Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan Residents of Oyo State place their demands before their governor, Senator Abiola Ajimobi On Saturday May 29, 2015, Senator Abiola Ajimobi was sworn-in as the governor of Oyo State for a second term in office. With that, he became the first governor to serve for two terms in the history of the state, though, his victory has been challenged by Senator Rasheed Ladoja, erstwhile governor of the state and his strongest opposition in the last governorship election at the Oyo State Governorship Election Tribunal holding at Iyaganku Area of Ibadan. In his inaugural speech, Ajimobi promised that he would work assiduously for the change the residents are yearning for, stressing that: “One thing I assure you all is that I will be the governor of all; the governor of my friends and foes. I will offer my shoulders to lean on in time of your sorrow and my palm for a ‘high-five’ in your moments of exciting happiness. I will care for the vulnerable in our state, protect those afflicted by existential hazards and misfortune and bring smiles to the faces of those hit by the harsh sun of the time.” On the basis of this promise, various groups in the state have started coming up with demands that would make their lives better, short of which, according to them, would earn the governor a poor scorecard by the year 2019 when his administration will end. The stakeholders include people in the education, health, and the agricultural sectors, farmers, market operators, and business owners. Residents also appealed to the Oyo State House of Assembly not to collaborate with the executive to make laws that are inimical to the wellbeing of the people. They warned the legislature to desist from passing bills that will give room to over-taxing the masses. In the education sector, stakeholders expressed dismay over the state of education in Oyo State, saying that over the years the standard keeps nose-diving because the government is not giving the right attention to the sector. Ajimobi’s first term in office received knocks for under-funding the sector, leading to poor infrastructure, lack of science laboratories, inadequate classrooms and furniture. This led to over-crowded classes with up to 80 students, some sitting on the floor to receive lectures and insufficient academic and non-academic staff. At Methodist Grammar School, Bodija and Bashorun Ojoo High School, between 50 and 80 students were found occupying a classroom while at N. O. Idowu at Olorunda-Aba, most of the classroom blocks are dilapidated, while all science laboratories were in terrible shape. [caption id="attachment_27361" align="aligncenter" width="155"] •Senator Abiola Ajimobi[/caption] A parent at Ashi Area of Ibadan, Mr. Babatunde Kayode, opined that the current government in the state is not serious about education. He said: “Oyo state government is not giving enough attention to education, and students are the ones suffering for this. They are only paying lip service to education. Schools lack chairs and tables for students, and that is why most students sit on the floor. During Ladoja’s administration, it was 30 students per class but now it is over 80 students per class. Teachers are not enough. As a matter of urgency, government should see to it that the school environment is conducive for learning just like what we have in states like Ondo, Osun, Edo and Ogun with model schools”. A co-education worker in the Ministry of Education painted a gory picture of the state of schools in the state: “I will not deceive you. Schools don’t have enough teachers. It is the PTA that is helping. For instance, Wesley College, Elekuro, Ibadan has 13 permanent teachers and PTA teachers are over 43, while NYSC members are over 50. Government should stop deceiving people that the school is free. What makes it free when they are not providing textbooks, infrastructure and transportation for the students? So, my expectation is that this government should fix education by providing all the necessities”. Private schools operators decried the multiple taxes and levies they are subjected to as well as the harmonization of their schools’ calendar with the public schools. They enjoined the government to have the interest of students and operators of private schools at heart when formulating policies in this dispensation. A prominent proprietor who did not want his name mentioned said, “Oyo State Government under this dispensation does not see us as partners, only as income generators. Standard private schools in the state pay between N2m to N3m per annum for various levies. Apart from a yearly N100,000, we pay exorbitant emission and environmental taxes when we are not manufacturing companies. We pay property tax, advert tax, mobile bus tax, and all sorts of rubbish taxes and levies. Apart from taking from us, there is no benefit that we get from the government. We construct roads that lead to our schools, we do the drainage, we generate electricity through heavy generators that consume several litres of diesel, we provide water, we provide the security; name it, we provide it.” “The government is trying its best to destroy private schools as it has destroyed public schools. They pay examination fees for students in public schools but tax students in private school as if they are international students. It is even so sad that they are using Federal Road Safety Corps to make money from us. Any school bus that is not painted yellow is arrested by the FRSC and forced to pay heavily. It will go a long way if this administration stops the multiple taxation and levies, stop the harmonization of the school calendar and allow us to run our schools in the best way so as to let the students who pay through the nose for qualitative education have it. It is not a government business as regards when we want to resume and close in private schools as long as we follow the syllabus in the best international best practices. They should put in place private school-friendly policies so that we can continue to give qualitative education at a reasonable cost,” he concluded. Some residents want transparency in way the incumbent government runs the affairs of government, specifically demanding that apart from the governor and his cabinet members publicly declaring their assets, reduce the salary of political office holder by 50 percent as well as a comprehensive budget proposal rather than budget speech which does not reflect allocations to sectors. “The practice before the advent of this administration is that governors present a comprehensive budget which contains the breakdown of allocations to each sector. This will help to assess the government at the end of the year. But this government doesn’t do that. It presents a budget speech and says that the ministry of finance will later come up with the breakdown. This breakdown has never come to the public domain and it is not even in the website of the state. This to me is fraudulent and does not provide a clear picture of how the government is spending our money. We want to know how Governor Ajimobi is spending our money by letting us know what and what is allocated to which sector”, an economist said. Also, the health sector has great expectations from the government. Various stakeholders described the sector as moribund, needing urgent attention of the government for its bouncing back to a living sector, describing the little equipments and structures in the state owned hospitals as dilapidating and outdated. Lauding the former governor of the state, Otunba Adebayo Alao-Akala for his efforts at renovating and furnishing some health facilities including General Hospital, Yemetu, Ibadan, some health personnel disclosed that the incumbent government in its first term did not really equip the state hospitals to provide the required services needed for the people. 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.”