Governor
Adams Oshiomhole celebrated his 5th anniversary as governor of Edo
state last Tuesday in grand style. After the colourful occasion,
Oshiomhole discussed national issues and his life as a widower with
journalists and he declared that his greatest regret in life today is
the death of his dear wife Clara. He spoke on other national issues.
Excerpts:
By SIMON EBEGBULEM, Benin City
It’s your 5th anniversary as Governor of Edo State, but your
opponents would feel this elaborate celebration was a waste of state
resources
We are not like any other government, our selling point is the trust
line between the governed and the government and every responsible and
honest steward must as a matter of duty and obligation account to his
master. I’m 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 few elites but of people in the rural areas and
as well those in the Urban area.
In terms of election, the people are more in number than the elites
and so on the occasion of my 5th anniversary and my first year in my
second term as I have done over the past four years, it has been a
tradition to face the people and tell them what has changed since
November, 2008 to 2012 and today but more particularly between last year
and now so that they follow the progress we are making.
If you call that extravagance, well that was your choice of words but
I call it practical accountability and open governance. In the trade
union world when you are elected, at a certain period you hold your
meeting, you give report of your achievements and where you have
challenges, you explain them to the people so I don’t see what was
extravagant.
I didn’t see people drinking champagne or eating, rather I saw women
under the sun, maybe when we finished few people came to the government
house to eat. My complain when I was in the NLC was that politicians
make promises at the beginning and in between, they don’t render account
but 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 is what we have
done in the past four years and God’s 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.
You sounded too harsh on the issue of signing death warrants, why?
I am sure you are familiar with the fact that the governor has the
last input when a criminal or a suspect is apprehended. It 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 has that judgment and the suspect can appeal up to
the Supreme Court.
If the Supreme Court is convinced that the person is guilty and hands
out death penalty and it is the requirement of the constitution that
the governor accents to it. If the Supreme Court finds out that 20
people were guilty of murder and they sentence twenty 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 the newsroom, the
sub-editor, the line editor looks at it, the editor signs the paper, is
that a reckless process? I have no apologies like I said at the
stadium. If you are convicted as a kidnapper because you killed the
victim, I will sign the death warrant because you have no reason to take
the life of another man or woman.
You did mention that you copied certain strategies from Lagos State, what was the situation in Edo when you came?
People don’t like to say they copy except when you talk about
America and Europe but what I’m saying is that there are a lot of good
things that are happening in the Nigerian environment and sometimes,
you need to go out to find what works and adopt it.
Lagos has always been there and at a point, things were so bad that
Lagos became so impossible that you used odd numbers and even numbers to
manage your traffic and senior military officers were deployed to use
the horse whip to enforce simple traffic rules.
That was how bad Lagos was. General Obasanjo was reported as saying
that Lagos was a jungle, today Lagos is not a perfect place but
everybody agrees that good things are happening in Lagos.
Ojuelegba used to be where we recruit our area boys when we want to
make Lagos a bit less comfortable for the big people plying the road.
The last time I passed Ojuelegba, I couldn’t find area boys. Lagos was
known for de-humanizing mass transit called Molue where you enter with
clean clothes and come out with tattered rags and we are beginning to
see roads that where blocked and opened up with several lanes.
So for me, that shows that things are changing in Lagos but we need
to understand what has led to those changes. By 1999 when Tinubu was the
governor I had to represent workers before him and he was obliged to
convince me why he won’t do the level of wages we wanted him to pay and I
realized that from that interaction, Lagos revenue was N600m.
But today, I understand from IGR that Lagos generates some good
amount and with that, they have been able to connect some bridges,
things have changed in Lagos. Oshodi has been cleaned up. So it was
something for me to copy and I said, I shamelessly 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 N285m
and at a point, we hit N2billion 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 realize that citizens have obligation to
the state to pay taxes so that in turn they can become real stake
holders to do the things that we are doing in Edo State. And that if we
are going to expand and carry out urban renewal like what they did in
Lagos. You do need to sometimes get rid of certain things in order to
restore the right of ways and expand the roads and that is what I meant.
There are couple of things we copied from Lagos: land use charge and
consumption tax because I’m sure that some of you at one time or the
other travel outside Nigeria and even those of you who have not
travelled, by just watching debates in other countries, central to every
election debate are tax policies and taxes and that defines the
character of a government. Look at the intra-city transport system which
would have been done many years ago.
It is now happening in Lagos. Imagine if somebody had made up his
mind to do thirty years ago what Fashola is doing now, life in Lagos
would have been lot more comfortable than it is now. But we recognized
that the fact that we failed in the past is no reason why we should fail
now. For us to be detained by the past and to become incapable of
facing the challenge of making up for lost time, I will say better late
than never. I am happy to see what Lagos is doing today.
ASUU strike has persisted despite all efforts to bring about peace
I have a particular difficulty on this matter and this is why I have
not commented on it and I don’t think I really want to comment on it
because somehow I have helped in mediating between federal government
and ASUU in 2009. The very agreement that is in dispute is not really
for me to cause trouble for any one.
I was involved in the making of that agreement, all I will say for
now is that under the Nigeria Labour laws, agreement are enforceable
even in law because both the Trade Union act and Labour acts recognize
the stature of collective agreement entered into between an employer and
employee and the key issue is that both sides should act in good faith
because making any statement for and against either side might not
promote the cause of peace.
Why have you not remarried since you lost your wife?
I wish you would have avoided the question because really when I talk
about my late wife, people may not understand why? You are in a
position to judge whether to agree or disagree. When a man in my own
case has the privilege of being elected as a state governor or
president, your wife’s status changes automatically to the first lady of
the state or the country with all the glamour that goes with it.
To have the kind of wife I had, who was familiar with all the police
stations in Kaduna and outside, and sometimes searching for her husband
who might have gone to work and detained by Police on account of trade
union work, it was her lot to stand by me and she bore all the
deprivations of a husband you were never sure where he was going to be
at the next minute. At a point, she called me an absentee husband.
In one interview she said ‘I have donated my husband to the Nigerian
workers’, so she went through all that pain and the day we were
inaugurated is usually the day where women put on their very best,
befitting a stature of the first lady of a state. But on that occasion,
we discussed how to appear because we didn’t have the opportunity of
long planning. I was declared on the 11th as the winner of the election
and was to be sworn in on the 12th.
So I said to her, I can’t change my identity now because I have been a
worker and have used khaki as a factory worker and President of the
NLC, and I don’t want to look different and she agreed. Rather than
going to buy lace, she opted to wear the same khaki, except that my own
was better sown than hers because the woman who made her own was not
used to sowing khaki for women.
So I looked around and imagined that she should have been by my side
today to share the joy of my 5th year anniversary. If you come from my
background, any woman who agrees to marry a man who is not rich, a man
who alternates between police stations and cells and lives in a one or
two bedroom apartment, that is your real love. When my wife said I love
you, it was from her heart.
I just imagined how she would have felt seeing all these people. The
only worry she ever had was who was going to employ our children owing
to my agitations with big establishments, because as an organized
labour, when we leave the NLC, we fear that our lives would be lonely
because it would be a payback time for all those big people I have
harassed in the course of my work. So, it would have been joyous for her
to see that five years down the road , I have more people around me
than I have before.
Her second fear was that she never approved my involvement in
politics because she was very proud to be referred to as the wife of
Oshiomhole because then she gets all the favour and saw the affection
because most Nigerians were happy with my stewardship at the NLC.
She was worried that once I get into politics, I would be ridiculed
and all of that would go. She felt I should keep the name. But I told
her even before I went into the NLC. NLC was a write off as military
apologists, the human rights community distanced themselves from the NLC
and I said you can always chose how you want to be remembered; that I’m
going into politics to redefine and demystify governance and reconnect
with the very ordinary people and politics offers that platform for
anyone who believes the ordinary man deserves a better deal.
So for all that and for many other reasons, that is one thing that I
regret that she should have been there to also see the other side of
life. I have seen it all, in this state now, they are people who will
call me the oppressor and you know who they are, the oppressors of
yesterday.
If you ask ‘Mr fix it’ who I am, he will tell you I’m oppressing him
because I have de-fixed him. It would have been nice for my wife to see
life’s full circle; that those guys who feasted on us and cheated, that
we have reduced them to political vegetables and placed them on
permanent political oxygen.
Why are APC leaders begging PDP members to join them when they described the party as evil?
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 they 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 platform is that it offers the
opportunity of people of like minds to come together regardless of where
you were before and Edo is a an example. Before I got here, those who
are with me now were either in PDP or ANPP and some in their private
grumbling 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 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 and that is how far some people went and by
praise singing like that, you could become a minister, senator or
governor for people who believe that the end justifies the means. I
think that in every political party, you would find some good and bad
people. I don’t think that there is pretense that every person in APC is
an angel or is there a suggestion that everybody in the PDP is a devil.
What’s your take on Anambra election taking place today?
Among all other candidates, Ngige is clearly outstanding because you
cannot compare Ngige with a man who worked with a bank that has folded
up.
In this country, we see truth but we can’t admit it. If you couldn’t
run a private business, how can you be entrusted with a state
instrument? It doesn’t make sense and you also cannot compare Ngige with
a man who was distributing kerosene with all the controversy around it
or was it the guy that wanted to become a medical doctor and
along the line, he got confused?
The media must help to enrich the political process by coming up with
facts that you know about every candidate so that you don’t mislead the
electorate. I can analyze each of them and tell you why Ngige is the
best. One works with a bank and he can’t say he grew the bank to a
level; bankers are not the best politicians.
The other one was a NANS President while I was the President of the
NLC and he was a villa creation. The villa used him to subvert the
National Association of Nigeria Students, he was supposed to be a
medical student.
How did he drop out? So of all of them, I can proudly say Ngige is a
proud medical doctor and a senator that has earned respect at the floor
of the senate.
OsunDefender
The
All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders are planning to have
discussions with former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as soon he
returns from his trip abroad.
