Governor Rauf Aregbesola, in this interview with a group of journalists (including JAMIU YISA) at the state’s Government House, speaks on his giant strides in the western Nigerian state of Osun.

The Osun State governorship election is just a few weeks away. How prepared are you?

Long before I assumed this office, I prepared so well for the office in a way that, going by the normal run, I should not be working as hard as I’m working now for re-election. A commentator said something to the effect that I am one of the politicians that, from day one, began my campaign. From the day I entered this office, I started my campaign.

In Nigeria today, how many governors walk the streets with their citizens? I have been doing that since the first month in office. How many governors created interactive fora in Nigeria before me? There is none. I was the first governor to devote close to 10 hours of continuous engagement on a quarterly basis with the citizens.

The people ask any question in a no hold barred atmosphere. The Ogbeni Till Day Break is a worldwide engagement because we take feedbacks from social media.

Governor Rauf Aregbesola

In what ways has your administration been able to make the people feel the impact of government?

Hardly would you find a community in this state that we have not touched in terms of physical and social services. This is the first government that will say that there is no household; be it PDP, be it APC and others that our programmes have not reached. There is none!

I feed 300,000 pupils every school day at the cost of N3.6 billion a year. I have been doing it since 2012 and I have spent N7.2 billion on that. You can go to the schools by yourself and assess what the children are eating to be sure whether it is worth what we are saying or not.

Long before we commenced the feeding arrangement, we empowered poultry farmers to produce poultry products so that the chicken and eggs the children consume are all sourced from them and that is the way they paid back to us because we are going to buy from them. The students consume 15,000 whole chickens every week and it is served twice. They consume 300,000 eggs every week, one egg a week. They consume 400 tons of fish every week. They consume 35 cattle every week. We gave close to N600 million to the poultry farmers and also the fish farmers.

The only people we buy from now are the cattle rearers. We had challenge with eggs supply because the totality of the eggs produced in Osun cannot cope with our demands, so we go to Kwara and Oyo States to make it up and we pick the real foods in the markets. The women, 3,007 of them who cook the meals to serve the students take money from the bank. We gave the women a seed capital to set up themselves and start. The bank pays them for the numbers of pupils they feed and the bank comes to us for settlement. With that, we have been getting a value to a large extent for the money we spend. They are fed that way every school day.

Also, tens of thousands are equally engaged in providing different items. From this alone, close to one million people are directly impacted from just one programme, O’meal.

We have the second batch of O’YES cadets, the first batch of 20,000 have gone, the second batch of 20,000 is on and they are from homes. They work two or three days a week and they have the entire days of the week left for them to see what they can do with their hands and earn a living because they are taught entrepreneurial training, but they earn N10,000 monthly as cadets.

On this scheme alone, this administration has spent N9 billion. I tell people what this type of scheme means for national government. You can’t say I don’t have 18 friends who I can give half a billion naira contract to, whether they do it or not, I would have still given it.

But the maximum amount of that investment that will stay here will be less than 50 per cent. Yes, you will have the project here but there would still be capital flight because we are talking about direct impact on the economy.

O’YES has changed the paradigm; 100 per cent of that N9 billion is in this economy. The programme has huge economic benefit to the state. You have in that scheme a directly injected N9 billion to the economy that has no means of going out because a man earning N10,000, unless you promised to double his investment, has no business travelling to Ibadan with that N10,000 if it is not going to yield anything more, he won’t go to Ibadan. Every bit of the money is better spent here.

Every O’YES cadet has a smart card and the issue of anyone handling or tampering with their money does not arise. We are one of the few governments that developed a meaningful programme for elderly citizens’ care. We are not into a blanket social welfare scheme for the elderly, we have a package that did an extensive survey of citizens that are 65 years and above – we have them in our database. We identified those among them that are without any support. That is the first time any government will do so in Nigeria. We engaged a consultant, who is a professor of Gerontology in OAU, Ife. He developed the programme they used and without sentiment or parochialism, they got elderly citizens that lack support, we called them critically vulnerable people who are aged and have nobody to care for them.

If we did not discover them, nobody would have known such people existed in Nigeria because they are waiting to die because they lack everything. We identified 1,800 of such people statewide. The selection was purely based on their conditions, no primodial sentiment. We didn’t do the selection anyway, Professor Ogunbameru of OAU administered everything, gave us the list and the addresses and we have been giving them N10, 000 monthly since 2012.

What is the relationship like between your administration, the teachers, civil servants, okada riders and the students?