A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and aspirant to the House of Representatives, Prince Dotun Babayemi, speaks with MOSES ALAO on the economic situation in Osun State and defends style of governance. Excerpts:
THE failure of the Osun State government to pay workers for many months has drawn different comments from various quarters, with most people, especially the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), criticising the governor for his failure in strategic planning. What is your view?
I am happy to say that as of today, the issue of salary in the Osun State is being resolved. Already, the workers have begun to get their remuneration. The state has stood out in the past five years under the governorship of Mr Rauf Aregbesola, in terms of qualitative leadership and development. You know that governance is not just about the payment of salaries; it is about the present and the future. And one of the things that Governor Aregbesola did, which is unique, such that the last time we saw something like that was in the 1960s, was to find a balance between the immediate needs of the state and looking forward to making the state a viable one; viable in the sense that it should have a good network of roads connecting the urban and rural centres such that farm produce can be easily transported from the farms to the city centres.
The government’s plan was and still remains that the state would be the food basket and agricultural hub of the South-West, from where agric produce would come and which would allow the state to generate revenues and create employments. To do that, the governor knew that investments needed to be made and when you are making investments, you should be able to look at the incomes, that accrues to you. So in terms of financial prudence, Governor Rauf Aregbesola has been able to achieve that in Osun State. A couple of things have happened to prove this assertion. One, the internally-generated revenue has been raised significantly from around N300 million that he met to around N900 million monthly. And that was achieved without chasing away businesses from the state or putting unnecessary pressure on citizens.
Two, in a scenario where there is a guaranteed income, which is what the federal allocation is, last year the state got about N4.6 billion monthly out which of N3.6 billion was for salaries, and the governor was able to use the remaining resources to execute the plethora of developmental projects currently ongoing in the state in the education, health and infrastructural sectors. These cannot happen without strategic planning. Unfortunately, we saw what happened at the federal level where the drop in oil price and the fact that so much of the revenue that we should have had under the former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration were frittered away or siphoned. Imagine 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day being stolen. Eventually, the income of N4.6 billion was cut down drastically such that there was a month that the state got N1.03 billion; how do you meet a commitment of N4.6 billion in that kind of situation?
So, what is happening in Osun State is not an issue of financial incompetence or lack of planning.
There is the view that the state got into its present precarious situation as a result of the deductions occasioned by the many bank loans obtained by the incumbent government running into billions of naira. How true is that?
At the time this government got into office on November 27, 2010, one of the things it met in place was a scenario where loans that had been taken by previous administrations were all short-term loans and if you look at it, the exposure of government at that time was significant. Salary back then was to the tune of about N2 billion. Meanwhile, there were these short-term loan commitments of his predecessors, which did not agree with his vision.
There were two things that the governor saw, some of which we are beginning to hear about and will begin to see at the federal level. First, the governor wanted to cater to the welfare of the people and second, he knew that without eradicating poverty, governance would be meaningless, because when it comes to the time of elections, people would just be looking for money.
So, when he came in, what he did was to consolidate most of the short-term commitments into long-term loans and exposures. When that was not sufficient to be able to run a welfarist programme and execute his vision for a state that can boast of physical and human development, the government further made plans to secure loans which have since been put to good use. Think about it, 40,000 youths were taken off the streets and given a sense of purpose within two years of the Aregbesola’s government. They began to contribute to the economy and he achieved that with an insignificant expense and the impact on the society was great. There was no family that can say that its life was not positively impacted on, whether through a member who had been sitting at home for four years after graduation, but was employed or through training or agricultural empowerment and so on.
But it is quite easy for some people to just look at the last eight months and make unsavoury comments and jump to baseless conclusions. If you want to see how baseless and distant from reality the comments being made by some of these opposition politicians are, you have to look at the governorship election in August 2014.
Respectfully, I can say that people voted for Aregbesola and the APC because they were not going to risk losing what they have seen him do as governor of the state. You see some of the policies and programmes that have worked well in Osun State are what the Federal Government are now looking for ways to expand and introduce across board.
You talked about how the governor has been able to execute his vision for the physical development of the state. But the view in some quarters is that he tried to do too many projects at the same time and ended up not completing them. It is even said that the road projects embarked upon by the administration might not be completed because of the paucity of funds. Is that not right?
That will not be the case. The projects will be completed. For a person that has vision like our governor, the projects embarked upon were done in phases. Ideally, if the right allocations were coming in, some of the projects would have been completed. But in the absence of that, once we are able to sort out the issue of salary payment, then, the projects would receive immediate attention.
What people keep missing is the fact that Governor Aregbesola is not looking at the state as it is now, but as it should be; that is very critical and it is rare to see people with that kind of vision who look beyond the here and now. If you are conversant with the state, Osogbo today is not what it used to be. At the time he started, I can remember the opposition crying wolf that the governor was taking people off the road. But now, when you enter Osogbo, it feels and looks like the capital of a state. The people of Osun State now have pride in the achievements and changes achieved in some of the key cities.
Now, when you talk about roads, a lot of rural roads have been completed. About 80 per cent of the rural roads embarked upon have been done and what was the objective of starting with the rural roads? It is to get farm produce out easily and encourage agriculture. This is not about being political; I am an indigene of the state and I can tell you that there is a huge difference between now and before. A lot of people are coming from outside the state and the country now to take active part in the development of the state because of what they have seen this governor do. There are several programmes that the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the United Nations Education and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO) are getting involved in in Osun State.
You were an aspirant for the House of Representatives, but that aspiration did not materialise. Does it mean the people should look out for you again in the not-too-distant future?
One of the things that attracted me to the political sphere in the first place was the type of politics and governance going on in Osun State. I can say that I run a successful business both in Nigeria and abroad, employing about 17,000 people.
So, running for the House of Representatives is not going to have any significant financial impact. It is because I believe in the style of governance of Governor Aregbesola and his kind of politics that focuses on the welfare of the people that I was drawn towards the development of the state. In the state today, I have personally employed over 2,000 people.
So, politics translates into service for me. The development of the state currently going on under Governor Aregbesola drew me to want to represent my people in the House and into the politics of the APC and I believe that this is the party that will take Nigeria out of the quagmire and put it on the path to the Promised Land.