In this interview, Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo state bares his mind on his administration’s efforts at transforming the state, his preparedness for 2015 and his view on the presidential system of government. AGBOOLA BAYO reports
Assessment of Nigeria’s democracy
As they say, democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. The underlying fact there is ‘the people’, and when you say ‘the people’, like anything in life, you go through various levels of training and experience. If you look at the Nigerian environment over the years, we started with colonialism, and from there, we experienced the parliamentary system which was truncated by military incursion.
During the parliamentary system, it was democracy and it worked relatively well to some extent until, of course being human, some human factors came into play and the military came in. Before the advent of the military, there was still what I call relative value system where everybody knew what he wanted to become; either he wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. You want to be a professional and you go to school. Those who took to trading were good traders.
Relatively, that was the time we had the Udoji award and everybody was now buying radio, television and other electronics. It was no longer who you were, but it was more of what you were. You have `might is right’; you have materialism; so what you have were chaos and force; so there was no value system any longer. It had more to do with what you could get from the system and I think that was the time the psyche of Nigerians, as it were, started to change.
Since then, we have tried to go into another form of democratic governance which we called the presidential system, fashioned after the American system. In that system, we had a lot of debates on the need for consensus but because of our background, we found it difficult to operate on consensus, and so we began to have the mentality of impunity where people do what they want, and when you are the boss, the chief executive, you can do and undo, especially in a country where the only thriving business is government.
View on presidential system
The presidential system, of course, is like the oldest democracy where you have the emperor, the president or the prime minister. The only difference which I see between the presidential system and the parliamentary system is that there is no consensus built in the parliamentary system, whereas, in the presidential system, the president or the governor is the chief executive. You will see that during the electioneering campaign, the party is always supreme but the moment you have chosen your candidate and that candidate wins, the party goes to the background.
In the parliamentary system, the party is always there to decide for
you. But in a presidential system, you must all agree; it is not like, once you are the president, the governor or local government chairman, you run government as your private business. I don’t believe that they are mutually exclusive. In fact, they are very much inclusive. And I am in a favour of the continuation of the presidential system.
In a country like our own, I think we need a presidential system; a
strong leader; a visionary leader but if you look at the parliamentary system, it is more of the party. My own little experience in politics, particularly in the area of consensus building, is that you discover in the end that people are fighting for themselves and not for the masses. So when you are saying parliamentary system, everybody comes with his own demand which may not necessarily be in congruence with that of the masses. So, I still believe that, understandably, presidential system is preferable, understandably because I am currently participating in this presidential system but I never participated in the parliamentary system.
Some people are even saying that `don’t you need a very strong leader in order to make a difference?’ From my own little experience, you need a strong leader; a leader that has the vision and the intellect to visualize, as well as the courage to implement. Unless you have such a leader, it will be very difficult to make a difference. I honestly believe that a leader will take people to where they want to go whereas a great leader will take people to where they ought to be.
Leadership is not about Father Christmas; it is not about missionary work; it is about having a vision of how you want a place to be; how you want your people to develop and to find ways and means of galvanizing them and making them to buy into your vision and then guide them towards the Promised Land. I very much favour strong leadership. I believe that a country like Nigeria needs a strong leader in order to change the country for better because by our nature, we are used to this element of impunity where you do what you like. Even when you preach, you practice something different from what you preach to your followers.
And in Nigeria, we don’t challenge our leaders enough; we don’t ask them questions. For any country to make progress, we need to do things right. Same Nigerians who will not break the law abroad find it difficult to obey the law here. And what does that mean? It takes a strong mind to enforce the law because before you know what is happening, people will start begging. So I think we need people who can pilot the ship strongly, in order for us to get to our destination. Above all, you must be God-fearing and be fair to others. It is really a balancing act like the story of the tortoise beating his wife, telling people that she misbehaved and continued to beat her until people were accusing him of wanting to kill the wife. The point is that you must balance it.
For instance, when we started educating the people that they must leave the road and not trade on the streets, some people were condemning our action. Ironically, the same people have been calling us to say, `Governor, why are you allowing them (the traders) to go back to the street?’. I ask them if they weren’t the same people complaining before and they say that now, they can see what we were doing and appreciating us. What I am promising you is that if we don’t achieve anything else, we will make sure that Oyo State becomes very clean and environmental-friendly; a state that we shall be proud of. I can assure you of that.
Relationship with former Governor Rasheed Ladoja
The funniest thing about politics is that even your twin brother will disagree with you, especially when you are looking for the same position. The fact is that former Governor Ladoja is my egbon(elderly one); he is older than me; he is my cousin and I respect him a lot. We have a good relationship. Recently, one of his daughters got married and I was there. I sat next to him and we were eating and drinking together.Like anybody, if your father wants to take your wife, you will fight. So, if we are looking for the same position, we must definitely fight.
Let me tell you however that most of the things they are ascribing to former Governor Ladoja, he is not the one doing them. There are some political mercenaries with him; they work with every governor and once they work with you and you are no longer the governor, they go to the next person. Some of them will say `can I be writing for you?’ `Can I be abusing people for you?’ They are political jobbers. You (journalists) are lucky you have jobs that you are doing. Some of them don’t have jobs; so they must look for job desperately and that is fighting for their principals. If I give them job tomorrow, they will also work for me and abuse people on my behalf.
So I don’t think it is Senator Ladoja in particular that has problem but he has his own people who can only make money by abusing us; by fighting; by cursing. How many times have you seen Senator Ladoja coming on stage to abuse me? He will never do that. It is all politics, and I think gradually those ones too will realize that what we are doing here is politics of development; politics of intellect and not of lying, rumour mongering, name calling and character assassination. The moment they tell lie against us, we debunk the lie and you will see that gradually, they will go down. There was a time they started condemning the bar we put at the footage of the Mokola flyover but when we told them that in
Lagos, New York and Washington, their flyovers have bars, they kept quiet. One day, they went to the flyover at night and they took something to cut the bar and it fell down the following day. You will see that the more they play this pedestrian politics and we don’t play it with them, the more they change their tactics. So with Senator Ladoja, I have a good relationship and I have no fear about him. If he wants to run (governorship), we will meet on the field. We are ready for him.
Managing NURTW’s excesses
Members of NURTW are Nigerians like you and I. They are decent people but some politicians are using them. But once we don’t interfere with what they are doing, it is not my business to know who their chairman or leaders are. So, what we have done is that we brought in our own buses and we will bring more so that when they misbehave, we will just be using our buses and you know that our prices are cheaper than their own. So they know that, and they are behaving. However, when you see any NURTW member engaging in violence, go and check; the politicians are behind it. It is either the government of the day or the opposition. And you know, election is coming and I am already hearing that they are grouping; that they are now ganging up to say they want to cause trouble in Oyo State. Let us just pray that they don’t start it, if they start it, we will deal with them. We will get those behind it and we will tell the whole world who they are. We are not interested in who becomes their president or their chairman but those politicians who realize that they cannot win any election unless they cause violence and rigging, we want to tell them that those days are gone and that Oyo State people now know better. They will rather continue to enjoy the peace they are already having. So we will not allow anybody who wants to cause violence in this state.
Restoration, transformation and repositioning agenda
This same Oyo State, particularly Ibadan, served as the capital of the then Western Region where the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo administered the whole of the region. Then, we were noted for firsts in many things. We then found out when we came in that all these firsts that we were known for had been destroyed. We found out that even this same Ibadan that would boast of being the intellectual capital of Nigeria, where free education first started, had become a place where our students who sat for the West African School Certificate Examinations came 34th out of the 36 states in Nigeria. It was very disheartening. We then said, look, maybe education was so bad, let’s go to other areas. We went to agriculture, to health and other sectors and we found out that it was the same story. So we then came up with a tripod of development which we said would be based on restoration, transformation and repositioning.
When something had been destroyed, the next thing is to repair it and restore it. Having restored it, we believe the next step is to transform it to the level where it is supposed to be. It is not enough to restore but we must also update it to a level that is contemporary. Then we believe that the next level after reforming is to reposition it to be a preferred state in the comity of states. So we came up with our own tripod and the tripod is based on safety and security of lives and property.
There is nowhere in the world where you can develop without safety, without security and peace. They are foundations for development. It’s like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So we now have this pyramid of safety of lives and property; next to that are social infrastructure, health, education, electricity and water which are all basic requirements of a modern society.
Therefore, we believe that so far, we can say we have done commendably well. In the area of peace and security, we can give ourselves first class. Since we came in, we have been having peace in Oyo State. We are happy with the safety of lives and property and Oyo State is now becoming a preferred designation to investors. When it comes to social infrastructure, we have also done very well.
For instance, for the past 17 years, taps had stopped running in Ibadan metropolis and environs. We did not have water in many places. Two months ago, we ensured that we have water running in our taps. So what we are doing now is changing the rusty pipes. We are also making sure that the new areas are also provided with tap water. Although electricity is essentially federal, we are trying to make a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement with some of these power generating companies to actualize our objective of improving on electricity.
In the area of social infrastructure, we have made an appreciable progress. In health, we have introduced free medical services; we are also refurbishing hospitals, establishing mobile clinics all over the state and providing health services in some of our remote areas across the state. So, in health, I believe we are also doing well. If you also look at the area of physical infrastructure, we are modernizing our roads. We are making sure that our own roads can stand the test of time; we are making sure that any road that we do, we can use it for next 25 years minimum, without worrying about all these disappointments that we have witnessed in the past. Of course, we have also built a flyover at Mokola in Ibadan, the first to be built by any civilian administration in the history of Oyo State. Even though we have people who dreamt about building flyovers, for us, we dreamt about it and we were able to actualize our dream. Besides, virtually all major entries into major cities in Oyo State are being currently dualized , while new roads are being constructed and the existing ones being reconstructed and/or rehabilitated. So I think generally when it comes to restoration, we have restored our pride. Oyo State is now becoming cleaner. We have gone to many foreign countries to sell Oyo State. They usually tell us that we speak good English and that we understand governance; there is integrity in governance; the civil servants are very proud now.
When we first came in, many of the civil servants could not make presentations; they could not make power point presentations. Today, many of them are experts in power point presentations. We have brought professionalism and integrity into the civil service. We are also establishing new things in Oyo State. For instance, we will be introducing e-Learning in our schools. This is part of our transformation agenda and it is an ongoing process.
