In a chat with the magazine, the Oyo State Chairman, Nigeria Medical Association, NMA, Dr. Olatunji Muyideen Babatunde said that the government over time has failed to adhere to the World Health Organisation, WHO, recommendation of 50 percent budgetary allocation to health as the government fluctuate between five and six percent budgetary allocation to the sector.

He said, “Much has not been done in the area of health. We need political commitment and will to do the right thing. For instance, General Hospital, Adeoyo, Ring Road as we speak is a ghost town, compared to what it used to be during its old glory. It is used to be comparable with the University College Hospital, UCH, in terms of activities, and personnel but now we’ve lost that. But we must commend the incumbent government for the approval of the 100% implementation of Consolidated Medical Salary Scale, CONMESS and Consolidated Health Salary Structure, CONHESS, salary structure which is a kind of motivation. With that medics that have been running away from the state now want to work here because the pay here is comparable to that of elsewhere.”

Continuing, “Better salary structure must be accompanied with right and sufficient equipments to work with and adequate personnel that we don’t have. In a secondary healthcare, or general hospitals, we don’t have more than two or three doctors working there. Before, Ring Road hospital was a good and functional, with about 70 doctors; but now, the over 33 general hospitals in the state don’t have more than 200 doctors. Invariably, we don’t meet the minimum healthcare package to make the hospitals functional.”

The medic disclosed that the union had met with the government to discuss some challenges the sector is facing but would soon hold a summit where stakeholders would comprehensively examine the sector with a view of coming up with proposal to be submitted on how the government can revamp the sector.

For the civil servants, their major anticipation is workers’ welfare, expecting the government to urgently clear the backlog of workers’ salary as well as ensuring that salaries and other entitlements and allowances are paid as at when due.

The Oyo State chairman of Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and Secretary of the state chapter of Nigeria Union of Teachers, NUT, Comrade Waheed Oyejide, in an exclusive interview urged the governor to take serious the position paper already submitted to him after winning his second term election stressing, “We would want to see schools where facilities are modest. We want to see schools in Oyo state where teachers are properly taken care of in terms of their remuneration, where facilities like school libraries are returned as it was like in those days, where the environment will be very serene and inviting and friendly to teachers and students, where students will be seriously involved in academic activities by ways of symposium, quiz competitions, literary and debating society, where parents are fully involved, check their wards in school to know their performances, and providing all the materials and schools returning to its old glory.”

Concluding, “Of course, I want to say that the new administration should look beyond the past and begin to see how the entire state could move forward in the areas of agriculture, industrial and educational sectors. Let us see how best government will run a society that he who goes to work come back and have his food on the table, where a sick person get the best medical care, a society where there will be employment for the youth. We want to see the rejuvenation of the agricultural sector to the extent that our moribund farm settlements would come back to the limelight to generate employment. We want a situation where man will be in the centre of government policy.”

In the agricultural sector, apart from heavy investment to generate employment and provision of interest free loans to farm, the operators of farm settlements want the government to raise the standard of the settlements in terms of building roads, renovating the houses that are near collapse for farmers to have enough houses to live, provide portable water, and good schools as they lament lack of government presence.

Operators and dwellers in the farm settlement in Iddo who specifically demanded for upgrading of the existing primary school to a model school as well as providing a secondary school for them disclose that only one block of the three blocks of classrooms in the school was built by the state government while the others were donated by federal government and an individual respectively.

“Our expectations include the renovations of the houses built by Awolowo so that farmers can have a place to live, construction of the roads in the settlement, building of secondary school and renovation of the existing one and building more classroom blocks. Give us pipe borne water, give us soft loans”, said, Mrs. Elizabeth Oladele, a widow in the settlement.

For the residents of Idi-Ape to Olorunda Aba, they expect that Governor Ajimobi will fulfill his promise almost three years that he would dualise the Idi-Ape to Olorunda Abba road to help resolve the traffic congestion in the area that make motorists to spend hours on end to reach their destinations.

On Friday May 26, 2014, the then commissioner for Works, Mr. Bimbo Kolade revealed to the newsmen in a conference that the road which is expected to be completed within 18 months had been contracted at the cost of N7b adding that sooner than expected the construction would commence. But as at the time of filing this report, there is no sign of government readiness to go ahead with the dualisation.

The road is notorious for awful traffic holdup attributed to the spontaneous increase in the population of the residents with equivalent increase in the vehicles that daily ply the single road which is full of potholes. It is always a herculean task from the back gate of 2nd Mechanised Division on Olorunda Road axis to get to General Gas Bridge in order to link various destinations. According to residents, a ten minute journey can take up to three hours. People of the area who believed that the government had included the cost of the project on the previous budgets wondered if the allocation has not been diverted and want the government to come clear about the current state of the road.

Also, in the area, people of Elewuro called on the government to complete the abandoned road in the area stressing that it is an act of irresponsibility not to tar the road that its drainage has been completed for the past two years. Likewise, the residents of Ologuneru are pleading for the rehabilitation of their roads which are already becoming not motorable and a death trap.

Traders in the major markets in the state appealed to the state government to take the salary of the civil servants serious saying that whenever it default in payment, they hardly have customers to patronize them. A yam seller at Oja’Aba Market said, “Life has been very difficult since government has been oweing its workers. Even those that come to the market ridiculously price our goods which don’t usually do before. Just tell them any price, they pay and everybody is happy.”

Some citizens also want the government to generate its Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, with human face. Specifically, astronomically increasing tenement rate or using tape rule to measure the compound in order to determine ones tenement rate or other levies areseen as anti-democracy. “This is not Lagos. There is no money here. Most landlords manage to build their houses. Many take cooperative loans to build thier houses just to be free from the shylock landlords. It took some people 10 years to build these houses and I think it is wicked for government to now come and say that somebody who has been paying between N1000 and N2000 should now start paying between N70000 and N80000. Government should stop the idea of collecting without giving. Things are already hard, government should not add to it”, a landlord at Orita-Challenge said.

Also, some commercial tricycle operators want to be insulated from members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, NURTW, who collect too much from them saying that per day, they pay about N2000 for reasons which they do not know. One of them said, “I prefer government collecting like N200 naira from us and ensure that NURTW stop collecting money they didn’t work for from us. We even want the government to ban the activities of members of NURTW on the roads. Membership should be made voluntary not compulsory and anybody that want to pay their due should go to their office to pay just like what is obtainable in other association.”