that is I am convinced that Edo can work, and Edo and Nigeria can work. I am convinced that the promises we made can be fulfilled. So in a nutshell, I will say the last 100 days, has been ones in which I have tried to as much I can, to touch on what I felt the key issues were or are in Edo.
The Edo Job Initiatives
Yes, it is feasible, this week, we are rolling out Edo Job initiatives where training has commenced for the officers, we intend to deploy these officers across the state to register unemployed people, to register people who want jobs. That training was concluded yesterday Sunday, from today Monday, they will be going around the 18 local government Areas of Edo State. We want to understand the size of the problem, how many people want work, what sort of qualifications they have, what experience they have if any, so that it will help us in planning for work for them, given all the initiatives, which we are currently contemplating. So I believe that we can in four years provide jobs, we have started in many areas even though little, you were driving through here now you see all the cars lined up, in front of the car park, they are not brand new. There is a workshop behind here in collaboration with the Lady Mechanic Initiative, am sure she currently has almost a 100 people working with her, fixing vehicles.
Agriculture
What am doing about it, first we are going around to get the exact number of people that need work, secondly we have had a whole series of sessions. We are now planning that the jobs will come from Agriculture, we have an agriculture committee headed by Dr Ida, they have been going round the state, and as I speak to you today, they have prepared almost a thousand hectares of land. We are expecting to prepare about five thousand hectares before the main rain begins, because we have gone into contracts with some large scale companies who are going to buy grains, particularly maize from Edo State. So what we are doing is take away the key risks on Agriculture, by first getting the land, helping prepare the land and then encouraging people to go in there, giving them the seedlings, give them the farming practices, to cultivate. So if you for instance are interested, you and your friends could get as much as five hectares and you could rent tractors, high improved seedlings will be giving to you, you cultivate, and they will teach you what to do, and six to eight weeks that lot will be ready for harvest. Given the yield, from those five hectares for instance, you can make as much as eight tons per a hectare, so you have about 20 tons at a N150, 000 per ton, imagine how much you will walk away with in six weeks, and you can replicate that for the other seasons. Corn is in huge demand and there is a quite a bit of shortage of, and you know is used for feed meals. Because of the cost of corn, Poultry has become more expensive, feeds generally for animals, pigs and fish has become expensive. So there is a lot of demand and we are getting those contracts signed up and we are trying to encourage our people to go into agriculture and there are several other such initiatives. So, as we roll out these programmes, you will find that a lot of people will have work.
Uniformed Harmonized Tax Rate Bill
Think about it, when I was campaigning what was one key issue, We kept saying as far as Edo State is concerned we are paying salaries, but when you go out there people say no, no, we have not gotten salaries, it wasn’t that we are lying, Edo State Government, Comrade Oshiomhole has reformed the government of Edo State, so it could meet its obligations, it wasn’t defaulting on salaries, unlike the situation before he came into office, however Local Governments as you all know is a separate tier of Government, separate from the state, they get their own funding directly, the law and the constitution give them their own tax base that is what they could collect taxes on. So we noticed that once the Local Governments got their allocations from Abuja, the allocations were no longer enough to pay their obligations, pay for the school teachers, and pay the workers of the Local Governments. The other source which they could have gotten money from which is their own tax base, don’t forget Edo State Government has cleaned up its own act and reorganize the tax office that is Board of Inland Revenue and we are actually able to collect its own tax and that is how we were able to meet up our own obligations both to our workers and contractors. But this was not happening with the Local Governments and I realized that the bulk of revenue that was supposed to be going to the Local Governments has been contracted out to non-state actors. So the first thing I have to do is to announce during my New Year broadcast, that this should stop. I banned it, but has to follow up with some necessary legislation which meant that first we have to itemized again, the various revenue subheads, where can and should the Local Government collect revenue from and that how much should they collect, because it was quite random. More importantly, we also have to put in place a process for collection. So we needed a law to back the all things which we are about to do now so as we roll out, we have a Uniformed Tax Rates, we have to itemized what you could collect money on, don’t forget all sorts of characters would go into markets and all sorts of places to essentially extorts people, collect money from them in the name of taxes or levies which were never defined, receipts were never issued, all of that has to stop and today if anyone comes to you to pay any amount as tax or levies they have to show you that there is a law backing that operation.
Benefit Of Using POS In This Process
First we want to eliminate cash from the tax collection process, you know the risk, if a market woman for instance needed to pay environmental dues, and it is N500 a month, if she doesn’t have a bank card for which she can pay with through our POS, then the collector in charge should buy a scratch card and swipe it and get the pin numbers and key in with her own code and a receipt will be issued to her, that way she doesn’t have to give cash to any person and she will get a receipt and record of what she has paid.
The Transport System
Yes, we have hired somebody who has a lot of experience to reorganize Edo Transport Management Agency, as we speak and as part of what we are working on, once the Edo job portals opens tomorrow, we would be hiring or recruiting traffic officers, but this time around we are going to screen them very, very carefully and train them, of course the place has been set up now in one of the government facilities, train them so that they go through very rigorous training before we then deploy them to the streets to begin to organize and control the traffic. We also have spoken with the judiciary; part of the law says we would have mobile courts on some magistrate courts designated for prosecuting traffic offenders. From the measures we have put in place, once we roll out the processes we should be able to put halt to traffic menace in the state. That is for the short term, for the medium to long term we have people currently working trying to help us develop a master plan for transportation in the city and eventually in the state. There is no transportation master plan, so we now have people who are collecting data they are in the field, doing a lot of field work, bringing in a lot of data, you may not have noticed them, to get us data that we can have a plan on how to organize traffic, how to organize the routing, how to work with the various transportation stakeholders, the bus unions, the tricycle unions, everybody who is involved in transportation. We are going to collect information hopefully working with the World Bank who we have spoken to, get enough money to do studies then reorganize the transport system. And the next thing about transport as you know is roads, we are trying to think through what are the major arteries and how to now get traffic flow through the cities, so in the short term, we get agency, train the staff who we are currently hiring, then make sure that we remove all the bottlenecks, in the medium to long term, we are going to rethink how to move goods and people across the city and then across the state.
The Judiciary
We are trying to ensure that very frequently I meet with the Chief Judge; sit down to review the situation, the judiciary is one arm of government we are taking very seriously, in this year’s budget as you realize, we made quite handsome provision to improve infrastructure in the judiciary, so we have to had constant interactions with them, we are rebuilding the house for the Chief Judge, we have to build more court rooms, we try to relocate the industrial court to Benin, we are helping refurbish the Court of Appeal, anything that will help strengthen the judicial system we will do.
Entertainment And Sports
Entertainment and Sports are two areas that we will spend a lot of time and efforts on; because these are two areas we are relying on to create a quiet number of jobs. Sports first, we need to rethink on Sports, as you recall, we set up several associations, what we have done in Education, Agriculture, and soon in Health care, we have to do same in sports and entertainment and what is that, we will have a strategy team in place, we will think through the issues, we look at the priorities as outlined in my electioneering campaign in my manifesto. We then look at all the issues around particular topic which is Sports, we then invite critical stakeholders, people who has done things in that area, people in the State government who are involved, people in the local government, we invite them to a session like a one day workshop, we had that in Agriculture, we brought potential investors, we brought people from the local governments, government officials, directors in the Ministry of Agric, to spend a night or two brainstorming. Not just talking through the theories but actually what exactly to do and how to do and who to do. So we have done that in Agric, that is why I can tell you today we are doing things in Agric, we have a very clear road map. We concluded education last week, we have two elements, first Primary Education how do we get Primary Education system to now be what it should be, to be number one again in the country, so we got experts from all over, so we got experts from World Bank, from Technology companies, so they came and we brainstormed on what to do with primary education. Then we had another session on Technical and Vocational education separate, we got people from Industries, we got the schools themselves, we got foreigners to sit down and think through what to do with Technical Education and we have started work on that, if you read the papers last week, we have gone to tender, we have started work on the Benin Technical College. We are going to do the same thing for health care next week and then we will now focus on Youths and Sports where we will sit, talk to ourselves and asked the key questions, what exactly should we be doing and how should we do it and who will be responsible for doing what and when we can get work done by. I won’t pretend I am not an entertainer, I won’t say am fantastic sports person, but I know that I have to put together sports managers, athletes, footballers in a room and by the time talk through the issue, we will know what to do and how to go about it.
Health Care
Like I said we are going to be having a session on health in a week’s time, I will invite you. The way I see health care, I see it from several perspectives, first you need to strengthen your health care system, there are several things you need to do, health care is not equal to hospital, it is a system, it is a process, so once you think about healthcare holistically, you will find out that the problem of health care is not only within the Ministry of Health, they may coordinate, they may direct, give information but is broader. The other issue is given the demand for health care today in Nigeria and the way we talk about health care, who will pay for health care, does government has the resources to pay for health care in the way it is always done up till now, lastly the practitioners themselves if you think about it, the Doctors are perhaps the least in numbers in the healthcare system, there are people who support the healthcare system, like you and the other professionals are much more. What do we need to do, how do we need to first improve the standards, improve the quality of their training so that as caregivers we are able to achieve the statistics of Doctor or Nurse to patients’ ratio which will make our health care system effective will be accredited this year. But the issue is who are the people, we are now are going to give the responsibility to manage those schools and provide the badly needed manpower. Let’s tell ourselves the truth, do we still have those people in government, so if not do we have to partner with private sector, if so, how. But as far as I am concerned key to my administration and what I promised is reinvigorate the primary health care system. That should be the base that you don’t have to walk more than 20km from where you live, to get a health care service. I don’t see why around every market, around every concentration of schools, we don’t have a primary health care center, because what are the issues really we need to cope with, child and maternal healthcare, things like malaria, typhoid and others. And this can be treated in Primary Health Care centers if you have the right testing kits and you have the right trained personnel, so that is the approach, the issue will be how do we approach it.
As for our Hospital I have looked at it and I believe that we need help and assistance in managing that hospital. Fortunately there are several models we are seeing across the country now where government can now go into PPP arrangement with management groups to come and manage the hospital. From what we have built, I believe that we just improving and adding a few things like oncology, renal and cardiology, we include those services given the diagnostic equipment we have there. We should be able to treat cases that currently go out to places like India and Europe, but that is now what most of us suffer from you young people right, that we know people who are prepared to pay millions to go abroad. So if we have the right partner which I am sure we will very soon, we are talking to a few groups already, and that Hospital should open its doors to now begin to cater to the public.
Unemployment
I want to understand the size of the Problem, the demography, if my assumptions are correct, you will find out that the civil service today, with all the teachers, health workers, employs less than fifty thousand people out of five million which I assume we are, so it cannot be the largest employer of labour. In Benin City alone, you have more than a 120 bank branches, Okomu employs so many more, and so the whole theory that it is a civil service state, I don’t think is totally correct. The State Government is a key actor, no doubt about that, but that is not the case. So how do we attract young talents, younger people into the civil service, in fairness I have looked at the remuneration in the civil service is not great, but given the general cost of living around here if were are able to improve on food prices, I don’t think N50, 000 a month which is about what they get if you put all in, is not enough on the average when you analyze it. It is not too bad a starting, we need to improve it, but is not all about cash as you know, remuneration is not all about cash. There are so many other things you can put as part of the package. By the time you are helping with transportation, you are helping with housing you know, and then you will find out that okay am doing well. All over the world the civil service are not what you called one of the top places where you get highest level of remuneration, however what we want to do is to improve motivation, bring in a lot of technology into the civil service so that they can work a lot more efficiently and accomplish much more. Make their offices a work place exciting. This is an office right, why can’t most of our public offices in Edo be like this. So back to your question, we are doing other things, we have plans to make the public service attractive, give a lot of respect and sense of authority to public servant so that you will want to be a public servant, because you are regarded and you are respected in the community and then create that other incentives for them, so that at the end of the day is not only about money, is about the impact and difference you are making to your community. The key here is, is not how much you pay, is how you organize your society such that what you need, you can afford, that is what is about, because if you keep increasing salaries, as inflation increases you will not catch up. So is about saying okay when I earn my income, how much of it do I spend on food, so I spend N25% on food, how much does that comes to, so if the prize of food is not cheap, there is no way you going to be able to spend 25% of your salary on food. If I am not supposed to spend more than 15% or 20% on rent, if the cost of houses or rental is beyond, that is the way we should think about it. Is about trying to make sure that you have general price stability in your society, in your community, which is what I am hoping we will achieve, after a few years and it comes from productivity. Once you get an economy to begin to produce some service you will be able to stabilize prices. They just feel a sense of hopelessness, they finished school, they are at home, there is no prospect for work, when they see people who have graduated for some many years not doing anything and they said to themselves anywhere else but here. Anywhere else would be better so whatever it is let me just go. And then you have a lot of agents who come in recruiting them, flashing all sorts of tales on them, to say look life is fantastic, they only show them the good sides from the movies and videos. But if we create opportunities, you know that I may not be able to get an office job, but at the end of I can wake up and someone will say come, you know what let me teach how drive a tractor or repair a caterpillar and you will end 20,000 or 30,000 a month. The fact that he has something doing is an option. So that is why we are pushing, that is why this job agenda is critical. That’s one of the few ways you can resolve this, because the guy will say maybe am better managing this N20,000 I am getting here than go to take all that risk of trying to go abroad. But if he has no option, then that is the only option he has. So we must register people, particularly young people, know what skills they have, know what skills to impact, and then begin to give them opportunity. Let it be that ooh, I don’t want to go to farm, I am looking for or I don’t want to be a bar tender, or I don’t want to work in a hospitality industry, let it be them opting for the choices available, to say they have nothing else to do. Because once you teach a child how to spell properly, how to string words together, how to add their sums, how to live in an ordered society, they will have that confidence to live through life. Because if you think about it in those days, standard 6 was primary education, but even with standard six in those days, some of them ended up managing multinational companies and is without going to formal education after that standard six because they were equipped at that level to be able to pick up, boost themselves, read, undertake correspondence courses and live to quality of life they want. If we strengthen our primary education, you will get a lot more confidence in younger people that they can read and pass their exams, they don’t have to cheat, they don’t have to try and cut corners and ask for the parents to beg for admissions they don’t deserve and things like that. Then what I called functional technical education, everybody can read and write, but what other skill do you have so that if everything else fails you can use that one to feed yourself. Why is that okay by the time you leave school you cannot even bake, you cannot do dry cleaning, let everybody else have some, so that if things are not working you can say okay let me go and manage this one until I get something better. But at least you have that technical training about that particular area, that is what I think we should emphasis, because that is the only way to deal with the level of unemployment and joblessness in our society.
More On Agriculture
Depending on who was bringing in a 50kg bag of rice, was between 19,000 and 21,000. For over Christmas we paid about a 21,000, 22,000, it fluctuated depending on demand and I think it has come down to about N19,000. But this is the problem, you know countries where we import these food stuffs from, their agriculture is not structured the way we have structured our agriculture. Over the years we have always talk about subsistence agriculture, we have always treated agriculture as if is a social service, agriculture is business and is a big business because buy food, we pay for it. So if it is big business like manufacturing cement or petroleum, why don’t we just make the sort of investment at that level? So what we have done in Edo is to say look, we are blessed, of the 19 million or 20 million square kilometer that we have, 80 percent of it arable and very fertile. So we have gone out to say, you know what, thank God for some studies that have already been done by the Food and Agricultural Association, you have soil samples from across the state that will tell you what crops will do well. We have marked every local government and say what can you do. How do we now access lands, because the key challenge is land, availability of land and access to the land? So we have dimensioned, if it is rice we have a competitive on rice, so if you look at our 50 km Osu stretch of the River Niger from Esan South East right through Etsako East and take it out another 10, 20 km it gives us potential, almost 200,000 hectares of land that is very, very good for rice, so we are working. Last Sunday, by this time I was just coming back from Illushi and that is all I went to do. During the week we had a group of investors somewhere from sovereign wealth authority, they are coming; we are partnering with them to now come and also partner with us. We believe with the initiatives we have now, we and the incentives we are putting in place to attract investors, we should be able to put into cultivation this year between 5000 and 10000 hectares for rice with different investors and if you are able to do all year cropping I think Edo will be competing with Kebbi, but we won’t make noise about it. Our mantra is just do it and don’t talk about it. so what is new is that we just want to do it and stop talking about it.
Tourism
When you get into a situation and you get a whole myriad of issues and problem is first Education, then recreation and entertainment and then tourism will follow. You don’t go to London to just go and look at Buckingham palace, do you, but when you find yourself in London you go to Buckingham palace. So the thinking is lets first make this place attractive, the good thing that is going for us is we are already a tourist hub, you know how many people who must pass through Edo every day, so people already pass through, the issue is can we make them stop and do things that will earn them income or create business for them. Once we begin to do that then we can now begin to expand on Tourism. That is the way I see it. if we are able to attract people to build an international convention center here and people can come here for conferences, in the evenings they will ask what else is there to do, we can so, no, no by the way have you gone to our place, that is it would come naturally, let’s build infrastructure, lets create an economy, lets attract people to come here and when they come they will find things. We have too much for them to see and do.
Investments
Is sold, went into AMCON, and I believe Pastor Chris Oyakilohme, their investment arm has bought it and here again having bought it, I noticed when I drove through that there seem to be activities picking up. Bendel breweries have been mired in a lot of problems, but by the grace of God we are resolving the issues. Bendel insurance have died, the company, a long time ago, when they recapitalize the government at that time has run it down, it doesn’t have a license to operate as an insurance company. However, the football club is alive and we will keep it alive and we make sure it gets into top of the league. From what I have told you, what can you pick out, is that all the companies set up by government failed. So does it make sense to now as government continue to put money in business? It is not government’s business to run business, there are people in the private sector who can take the risk, between Nigerian Breweries and Guinness and SAB, they have the most of the breweries in the country and they are working. So why should government now take tax payer’s money to go and be investing in a brewery that it doesn’t know how to manage. Government at that time had to assume what you called commanding heights of the economy because we do not have enough domestic savings, we do not have enough Nigerian entrepreneurs to do this thing, to invest in this businesses, so government has to take the lead then. Today Government does not need to, Edegbe’s fleet is larger and more than Edo line. So when you think about it, why must government be in this kind thing that you know people can do? Government should take its money, build better schools, and pay teachers well to teach the children, improve our health care system, so that we all can have a better society. I don’t believe that we should be spending tax payers’ money doing things that individuals can do better than Government can do. But the Edo people constitutionally have the responsibility to review and say no this is what we want, this is how we think, that exactly is what the House of Assembly has done. Don’t forget they are representing different constituents, so when you take your budget there they will look at it and said no, we believe that this is important to our people. But maybe the executive didn’t look at it, from this angle; so therefore, I think we should put more money here, to achieve. The good thing is that we have heard a conference; we called members of the executives, the different ministries into dialogue session, and based on which we then agreed and we didn’t see any problem with that marginal increase. We though yes we could accommodate it.
I think first we should be careful, when you have illiterates, financial illiterates as I call them, pick up data and interpret data, you don’t want to begin to take them seriously and dwell on, Edo State could not be, first what I need to say is in terms of debts, we have the best profile on debts structure in Nigeria. There is no Government anywhere in the world, no business that does not use debts, but you have to use it responsibly, and no lender will give you money if they do not believe you have the capacity, to pay, thirdly you cannot say we are too indebted and yet we are able to pay salaries, we are able to pay our contractors, we are able to run our services. Not everybody can get World Bank money, only two states in Nigeria, in Africa, Lagos and Edo have that privilege of getting money from the World Bank at less than 1% for 20 years, in some cases ten year moratorium. So at the end of the day when you look at what we have to pay to service the debt is nothing, is better than going to a commercial bank to take money at 20% as overdraft as they use to do when they were in government and then do phony deals with the banks. You have to look who is saying something and what is the motivation. If we expose the evil in one day in this government house in times past, it could show you how they collected N4 billion in one day from four different banks and that money never even acme into the government coffers, went into private accounts, the documents are there. So people who ran government that way that is the way the think. Every kobo that we have earned as a government under the last administration and this administration, we can account for it, you can see why and how, yes that data is not correct, we are not the most indebted and the DMO came out and denied it that we are not the most indebted. In terms of ranking, Lagos, Edo and maybe another state have the most foreign loans, but those loans are mostly concessionary, that is what we are using to develop the state, invest.
Security
You see if you don’t do anything about security nobody will bring their money here, to invest. You cannot build economy without taken care of security. So that is why security is important. Security is not something you sit down and discuss, this how we are going to secure, this is how am I going to secure, but I can assure you as we speak, we are developing our own internal Edo State Security plan in consonant with the Federal Government to make sure that this state is secured well, you know is quite difficult to secure because we are right in the middle of everywhere, very porous, people come in and go out, so we are going to think very clearly, cleverly how we secure our state, But I am pleased today that most of issues of security has been dealt with. We have not heard any issue of terrorism incidence here and we pray to God that it will not happen. We have issues with herdsmen that, we also have a plan to deal; cases of armed robbery are not as prevalent as they were in times past. So I will say on the whole in a short term, we are watching the security situation and putting in the right investment to maintain order and security. In the long term we will be fine-tuning our security plans to make sure that it is sustainable.
Power
Yes, on a lighter note, I have gained one kilo, on a lighter note when I say God has won, Godwin, is for real, don’t think I am here just by chance, because this state is really, really blessed. If I have my doubts about our endowments, about the fact that Azura power plant or that we will be number one in electricity, if I have any doubts, those doubts were totally erased two days ago when I went Oben, visiting Oben after two year, I think the first time I went to Oben was about two or three years ago, is a totally different location, totally different operation, the expansion, you know Oben is one of the largest gas processing zones in the country, quite a lot gas comes in from Delta and is processed and transported into the grid, you feed the Escravos pipelines, they called them Epps 1 and Epps 2, those are the gas lines that comes through Edo and then tee off going through the West, East and North. If you see the amount of expansion that has occurred there, that is where the gas to feed Azura will come from, so that is sorted, therefore Azura and the plant in Ihovbor will come alive by the grace of God next year and there will be 900 megawatts from that location and the good thing about that location is that it has a substation, substation where you can step down that power, so if you wanted the power some of it today, you can actually do that, you don’t have to make any additional investment is there and as I speak we have now delineated a whole industrial city of about 18 square kilometers and in the next couple of weeks, I am going to be going out to India to meet the consultants who are the designing this industrial city for us. So that we can step down, so that before that plant gets ready next year we are already ready, to use some of that electricity for manufacturing and production close by, that is the kind of opportunity we see in that location, that is we have two separate plants there and there are conversations already as to how to step down some of that electricity for use locally. So we have three models, one the very, very big one, the second model is we are going to sign a power purchase agreement with another company that is producing electricity using gas from the Ologbo fields. We are going to get the first five megawatts, this year, which we hope to bring into town to power our government buildings and street lights and all those things we need to. Once that works, I have met the investors; it therefore follows that we can take another pack of 50 megawatts and dumps it on an industrial cluster site next door on Sapele road, and you can now begin to build in those packs, that is the second model which is smaller and more affordable and then the third model is the Gelegele model where Dubri Oil I met them, couple of weeks ago and they are now going in to begin to drill for more wells and that whole area, you we are sitting on the largest onshore gas reserves in Nigeria. All of Benin right through to that Gelegele axis is all sitting on Gas. Sahara oil came to me and we resolved the community issue, they have now been able to move their pipelines to OML 270 near Ajoki, I think they are beginning to drill, all of those are gas related and so the plan am hoping when the Gelegele committee finishes its work, is to now use that gas there to generate power, locate industries there and be able to now with the ports bring in goods, bring in raw materials, processed and sent to other markets, if we are able to accomplish all of these in the next ten years, Edo will never be the same again.
Local Governments Administration
LGAs that don’t have money to pay its workers, bring in anybody today, he is not going to solve that problem, what we need to do is to sit down and restructure them to make sure that they are able to earn enough or reduce their cost to be able to pay their way. I will say that is the first thing to do. Make local governments now viable and financially sustainable because not to address that issue and feel that by going in and conducting elections and bringing another set of people to run a system that is broken will not resolve it. So, the first challenge we have, you I am now the chairman of JAC because of seriously I view the issue, is Local Government by Local Government, and all the local governments are not the same. The urban local governments have different challenges from the rural local governments. So we are sitting down and they are mentioning them, we say okay what are your revenue bases, how are you collecting the revenue now, how much can you potentially collect and if you did collect would you be able to pay your way. So once we spend the next three, four months, sorting them out, so that this whole complain about not been able to receive salary does not arise. Then we can now say yes, let’s now conduct elections and then get these things going again. But to do it now, I mean like you said in the case of recession, it is not even because of the recession, is just that I as governor in good conscience wants to be able to understand what is going on at the Local Government level. It is unacceptable when a local government cannot pay its salaries at the end of the month. That is the situation we met, when we came in to Edo State eight, nine years ago. So we have sorted out state, I need to now sort out local governments and is something we must do and we must get a whole of situation before we conduct any elections into the local governments.
About TVET
Institutional arrangements and let be coordinated within a structure and that is why we are focusing on what we called TVET, Technical and vocational training. Under the TVET arrangement we now are breaking down industries into several components, so that we now say what are the opportunities available, let’s take wood and furniture, what is the opportunities, is it carpentry, joinery, you know what exactly. Because if you think about the Nigerian state every day we consume goods and services, but the tragedy of the Nigerian state is that we now spend more than we earn, almost $30 billion of our own money we could have saved to do other things, to import goods and services we can make here. This Tile you seen here is sand and electricity and they are being made by the by pass but you how much we consume in this country and we go all over the world to China, to Spain to buy Tiles, Granites, Glass, everything there is nothing here that we cannot make and we are so blessed in Edo state that we have a base, we have the raw materials base to make all of these. But it is not going to be made by one huge government sitting and controlling the whole chain. You have one small company there, they are making glass, they make them in sheets, maybe you have another company that has a machines to cut them, beveled them to needs. So that’s how the economic system is organized, so Government has to create that enabling environment, enabling base. What are the enabling bases, first security, so that people could bring their money, secondly you want to have the basic raw materials, which we have, we have electricity and we have the raw materials, thirdly you need the person who has skilled to do the work, that is where the training and getting the youths involved in vocational and other skills come in. so that when people come in with their money to set up, they don’t have to go to China and all of that looking for disciplined workers. What does it take to weld, nothing, most of these processes, look at this stand, everything is our all our welding oil and paint, what does it take to make them. So your question yes there is a whole, we are breaking down and looking and said at this stage where do we train people. I met with the BEDC MD and I said okay our partnership, I want to be able to give you a thousand young men and women every year to help me train in electricity, to just understand how to string lines, how to fix conductors, how do you fix transformers and all of that, if they train a thousand, maybe they will employ 200 or 300. The other DISCOS across the country would employ the rest and if they don’t, they also have other things they can do. We can just go on, and on, the truth is that this is the right time in Nigeria for us to look inwards and to bring those investments and the role of government should be helping organized all of these, making it work, not trying to play God and do the things themselves. You can’t, there should be the platform and environment for you express yourself in the way best you know how to, that is how government should be organized and that is the role of Government and that is why we are trying to organize this government that way.
Law Enforcement and Security
I agree with you that enforcement is key, but we should stop thinking of the Nigerian state as if it is an alien that has responsibility for governing the Nigerian State and no other area is it more critical than in enforcement. What is policing, and who should really be responsible for. So as part of our security plan we are emphasizing community policing, where in your unit, in the area you live, some young men and women must be involved, must be trained to secure the environment, to provide information as to intelligence, as to movements and what is going on within and then collaborate all that information and enforcement with the Nigerian Police. So that way it is a partnership, you don’t think this is one thing, so by the time we are arresting you are finding someone from the local community and the police coming in to enforce that arrest. So it cannot be extortionary because it is extortionary then the community will react. So it is about breaking it down and ensuring community participation in providing security in both enforcement and prosecution. Let just stop thinking Edo or Nigerian as a state being ruled by alien from somewhere, no. we live here, we have responsibility to secure it for ourselves and we should make the investments and provide the resources and also secure ourselves. Once we do that, then you see we underestimate the importance and power of technology, once you deploy enough technology you are almost able to do it, you beat traffic light is not an argument, the camera picks it and so prosecution is clear, you what fines to pay and then next time you will not do it and on and on. So deploying technology to security and like many other things is key to providing effective security and bases for prosecution and enforcement.
