Prince Gboyega Famodun is the Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Osun State. In this interview, Famodun analyses what the party has achieved under the governorship of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and challenges facing the state administration and the party. Excerpts:
How would you describe the performance of Governor Rauf Aregbesola and your party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), in the running of Osun State?
We thank God for what we have been able to do achieve for the people in the past six years. It has been monumental in the annals of the 26 years of existence of the state. When the party came in, we had programmes centred basically on youth empowerment and emancipation, to banish poverty, hunger, and making life abundantly peaceful and prosperous for the people of the state. By all standards of judgement, I think we have performed excellently well, especially when you juxtapose our achievements with the meagre resources at the disposal of the government, and also in relation with other states that were created with Osun in 1991. We have ensured that Osun remains in the front burner of regional and national news for pacesetting, path finding and trail blazing.
Apparently, I am not judging myself or our government, but we have performed well in every aspect of governance, viz a viz education, infrastructure development, securing lives and property, ensuring communal peace and harmony, rural development and electrification, women empowerment, job creation and youth empowerment, environmental beautification, reducing maternal and infant mortality, agriculture, regional integration, controlling an annual reoccurring flooding, urban renewal programmes etc.
The government has secured banks against security threat, it has overcome the challenge due to the proactive measures of Governor Rauf Aregbesola. The introduction of the Osun Youths Empowerment Scheme (OYES) gave our youths an opportunity of engagement, reorientation and training. The youths have known that jobs are not served automatically after graduation. You have to be ready to think properly and engage yourself without relying on government or anybody for employment. The OYES scheme has been largely successful in Osun, emulated and copied by some states and was consequently recognized by international bodies as a model both within and outside the shores of Nigeria. We have engaged over 40, 000 youths and we have re-orientated them and they are serving good purpose for the people of the state. Apart from this, there’s a fraction of the OYES scheme that is responsible for cleaning and making sure our environments are clean, we have O’Clean programme that has also engaged and employed several hundreds of people. Apart from this, our ambulances service programme across the state is doing wonders. Over 15,000 lives have been saved through this initiative.
It seems the delay in payment of salary and pension robbed off on the programmes you enumerated for the governor?
That is not true. We value our workers so much and we are doing all within our reach to meet our financial obligations. Payment of salaries to workers is a very important aspect of governance because those working for government are significant to the success of every administration. They are more or less the engine room of government created to implement its policies. However, nobody remembers any government for paying salaries of her workers; people will always remember you for the legacies, giant strides and monumental changes you have impacted on the citizens.
Are you saying the government concentrates on capital projects at the expense of civil servants?
No, I do not mean that and please don’t misinterpret my analysis, and the phrase “legacies and monumental changes” as used is not limited to capital projects alone. I started by accepting the basic truth of how irreplaceable and important the public workforce is to our and every administration. Though, capital projects are essential because they are physical things that people will continue to see for years after leaving office; but the impact on the knowledge and psyche of the people of the state, making sure they are thinking in the right direction that will be helpful to governance is also very important.
The governor is accused of taking huge loans that is affecting the state. How has the state been surviving the hard times?
Let me tell you the bitter truth of the situation: in Nigeria today, thank God for the timely intervention of the APC government led by President Muhammadu Buhari, almost all the states are in financial mess of decreasing statutory grant from the centre. But when President Buhari assumed office, he decided to give a life line or soft loan to the states. The CBN asked the states to package all the loans of the state, the one we inherited and the one we obtained by ourselves into a bond, and that one goes to the federation account where it will be deducted on monthly basis from the account of the state. Unfortunately, some states did not do so, they did not package their loans as CBN directed. Those are the states that receive fairly buoyant allocation, but when it got to their states, they are having issues with commercial banks on loans deducted at the end of the day, they also have nothing on ground to disburse. Those states are just like us who packaged all our loans portfolio into the CBN and when they make necessary deduction, at times when the general allocation is low, our account goes into minus. We have been operating like this for some time, but due to the proactive nature of the governor, we have been able to take care of the civil servants. Whatever we receive from the Federal Government, we add our IGR to it and we share it. For some months in 2016, we were paying as low as 50 per cent to some cadres in civil service, some get full salary depending on the level you fall into. But with understanding and good financial engineering, we have been able to improve the situation, we are on top of it now and we hope to get out of it as soon as possible.
APC members and supporters believe the party would still win future elections in spite of the controversies surrounding the Aregbesola’s administration. How would you react to this? Going by what we have done, accessing and judging the government by the services it has rendered in six years, looking back to the pitiable condition we met Osun and focusing on the pathway and roadmap of greatness we are plying presently as designed by the manifesto and coordinated programmes of our party, we are confident that APC will win 2018 election. People know that the best thing that has ever happened in Osun is Aregbesola and his government. So, anybody who has a thinking in that direction will know that we should continue in government because the people of this state are getting to know what we are doing. Unlike in the past when they were misinformed by very few influential section of the society that government must be business as usual, the people are getting to know better.
There are insinuations that as the chairman, you always do the bidding of the governor, having pocketed the party. How do you react to this? I don’t know the governor’s bid, I only know that the governor and I discuss almost on daily basis the issues concerning the development of the state. Must I be fighting the governor on all issues?
The governor takes me into confidence in most of the things he wants to do. If they accused me of being on the same page with the governor on good things, on the development of Osun, I welcome it. If it is an offence for working with the governor in the right direction of Osun, then I plead guilty as charged. I have no regrets whatsoever cooperating with the governor as it is this relationship triggered successes we have been discussing.
Some people suggested that the governor should drop free school uniform, free school feeding and commercialize Opon Imo etc, to save money. Do you agree?
Every government has a way of rendering free service to her citizenry, ours was fashioned towards the education sector and this is strategic. Our party believes that an educated child is a liberated soul that will bring positive changes to the society someday.
As long as this government exists, we would give free school uniforms to our new pupils, free Opon Imo to senior secondary school students and other educational materials to facilitate their learning process. All these suggestions that tend to attack feeding in school, OYES and other social programme of the government are not welcomed and can’t be implemented. If you observe, we are the only government that has been able to sustain the free school feeding programme because it is important to us, it has reduced drastically the rate of illiteracy level among children of school age, boosted primary education enrolment with Osun having the highest number in Nigeria going by NBS figures, created employment opportunities for our women who are caterers thereby rejuvenating the economic parameters of the state. We are able to survive because the governor made some political sacrifices. Some of your party members are not happy for non appointment of commissioners, SAs, boards, after two years of Aregbesola’s second term. Don’t you feel this will affect the interest of the people? I want to thank the APC members generally for bearing with us with understanding and maturity. It is not an easy thing for us as political party, at least you need full party members to be on board to work for government and have some patronages from the government. But we made several political appointments when things were okay, but when there is economic downturn, we have to make the sacrifice with understanding.
That this is what is required for us to survive as a party now and we have to survive as party members and as a family. So we have been able to understand the government by making sure that we make this sacrifice, we are now on top of the situation and very soon the governor will be inviting and calling people into government, we would have board members to manage our parastatals and agencies. We are begging civil servants to continue bear with us because we have not been paying their salaries of some of them in full for sometimes now,t here is nothing you can do when you are financially limited and incapacitated.