Governor Seriake Dickson:
“If you ask me, some people are uncomfortable with the reforms that I have started. Yes. When I started in Bayelsa, the wage bill was N 6 billion, six point something billion naira, my commissioner for finance is there. Now with the steps that we have taken, the wage bills have been dropped down to 4 billion, now what that means was that about 2 billion naira was going into the wrong hands every month and that’s a huge amount of money. I mean that can make people go crazy- treasury officials, accounts, other civil service leadership and some political leaders over the years and some bankers, and so on and so forth.”

I have built more roads and bridges than all governors put together. Roads and bridges that they didn’t build, that they could have built, roads and bridges that they should have finished but they did not, Bayelsa is now safer with greater prosperity but the attitudinal and cultural mindset that I am fighting, that is war. For the public service you must go to work, for the public service, there is no free cash that is one of the values for money, if you are an appointee, it does not mean you should play the richest man in your village or your local government. If you are close to me or whoever you are, you can’t use violence and terror to prosecute a political agenda, if you do so, we arrest you and try you. So am putting myself through the system. These are far reaching changes, when they were voting for me I told them that they were voting for a revolution. But I didn’t think they understood the import of it. So there are a lot of changes that we have introduced and the state is no longer the same, so ordinarily people will react. Also, Bayelsa has no industry and people are now forcing people to be entrepreneurs.

There is no industry- everything bread, water, all comes from neighbouring states and we are now selling the message of self reliance and independence outside government. In the past, everybody wanted to live off government, everybody must be appointed, must earn a livelihood from government, they want to marry, everything is government. That culture must stop and we are making it. There is no issue about not performing, no one will tell you that our governor is not performing, has stolen our money. In Bayelsa, there is a system of transparency. The finance commissioner is here, every month we address the state – this is what has come in, this is how we are spending it. These are fundamental formats. If you are a former chief of staff in government house who used to have one N1 billion every month to play with and now I come and reduced the overhead to N200 million and plough the balance to work, you should know there will be some resistance, but the resistance is a conspiracy, it is not rooted in the people.

That’s why even when the Abuja powerful group undermined us for three years, it couldn’t affect the results of the elections, all their candidates lost. Even look at it from outside: big name, big name and at the end of it, one vote, everybody. So when we have the people behind us, because the people are seeing the school, health centre, roads, referral hospitals which were not there, bridges springing up, they are happy, saying that for the first time, this government is working. The people are with us.

Unless most of these characters retrace and come back, politically speaking, there is no future for APC and the agenda they want to prosecute in Bayelsa.

Q: Some people in Bayelsa are complaining about you…?

A: That is in terms of sharing money?

Q: You spoke about one man one vote; your party has expressed its strong reservation with the appointment of the INEC chair. Now do you share such sentiment? Do you have anxiety or the possibility of the return to the creeks?

A: For the possibility of returning to the creeks, I can’t speak for militants. But Bayelsa central as far as maintenance of national stability and security is concerned. I don’t think there is any imminent return to creeks in that violent sense that we know of it. I have a duty to interact with the federal officials which am doing, to let them know the issues they need to address. I am happy that the president appointed the amnesty coordinator; I believe the programme is still on, we are following developments. If there is any course for me to add my voice, I will be available to do so, that is why I am there, to moderate developments in the interest of our nation.

You asked about INEC, my party has spoken, I have nothing to add other than that the laws and constitution empowers the president to appoint whoever he wants subject to National Assembly screening. The screening process is meant to take care of issues. I think we should all expect the president to appoint people who are credible to advance and deepen our democracy.

Q: Some people are saying you do not spend money the way politicians do that you behave like an Ijebu man with government resources. Even contractors are complaining that apart from not being paid, they are not making enough gains…

The issue raised- money! I also have ijebu blood; there is no doubt about that. My great grandmother was a princess in Ijebu land; I am a descendant of the Fidipote Ruling House in Ijebu Ode. On a serious note, I don’t think there’s much to that, we awarded contracts and suddenly the economic downturn came on, so our inability to meet our contractual obligations is not as a result of governors stinginess’, it is as a result of unavailability of money.

A lot of people think that government has so much money, they say “Ah governor no dey release money, governor don spend the money.” Many people still ask, does the governor have the money, does the state have the money. They don’t ask, and this phenomenon is not limited only to Bayelsa, even federal government contractors are moving out from site. I doubt if any state in Nigeria is pursuing any aggressive fiscal development, we are all owing. States owe their contractors.

A number of states even owe salaries, Bayelsa is not, maybe because of my Ijebu stinginess, Bayelsa does not owe civil servants and we do not owe our pension obligations, so we are current, so we do not even owe WAEC. In Bayelsa we go beyond WAEC. Since I became governor because of the emphasis on education, we pay WAEC, GCE, NECO, JAMB, there’s no state like this, now these are the ways to spend public resources.

The same people talking, their children are overseas on scholarships across the world. Now let me also add, we also owe some of the scholarship obligations which again is not peculiar to the state, even the federal scholars, because we are in a depression, our economy is in a terrible state now, and we have been managing for the last one year. If some political leaders feel that because they political leaders, that I should use the money meant for civil servants and pensions on servicing their greed and their lavish lifestyles, sorry. I think in that sense, Bayelsa needs an Ijebu governor so that we do not owe salaries, primary obligations.

Talking about contracts, we have given out more contracts to Bayelsa indigenes than former governors because of the works we are doing. If we have built schools, 32 schools, secondary with boarding facilities. There was no single school with boarding facility when I took over, and now every state constituency has one. In fact the speaker’s constituency has two because of the population and illiteracy level. We are building more schools, primary schools, teachers training academy, we are building a college of education, schools, schools, schools.