Governor Theodore Orji of Abia explains how the state was rescued from the clutches of political godfathers, whose greed ran it aground Can you share with us what went through your mind when you were elected governor while in detention in 2007? What happened to me (my detention by the EFCC) was a clear sign of what God wanted to do with me in Abia State. I was incarcerated for three months when the election was held. All the while, I didn’t know that God was panel-beating me for the job that I was going to do in Abia State. Some people didn’t realise this, while others did. People who are conversant with history will know how people who experienced a similar incident eventually achieved greatness. My experience was historical because greatness doesn’t come without some sacrifice. From the moment I won that election, I knew I had a job to do in Abia State. Upon my release from detention, the first fight I waged was to remove Abia’s face from idolatory and return it to God. I knew the first thing to do was to seek divine intervention so that things would work out well for us. It was the first challenge we faced and it was not an easy thing to overcome. I combined the work of a politician and a missionary and God helped us to succeed. That marked the beginning of our success. We pleased God and He, in turn, was pleased with us. With that, God said: ‘Yes, these are my people.’ And that is why Abia State is worthy of her appellation as ‘God’s Own State’. Having succeeded in that, we started fighting other ills. [caption id="attachment_10529" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Governor Theodore Orji[/caption] Apart from your initial battle to free the state from the ills that hampered its growth, how has the journey generally been as governor in the last seven years? The journey has been rough; we cannot say it has been smooth because no politician who is serious about making a change can have a smooth sail in office. Besides, change is a difficult process. It has been rough, no doubt. I am saying this in the sense that Abia as a young state lacked many essential things, particularly basic development that could have made it a proper state. Apart from that, we faced other challenges like insecurity, lack of infrastructure, psychological as well as an under- achieving economy. The problems were overwhelming because there was no foundation on which we could develop the state. We took off first by kick-starting a transformative process. It was a process of transforming from the gloom the state had suffered in the recent past to the prosperity it currently enjoys and that is why projects executed by this administration are dubbed legacy projects. We are determined to leave worthy legacies that will be remembered and appreciated by everyone, and even by generations yet unborn. If when I came on board, we had a comfortable government house, I would have considered using the money we spent on building a new one on other projects. If when I came on board, we had a conference centre befitting of our government and our people or a secretariat for the civil servants, who are the engine room of the government, I could have moved on to the other things we lacked. But there was none when we came in. Our civil servants were scattered all around the state, even in rented apartments. The consequence of such anomaly was lack of effective coordination. But that has become a thing of the past. We have built a new secretariat, where the various ministries are housed and, now, there is proper organisation and coordination for efficient, effective and seamless service delivery. Equally, before our administration, the civil servants were disenchanted with the system because their allowances were neither paid as and when due neither was their capacity enhanced. We have corrected that and given them a new lease of life and that is why the civil servants are at peace with the government, which has brought about industrial harmony. Would you believe that until we came into government, there was no centre where renal diseases could be diagnosed in the state? But this government has built a state- of-the art diagnostic centre, which has given us a comparative advantage in the South-east and above other regions where there is none. We acquired the property and installed the equipment. Today, Abia can also boast of state-of-the-art dialysis and eye centres fully equipped. We have also built as many hospitals as could tend to the health challenges of our people. Since we didn’t meet primary health centres on ground, particularly in the rural areas, we decided to face that squarely and currently, our administration has built 710 health centres across the state. Although, those were the initial challenges our government faced, the worst of all was insecurity. We inherited insecurity, particularly armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom, and that hampered progress and development of the state in a big way. One of such ways was that contractors couldn’t work and people were unhappy and lived in fear. It gave us sleepless nights, but we faced and overcame it. By overcoming insecurity, we overcame other knotty challenges and what we are doing now is to build on the progresses we have recorded. In the address you gave while you were being sworn in for second term, you described your re-election as a call to finish the “truncated” assignments of your first term. We know that there are challenges implicit in that statement. Please explain? They were the same challenges I said we faced earlier on. Aside that, I equally faced the problem of political godfatherism of the worst order. It is nice if one has a godfather, who can guide one very well. But if you have a godfather, who intimidates and wants to strangulate you, you will to have run away before you are strangulated. We needed to overcome that in order to move the state forward and that was the truncation I spoke about. So, we had to extricate ourselves from that godfather and that has brought about progress in the state. You have painted a grotesque picture of the defective governance under the immediate past administration in which you served as chief of staff. Was it for want of quality advice from people that the government failed or what? We did offer suggestions and advice to the government, as our offices demanded. Anyone who has been in government will appreciate what it means to be in one. The former governor (Orji Uzor Kalu) appointed me to do a job, which I did to the best of my ability. It is one thing to offer suggestion as to how things could be better, it is another for the chief executive to either take or reject it. As a chief of staff, you are not in a position to implement your own policies; you don’t even initiate policies without clearance. My own schedule of duty did not involve making policies because there were commissioners to do that. As a chief of staff, I was just there as an appointee of government to offer suggestions regarding my schedule of duty. My function was a little limited to the Government House. Yes, I was a chief of staff and member of that government, but now, that I am in charge, I am able to correct those mistakes made by my predecessors and for which the advice we gave were reject ed. Those who are not happy about what we are doing now are the people who will want the mistake to continue or for the state to be in confusion. I am able to effect the changes and correct the ills because I don’t need to take directives from anyone. If as a governor, I have to give any directive to any member of the government, it is one that is geared towards achieving a positive objective for the good of( the people. As a chief of staff, it was impossible for me to do the things I am doing now. In the past, it looked as though the Abia people were impervious to the anomalies of the past government and were equally nonchalant about many things, including their usually dirty environment. But the story seemed to have changed with the state wearing a new and clean look. How did you achieve this attitudinal change in the people? The first thing was our determination to make a drastic change to the problem that stared us in the face. The second is having the resources to drive that change. Though we don’t still have enough financial power, we have been able to manage the meagre resources so prudently to make an impact in the lives of our people. People who have been to Abia State before now, particularly those who may have visited Aba, would testify to the usually mounting refuse which would always roll-over to the Aba-Owerri Road, thereby causing discomfort to road users and people who walked past the dumps. Osisioma-Aba-Owerri Road was also synonymous with storey-high refuse dump. But all that happened during the last dispensation. Today, we have cleared the cites and relocated the dump and Aba is looking neater now. We have re-engineered Abia State Environ- mental Protection Agency, ASEPA, by providing new equipment. We have equally brought in experts to take( care of the refuse and that effort is working well for us. We have engaged contractors, who have studied the map of Aba and have opened up the drains so that there can be free flow of water. The engineers are working on the road network and based on the government intervention, it has become difficult for Aba people to dump refuse in the open drainages. That was why there was no serious flooding during the last rainy season. We could achieve that because water now finds its proper passage into the Aba River. Our effort at making the city safe and clean is a restorative one and the status of Aba has changed from what it used to be. Even investors who left the state have begun to return, especially those who left due to kidnapping and lawlessness by miscreants. Before now, prominent Abia politicians who were at loggerheads with the past administration stayed away. Nowadays, many of them have openly identified with your government. What was your offering to have them in the same boat with you? Like I said earlier, one of the things we have had to do is changing the psyche of the people. Truly, many people, before now, were not interested in the governance of the state, especially our critical stakeholders. They were either living in Abuja or Lagos and were not interested in what was going on in the state because they were dissatisfied with the government of that time. Despite their absence from the state, they didn’t keep quiet about the happenings in Abia. They were not doing that just to paint the state bad, but to draw attention to what was going on. Unfortunately, that affected the psyche of our people and they didn’t see anything good in Abia. So, when we came on board, we began to sensitise the people to the new government. We began to assure them that we are a caring and participatory government. We assured them, also, that ours is a government that would galvanise ideas from the public with a view to moving the state forward. Once we started showing them that their opinions and ideas mattered; calling them together for consultations and intimating them about government policies and programmes, they began to have confidence in their government. –Excerpts from an interview published in TheNEWS in May 2014