Kogi Polls: I am not Afraid of Audu, Says Wada

We are building a 500 housing estate here in Lokoja, about 282 of them are at the roofing stage which we hope to complete in the next three or four months. We are doing that in three sites. We just build the most modern vocational training centre in cooperation with Korean Development Agency. It is going to train young people in IT, welding, mechanical engineering, automobile engineering, and diagnostic equipment for these modern vehicles that you have now. It is a very modern centre; we just commissioned it about a month and half ago. We have water projects all over, we have at least over 300 boreholes across various communities in the State, we have brought electricity to many towns and villages. We are doing water projects in all the major towns of the State. Some of them were done 20 years ago and we are doing total rehabilitation and refurbishing and new ones in those places. We have built five zonal hospitals; we are building University Teaching Hospital as a tertiary facility at Kogi State University at Ayingba. We have four floors, very modern diagnostic centre at our Specialist hospital here, it is almost completed. It is right by the roadside. We got most of the equipment on ground already.

Our tertiary institutions- four of them, they have full accreditation in most of their programmes. Education is growing in our state, medical services are growing, and we are promoting agriculture. I believe that on our record, we have done a lot. But don’t expect opposition to praise us, because if they praise us, they have no business coming to compete. If you go to Abuja, we are building an 11-storey Kogi House on a land that Kogi has had for about 20 years. We took the bull by the horn and the building is now at the 8th floor. We started it about six months ago. Our Lodge at Asokoro was not touched for 20 years, but it has been redesigned, been rebuilt, restructured, we have added 20 room quarters for our security staff and officials of our government that go to Abuja. Our Liaison office in Lagos was not usable when I came; we are converting it to more modern and useful property that will generate revenue for the state. The idea of the Abuja building is not just a symbol of our state. It will generate revenue for us. We all know the value of property in the Central Business District of Abuja. We are making this investment for the future of the state- to position us to survive as a state without depending much on federal allocation.

What efforts are you making to rid the state of the so called ghost workers?
With regards to ghost workers, before I came in, the preceding administration had done some screening of the workers. I met the fallout of the some complaints and all that, which we try to address. We also did some screening; we make sure that every worker has an identity card. Then, we did another level of screening of our workers- show your certificates, letters of appointment, your working history in the state and all that. So, to the best of our ability, we have tried to tidy the payroll. But it is dynamic thing. Whenever there are opportunities for leakages, human beings try to exploit it. So, it is a continuous engagement. Periodically, we carry out assessments. There is one programme we are doing now which is unit by unit. We started with pensions to try and determine the genuineness of our pension payroll and again, we made some discoveries that have helped us to tighten that area and we are moving to another department or agency. We will do it sector by sector like that because of the financial challenges that we are facing, these are the things we are doing continuously to improve the integrity of our payroll.

What would you say are your major challenges as the governor of the state?
The challenge is financial. I wish I had more money to do a lot more for this state. How I wish that we have a lot more industries, employing a lot of people, particularly young people who graduate from school and for three, four years, they don’t have jobs. It is the most painful thing to parents because our culture is by the time you go to school; you become something in life to help your parents in their old age. That is the way our society has been looking after itself.

Where do you stand on the issue of campaign for power shift going on in the state now?
I believe in power shift. We will call it power rotation now, not shift. That’s the new terminology people have invented for it. I believe the state belongs to all of us and every citizen has a right to lead the state. But for me, it is not an issue which one man can drive. I can show leadership by expressing my views and supporting all endeavours towards actualizing it. But it requires continuous engagements of our stakeholders, our political leaders, our youths, our women- all the three stakeholders in the three senatorial zones must engage themselves, work out the modalities – is it a clockwise rotation, is it anti clock wise, who should come first and who should also consider the interests of even the minorities within the major tribes in our states. And all these issues need to be carefully discussed over time. We shouldn’t bring it up only when we are running for governorship elections. Let’s start now and works towards 2019 for example. So, that’s my own take on that. I support it, but not let’s leave it till somebody is running for governorship, then you start using tribal sentiments to whip up people’s support. No, let’s agree, because no zone can win alone, you need the other zones.

Kogi State used to be known for political violence, but that seems to have reduced now?
Right from the time of campaign, my body language was quite clear that I do not support violence; that no human being’s life should be sacrificed for anybody’s political ambition and that politics should not be a do or die affair where we killed ourselves to achieve our political expressions. I believe very strongly that power comes from God and also, only one person can occupy this position at a time. With that body language of zero tolerance for violence, people saw that there were no sacred cows, I supported the security agencies and supported them to see that people do not get away with crime, they will be punished and gently, people got to see that we will not tolerate violence, and the environment is a bit calmer now. It is a continuous effort; we are already strategising against the coming election. Every Tuesday, we have the Security Council meeting to plan in advance and strategise.

With the cooperation of the citizens, we carry out periodic security awareness seminars in various local governments to get people to know that if one person is insecure, all of us are insecure. So, we must help the security agencies with information. There was a time we had this incident of fundamentalist activities and we made a decision that anybody who rents house to people must know who he or she is renting the house to because if we find out the person is an insurgent or a criminal, we will knock down the house. And this happened in places where we have evidence and when people saw purposeful commitment on the part of government, most of our citizens cooperated.