*On 2016 gov. race: My vision
Mr
Godwin Obaseki is the Chairman of the Edo State Economic Team and one
of the people aspiring to occupy the Osadebey Avenue after Governor
Adams Oshiomhole’s tenure in November 2016. In this interview, he bares
his mind on why he wants to govern Edo, saying that with the
foundation laid by his boss, Oshiomhole, he will take the state to the
next level with his expertise in the financial sector.
Excerpts:
Before
becoming the Chairman of the Economic Team, where were you? I was born
in Benin where I had my primary and secondary education. I finished
from the University of Ibadan, got a job as a stockbroker in Lagos and
started operating in the capital market in the mid 80s and then worked
in the International Merchant Bank. From there, I veered out to
financial advisory AVC Fund, where I managed a large commercial paper
portfolio and also did advisory work in helping to establish some banks
in Nigeria at that time.
Thereafter I went for my graduate
school work in the United States, had my master’s degree and came back
to establish my firm, Afrinvest. And since 1994 when I established
that firm, we have pioneered several innovative financial instruments.
We have been the cutting edge of financial services in Nigeria and then I
got into the Council of the Nigeria Stock Exchange and participated in
several reform projects in the capital market and in the entire economy
including being a member of the presidential committee that worked to
set up what we call the National Pension Commission today.
To
answer you specifically, I have been in the financial services industry
in Nigeria for the past 30 years and I have been involved very deeply in
the financial landscape of Nigeria.
How has it been working with Governor Oshiomhole as Chairman of the Edo Economic Team?
It
has been quite a rewarding experience. And then looking back seven and
a half years later, it has been fulfilling and quite an interesting
experience. Overall, our expectation is that, with proper leadership,
human capacity to manage resources efficiently, we have enough resources
internally, if properly harnessed, to kick-start our economic growth.
If you look at what we have done in seven and a half years, the level
of improvement, the level of infrastructure we have built, the order we
have brought into the politics and polity of Edo, when you compare our
accomplishments with the amount of financial resources we have utilized,
then you will appreciate how much we can achieve as a country.
Specifically,
the total amount of money we have spent to improve infrastructure is
less than 50% of the amount involved in Dasukigate. It is less than the
amount spent on Abuja airport road; I am talking about us having
constructed almost a thousand kilometres of roads, we refurbished almost
50% of our primary school infrastructure and 30% of our secondary
school infrastructure; we have built a world class General Hospital and
refurbished all our General Hospitals; spent over N30billion draining
Benin-City so that we can build roads and you can see the quality of
the roads.
But, more importantly, our procurement process has
given us quite a lot of advantage. We made sure we got value for money
from all the works we did. Even our opponents sometimes claim bogus
sums to say we spent three times of what we actually spent. So, in
their mind, we would have borrowed over N600m because that is the
value of what they would have created from what we have done. The
economy of Edo has improved significantly since we took over in terms
of GDP ranking; we have moved to be among the top ten states in
Nigeria; in terms of IGR, we are among the top five. In terms of
attractiveness to business, our ranking is quite high; you can see
businesses trying to locate Edo because of the quality and nature of
infrastructure which we have created. In terms of human resource
development, we are working on that. Having refurbished our school
infrastructure, we have now moved to the next stage of giving high
quality training to our teachers. The outcome is becoming obvious, going
by our ranking in NECO and WAEC exams. There is quite a bit of work
to be done especially in our technical colleges and then vocational
schools and so, I believe we have started well.
Before the coming of Oshiomhole, why didn’t people like you come to help the state?
I
have always been concerned about policy issues and, during the PDP
administration, some of us took interest and tried to understand what
was going on and engage Governor Lucky Igbinedion at that time. In our
group in Lagos, we invited him once or twice and he actually came once
to address us on the state of things in Edo. At that point, some of us
were even nominated by him to be part of an Economic Advisory Team
under the chairmanship of the late Aret Adams. The late Chief Aimuwu was
a member of that team but we couldn’t do much with him because we were
just confused about what was going on in the state. We just couldn’t
understand why they felt that the issue, at that point in time, was how
to raise money to set up few factories. In fact, one of the officials at
that time threw away series of feasibility studies which we did and
said our role was to go and raise money for them to carry out projects.
With that kind of orientation, that group disbanded because we just
couldn’t work with them, but that raised real concerns and issues in my
mind that state policies had been reduced to a couple of transactions
which we found out later they went ahead with and we could see what the
outcome is today. So when Comrade Oshiomhole said he was going to run, I
saw in him a great advocate, someone who could convert our frustrations
into development. I saw someone who was not contented lamenting the
decay we all saw but someone who could have the courage and the boldness
to promote and foster the changes that we required and that is how I
got attracted to him. I got close to him because I had worked with him
briefly at the presidential committee on pension reforms. Even though we
were on the other side of the divide, he didn’t trust us coming in from
the financial industry and he saw that the whole purpose of our being
involved in the pension reforms was because we wanted business for
ourselves, to the detriment of workers. So, having worked closely with
him gave me confidence in his ability and closeness to know that he
understood the macro and micro economic issues that were required to
transform not just the financial system but also the economy of Edo as a
whole. With that background, I was confident that, if he was supported
to embark on his gubernatorial ambition, he will make a good governor.
That is how it started in 2006 when I met him at a friend’s birthday
party, and we talked about his ambition, his concerns, the need to help
raise awareness and resources, and we agreed that we would support him
and, a few weeks later, we started the work. Many Nigerians supported
him through the electioneering and he won but he was deprived of his
victory and he went to court. But as professionals and people who
believed in his cause, we hung around and continued to support him in
our own little way to pursue the case in court. Later, we began to
prepare his mind for governance. I had the opportunity of meeting with
him in a flight. He called the next day and asked us to set up a team
in Lagos to help create a blue print for his administration. That team
was made up of fellow professionals in Lagos like Aisue Ighodalo, Uyi
Akpata, and some other professionals but he then included people like
the late the Professor Iyayi, Didi Adodo, Professor Osarhenhen and a
host of other people who met in Lagos. Even though we did all these,
when he took over, it was so different; we didn’t believe that the state
had really decayed to the level it did, we did not believe that our
school infrastructure was in such a decayed state. Going on inspection
with him one of those days, I was almost in tears like if this is what
the school system looked like when I was growing up, I could not have
gone to school. But this was just the surface. We took a tour after
inauguration round the city to see what the situation was. Most parts
were just impassable; the roads were bad and what was even more
worrisome was the way government was being run. What we met was worse
than what we expected.
You have never been in politics, what inspired you to run for governorship?
Having
been part of the whole policy infrastructure, the whole policy
machinery over the past seven and a years, even though it was on
advisory basis and I have been working probono because I felt that,
given what I have been endowed with, given God’s grace, given the almost
unmerited favour from God to accomplish all I have accomplished in
life, I felt that I should pay to serve, not be paid to serve and, from
that stand point, one was able to use the experience from the private
sector to begin to understand how government functions and why
government functions the way it does in Nigeria. I was also privileged
to grow in a home of civil servants; so I understood what the structure
of the civil service ought to be and, to my greatest surprise, what I
found was that the way government ran when I was growing up was not
totally different from the way it now runs. I began to understand why
things had become so bad, why things had fallen apart so much. So my
experiences in the private sector helped me to make that comparison, to
understand how the private sector functions in relative to what was
going on in government and the last seven years has helped me deepen my
understanding of governance. The opportunity of just having an Economic
Team, working with all the MDAs, observing EXCO proceedings have
given me the unique opportunity to understand the inside of government
and how government functions and why government is not able to
accomplish most of its goals. So, with that knowledge and experience, we
have done a few test runs with Oshiomhole. How do you build roads
despite the fact that you don’t have your core of quality engineers in
the Ministry of Works? How do you build your infrastructure when you do
not have the tools in the various ministries and Ministry of Urban
Planning? What I find is that there are private sector tools that will
be very useful in government. Planning was at the core of government
when I was growing up. Budgeting was a very important tool, but most of
these have been diluted in government. So with the benefit and
understanding of how these things work in the private sector, I have
been able to understand the priority in the private sector, how it got
broken and where to begin to fix it. But, in the mean-time, we also had
the benefit of the experience of Comrade Oshiomhole on how to execute
transactions, policies and projects even when the super structure of
governance is broken down. So, we had to build roads, whether we had
qualified engineers to help us to design roads in the Ministry of Works
or not. We had to get our bills of quantity right for our schools and
our government buildings; we had to procure the services of consultants
to help us understand the lay of the land of our environment to do the
mapping to determine what we needed to do before we build roads.
But there is this fear that you may embark on excessive borrowing if elected governor and that may plunge the state into debt?
First
of all, a lot of people, their understanding of finance and financing
is not very sophisticated and they see borrowing as permanent
indebtedness. Meanwhile, government, all over the world, usually spends
money they don’t have to create money that the society needs. That is
why when you go to Europe and America, you find out that government
continually issues municipal bonds, government bonds, treasury bonds;
these are instruments by government to borrow and finance its
operations but you are limited. Government just doesn’t borrow
indiscriminately, they only borrow to the extent they have the capacity
to repay. And how does government derive the capacity to repay? It is
ability to impose taxes and levies. The total indebtedness of Edo and
the figures can be paid under two or three years from our current tax
revenue if we don’t do anything. When you say we are borrowing and
over-borrowing, how does government get money to spend? It is only in
Nigeria where states go to Abuja and earn salaries, local governments
go and earn salaries. What happens is that government organises itself,
it has a whole string of levies and taxes to use to generate revenue
and, in anticipation of that revenue, it makes commitments to build
roads, schools and infrastructure that can help the society to generate
more economic well-being. Now, what this administration has done is to
change that to make sure that the bulk of the resources that accrue to
government is used to provide goods and services for the people. So,
first, Edo has not over-borrowed; second, government doesn’t have money.
Government money is what you call the tax payers money and no
responsible financial institution will give you money if you do not
have the capacity to pay tax on one sole factor on how you govern
yourself. If you don’t have transparent, accountable governance, nobody
is going to lend you money or they would lend you limited amount of
money. So, Edo has not over-borrowed in the last seven years; if
anything, we have looked for ways to internally grow our economy. Today,
where many states cannot pay salaries, we are able to pay and we are
not paying salaries from borrowing, we are paying salaries because there
is economic growth. Because of the infrastructural development, we are
the bride of investors; people want to come and produce in our state;
people want to come and grow things and participate in the agricultural
plans in our state and people want to come and do solid mineral mining
in our state. So, with all of these economic activities growing, we can
see that our revenues in Edo will continue to grow and, therefore, we
will not need to over-borrow or put so much financial pressure on the
balance sheet of the state. The problem is that you don’t the collection
of technical skills in financial management which you have in the
private sector in government and, as you begin to bring them in and
educate people, they will now begin to understand that bond is not
bondage.
My vision for Edo
The Edo project, which is the
house that we started seven and a half years ago, will tower above many
in this country and so we have taken time out to lay a very solid
foundation in terms of ensuring that we have restated the whole idea
that government is about the people; that there must be governance,
there must be prudence in the management of government resources because
these resources belong to the people. You can’t just dip your hands in
the treasury and take people’s money and do whatever you like with it.
You have to have a sense of accountability; you have to show the people
and tell them what you are doing with their money. In specific terms,
what I will do differently is to extend the plan to the next phase which
is to begin to introduce more of the economic elements into the plan;
to begin to sell what we are doing to the outside world, so that we can
attract investment and investors to create jobs. We have to send
children to school, we have to create an economy that will employ them
and the only way we can get employment for them is to encourage and
attract the private sector to come. Will they come? They will come
because they see that we are governing the state properly. They will
come because they will see we have built infrastructure which will help
reduce their cost of doing business. We are the only state that has
actively encouraged electricity because electricity is a core plank
required for production and industry. I am going to redesign our
agricultural cadastral so that we can make land an asset available to
investors who want to do agriculture. We will organise an agricultural
value change such that we can get large commercial farmers to come in
and support our small scale farmers with modern technology, with modern
tools of farming so that their yields can be improved. So, this
out-grower arrangement, which is change government extension services,
we will see how we can combine our grower framework to extension
services working with the private sector to ensure that we can move our
peasant farmers into modern day farming and boost agricultural
production. We also want to make sure that we extend that value change
such that we can begin to process what we produce and add more value
before we take them into the market. How is that going to happen? We are
going to have industrial layout close to agricultural concerns and I
believe that, if we can put between 100 and 200 thousand hectares of
land by the way we have 20 million hectares of land, if we can put 15 to
20% of that land into active use and properly organised agriculture, we
should be able to create jobs in their hundreds of thousands. Then we
look at industry, because of the location of Edo at the core of
Nigeria, we are three hours away from every major market in Nigeria,
that is, like eight hours from Kano, the farthest. We believe that if we
can create Edo, as a production hub, attract people to come and produce
here, then we should be able to have access to all the major markets in
Nigeria. I am confident because we have refurbished our educational
system, we are going to create more technical schools, more colleges of
agriculture, and we will partner under the TEVET arrangement, the
private sector, with government to train youths so that you can move
them into jobs very quickly. We will have school of agric that will be
closely affiliated to large commercial farms so that we can have a basis
for training and you know that when you attend any of our colleges, it
is already affiliated to an industry and there is likelihood to get a
job when you finish. So those are the things I will do differently while
continuing to extend what we have started, but we have to focus more
now on how to create jobs and economic well-being for our people. We
want to use what we have started, the infrastructure we have built, the
governor’s framework that we have, to now move forward to ensure we have
economic growth.
Read more at:
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/03/anti-corruption-saving-money-programme-is-wrong/
Bukola Saraki
