We want you to speak on industrialisation…
On industrial development, there is no state that can develop by relying only on government business. Presently, as it is, the only business we have in Ekiti State is government business. When you talk about location of industry, one of the factors that affect location of industry is infrastructural development, good roads, something that could attract people and make it look modern. Ease of traffic, etc. That is why what we are doing is building a foundation which I believe we are going to build upon when I become the governor by God’s grace. That one is not a controversy. By faith, I am already the governor in Ekiti State. We have put up a foundation. It is my responsibility to build on it. Industrially, it is my focus to give enabling environment to investors to come. Without power, there is no way we can have effective industrial development. If you want to look at the present power supply system, it is not the type that encourages industrial development; load shedding, poor voltage profiling etc. I have started looking at issues, some power technology solution, hybrid system. Not necessary solar or wind or hydro, hybrid system that could be brought in using turnover approach in which case government is not going to spend money there but it is going to give enabling environment to private investors that specialize in independent power generation and supply system. Let them come in. We are already in talks with some technology companies. I am already preparing myself. I am not going to wait till I become the governor before doing all these. I have started working.
Here we produce a lot of yam and plantain and yet most of these things get wasted because we don’t have facilities to preserve them. Why can’t we convert them to other usable forms? It is not expensive to establish yam flower industry, cassava mill. Let us start from somewhere. We are not saying that we have to have a big industry at a goal. We can start from small cottage industry and gradually we will begin to expand. Rome was not built in a day. Bible says do not despise the little beginnings. Let us start with the small things.
Education is our pride in Ekiti State. Unfortunately when we came in, the standard was low. The performance of our students was so poor that Ekiti State was between 29th and 30th position in WAEC and NECO and it was so terrible. A state where we pride ourselves fountain of knowledge. When we came in Mr. Governor asked me to supervise the ministry of education. Immediately I took off. We discovered two things. First the morale of the teachers was down because of the palpable fear that had been created in them that they would be sacked (that they would be made to write competency test by the Fayemi administration).
So the teachers were no more productive. What do you expect? You don’t expect the students to do well when the teachers are not in their right mind. No teacher can be in his/her right senses if s/he is confronted with many challenges. He cannot think straight. He will not be able to deliver. That was what happened. We did our investigation. First, we have to motivate the teachers rather than harassing and intimidating them. I am a teacher myself. I know what it means to teach. It is a very big sacrifice to be a teacher. If you see a teacher, you are supposed to encourage him. What we now decided to do is that rather than harassing our teachers, we encourage and motivate them. We put up capacity building programme, on the job training, we organise workshop for them rather than all these one day workshop where facilitators will come and go. We make it resident. We involve resident approach to workshop training. Also, we are paying the allowances very well, correctly. We have paid January to August core subjects and allowances.
We stop by August because by September, there could be transfer. Usually we don’t do transfer between January and August so that wherever you are, whatever we are paying you, you are entitled to it. Of course, we don’t pray that any of them will die but if anyone collects money beyond what he is entitled to, there is a system by which such can be deducted from their entitlement. The teachers are now happy that we are paying them in advance. When Fayemi was there, when he was leaving, he owed seven months: core subjects and rural allowances despite the fact that the money released through World Bank support was more than sufficient. We wonder what they did with that money. For now we are paying in advance. We have paid January to August. Some of the teachers have been sent abroad for training. One of the products of our journey abroad is the issue of technical education. When we finish now, I will take you to government technical college and you will see that we don’t tell lies in Ekiti.
At present, we have evolved a programme in which we are transforming our technical schools from just mere technical school into entrepreneurial and vocational skills acquisition centres. That means we have to redesign and remodel the technical college. We have five technical colleges. We are starting with Ado government technical college, Ado. It costs us over 1.9b and the contractor has commenced work. This is a plan ( he shows it to the journalists). These are existing buildings which are nothing to write home about. This is the new plan. The new one will be with modern technical equipment. It is not just building. Part of the contract is equipping the school with modern equipment. What we plan to do is to limit technical education training and the vocational training for the students there between the hours of 8am to 4pm. From 4pm to 7pm, we will open the place up for youths to come in and learn something.
There are so many youths hanging out in garages operating ‘Okada business and things like that. We want to encourage them to acquire a skill. These youths will be certificated after their graduation. It is going to be like six months or one year training. After this government will now stand in as a guarantor in a way of assisting them to look for soft loan that will help them to establish business and we will monitor them to ensure that what they are doing what is right. You will sign an agreement with the state government that if you don’t do this work, we will close down your business.
This is our way of withdrawing youth from motor parks and crime centres and getting them engaged meaningfully. This will go a long way to address youth unemployment in the state. The truth of the matter is that government alone cannot employ youths. This is my idea by the grace of God in this government. This is part of the good things that I brought to this administration. We also discovered our students are failing in national examination because of poor performance in English and Mathematics. To address this, we organise extra classes for students between the hours of 3 to 5 from Monday to Thursday and 9am to 2pm on Saturday. We made it compulsory. We started exchanging teachers. The teacher teaching in school ‘A’ can be taken to school ‘B’. We ensure that the distance is not too far between one school and the other. It is not the same teacher that taught you during the normal hours of school that will teach you in the evening. In the evening classes, we ensure that the pattern does not follow the normal school period. This time around, we ensure that you concentrate on past questions. The government makes available to them a compendium of past question containing 11 subjects for the past six years. The one for this year was past seven years. We give the past question freely to all the students both private and public schools.
We do not discriminate between public and private schools in this respect. Private schools were not excluded. All of them were given freely. That is the secret of our success. That was not done in the last administration apart from harassing teachers in various ways including asking them to write one stupid competence test. Also, we engage science teachers in the practical. Can you believe that a science teacher, a chemistry teacher who has been preparing students for WAEC and NECO confessed that he has lost touch with preparation of chemical solutions? Interestingly, the man was taught and he was very happy. That is just an example. On the job training is very important. Don’t forget that most of our universities have challenges. I am from the university environment. When somebody says he is a governor and all he is referring to is Obama, will Obama come and rule for you in Ekiti? We need home grown solutions. In the university, you discover that when you are doing practical for students, because of lack of facilities and materials, you discover that you have about six students to a particular set of practical materials. Most of the time, it is only one or two that will be prepared to participate.
In advance countries, every student to his or her own set of materials. If a student has been lazy when he was in school and just managed to graduate with lower credit and now manage to get a job. When he was in school, he was always partnering with about five people to do practical using the brain of others to pass. Now tell me, when he becomes a teacher, won’t there be a gap? The best thing you can do once you have employed such a person is to brush him up. You discover him and brush him up. You teach him all over again. That is the approach that we are approaching and we have been achieving results.
I am surprised that Dr. Fayemi in a recent interview was badmouthing the performance alleging that Ekiti State pays money to get high grades and that we are engaging in examination mal-practices. Indirectly he is indicting the teachers. It shows his hatred for the teachers. That is why if he becomes governor, I wish him good luck but he cannot because Eleka is becoming the governor come October 16, 2018 by the grace of Almighty God.
What do L and D stand for in your SHIELD?
The ‘L’ stands for leadership and governance which has to do with civil service reforms.
‘D’ stands for development of agriculture and tourism. I have mentioned about rural road construction leading to farms and engagement of youth. What we are doing currently is government giving enabling environment to invest in agriculture. First, let me give you a little example, Iyemero-Oke-Afo axis, we have many investors there now having large farms. That is why we thank God for our anti-grazing law. It has helped us a lot in this regard. Many investors are coming now. They are becoming more assured of the protection of their products. Presently in Iyemero, we have a company, ‘Promisepoint’ that has a cassava processing plant that can produce industrial starch and then opportunity for production of other products. The cassava plant can produce 350 tons per day. The company has massive cassava farm in Iyemero area. Now, we want to encourage the company to assist some farmers so that the company will become an off-taker for these farmers. We want the company to be buying up their products.
This is the kind of enabling environment that government has to provide. Also in 2016, we had Agricultural summit which had led to a land bank development programme. The aim of the programme is to address shortage of arable land for farming across the state. This has led to the birth of Public Service Farmer Confederation, PSFC, ‘Agberemi’. The public servants have farm now, they have cultivated about 357 hectares of rice at Oke-Ako, Agricultural Growth Corridor there. Not only this also, we talk about cocoa, we know that Cocoa is one of the major cash crops which we have a comparative advantage in Ekiti state. But unfortunately, most of the cocoa plantations have old breed cocoa that are not yielding very well.
We have modern new hybrids. What we have decided to do now is to establish cocoa cloner gardens. Some two years ago, we established five hectares, now we have started another establishment of five hectares. The idea is to be able to produce quality seeds and seedlings to replace all these old cocoa farms and establish new ones. The variety of cocoa we are propagating now in our cloner garden takes 18 months to mature, that you first of fall grow the seeds, it comes up, you have the pods, and from the pods you get the seeds which can be given to farmers to plant.
It is high yielding, it can yield 1.5 ton per hectare. It is disease resistant. It may appears as if the efforts have not manifested physically, we believe that by December this year, we will be reaching around 18 months, that means the seeds will be ready for farmers to start planting. I have discovered that we have comparative advantage in the production of cocoa, cassava, rice maize and oil palm in this area. It is my vision to establish what I call centres of excellence in which case you clear large area of land and interested individuals within the community where this thing will be established will own some of these farms, government will come in initially, later we are going to shop for investors that can take over from government. The investors will be like off-takers. There will be a memorandum of understanding between the investors and the farmers. The investor will make available input for them, then he will off-take. That is after they have finished their production, he buys from them, deduct any amount of money it has cost the investors to give them input and the farmers will also have market for whatever they are producing. These are some of the schemes.
On rice production, the challenge we are having for rice production is issue of land. It costs so much to clear land in this area. The amount of money you will spend in clearing of land in the southwest is more than enough to grow large hectares of rice in Kebbi or Sokoto. Sometimes I laugh when people compare Kebbi and other areas in the north with Ekiti or anywhere in south west. It is not comparable because the major component of cost here is land clearing. Thank God we are able to key into the DAWN commission programme. We have reached an agreement with Lagos State. Lagos State doesn’t have land but she has money but we have land. We have entered into the kind of agreement Kebbi State has with Lagos State.
In spite of political differences?
It doesn’t matter. This is southwest. There is synergy between Ekiti State and Lagos State that is why I like my governor. We have collaboration to drive rice valuation; over 10,000 rice farmers in Ekiti will benefit from the over 9,000 hectares. Lagos State is going to clear over 9000 hectares. The process has already started. We have mapped out the area for Lagos state to come and do that. Don’t forget it is our people that will work there. This will take lots of people away from joblessness. These are parts of the plans we have in developing agriculture. Presently, it is not that we don’t have rice mills in Ekiti state but most of these rice mills are on small scale. We need investors that can come in and establish rice mills large scale. If we are able to have this volume of rice production, definitely investors will rush down here. People that can come in and assist with the establishment of large scale rice mill production. We believe that we will get there.
Let me go to the issue of tourism. The issue of tourism, if you look at Ikogosi Resort, the last administration under Fayemi actually spent about N2b to revive Ikogosi. The N2b involves money for restructuring the buildings, the working capital. There is a difference between Ikogosi Resort and Gossy Water. People out there lump the two together. Ikogosi Resort is still in existence and it is still working. The only one that collapsed is the Gossy Water which is actually a business venture of UAC not Ekiti State. The reason why Gossy Water collapsed was lack of power. The running cost was becoming too much for them, running on diesel and black oil and it became unprofitable for them to operate. The same power is the same thing that is affecting Ire block industry. Ire block industry also functions on black oil and diesel. It is still the same problem.
Then Ikogosi Resort itself, a lot of work was done there actually. There are three sections of Ikogosi Resort: two of the sections of the resort were properly done but the third one which also has some of the hotel rooms were not properly done. Today, if you go there you will see that termites have invaded the structures up to the roofs. It is because, when you want to go into construction, the first thing you do is site investigation, do your site survey, what kind of soil do you have there?The soil is termites invested. They ought to have done a very thorough land treatment of the place before putting all those buildings there. It is a big minus for that project.
That is why when people talk of sub-standard construction, that is exactly what is being referred to. Then the landscaping is not properly done to provide easy access to the hotel. I have a plan toward Ikogosi, not Ikogosi alone, Arinta Water Falls, Ipole Iloro, the two of them are in the same axis. Ipole Iloro, Ikogosi and Erijiyan, they have the same challenge of power. Most of those places have been without power for years. That is why we need the alternative off grid power supply for any industrial establishment that is going to be in place in that area. Arinta Water Falls is a place that could be developed. It is in the same axis with Ikogosi. If we are able to develop that place for tourism purposes and Ikogosi also, it is going to attract a lot of people.
How do you hope to finance all these projects?
If you observe I have been saying one thing. Government should not get itself involved in some of these businesses, rather it should provide enabling environment. We will kick start these programmes as a government. We are spending our money. The research that I did has revealed that there is a grant from World Bank that has to do with technical education but they must see what we have done. I got all these when we travelled abroad and I said okay, we will kick start it. Already we have been sending our (blue print) to the World Bank to come and see what we are doing. We are going to look for grant through them to complete the remaining technical colleges. Out of five, if we do one, they will not say we have not tried. We know we don’t have the financial capability to do all the five. When we do one, we can use it as case study and request for grant and I believe we will get it. We have good intention and good motive.
IGR in Ekiti State is very low. This is the document of Nigeria Governors’ forum with source from national Bureau of Statistics, office of accountant general, and state government and budget IT Research. If you look at IGR, Ekiti is number 33 out of 36. When my brother Dr. Fayemi was here, he was saying that he was generating 600m per month. Please sir, these are the details of IGR generated in Ekiti State from the ministry of finance. These ones are even higher than what is reported here by this data from Nigeria governors. Nigeria Governors Forum 2011, 2.5b; (probably they don’t have enough information), 2011 from our record here, we have N3.4b; 2012, N3.8b; 2013, N4.4b. Let us look at 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, let us look at 2014 as base year, transition between the immediate past administration to the present. 2010 to 2013, the maximum generated in the last administration was 5.5b per annum. That is about N450m per month. That was the highest. Others. the record shows N4.3 or thereabout. Yet they told the whole world that they were generating over N600m per month averagely. That means we should ask Dr. Fayemi where is the remaining, the balance. If he generated so much, then he should come out and tell us where the balance is. When we came in they said we were lying. That we were not declaring the amount of IGR we are generating as if we are hiding the money somewhere. He should come and tell us where he has been generating N600m per month.
Now look at 2015, you can see there was improvement when we came in: 2015, N4.3; 2016, N4. 8; 2017, N4.9; 2018, as at January to May, it was 2.3. That means we hope for more before the end of the year. Despite these, the IGR of Ekiti State is still very low. The truth of the matter is that there are lots of untapped sources of IGR. First, there is need to reshape the board of internal revenue and give it a more enabling environment, give them more incentive so that they will be able to move out. The issue of digitalisation, for instance, our C of O, the way C of O is being given, it is possible for two people to get C of O on the same land now. That is going to change. Nasarawa adopted that approach, though they spent a lot of money initially. More revenue is coming in. There is a particular area in Ado-Ekiti, all the buildings there do not have C of O because there is dispute on the land. It is government land but some people decided to sell it off before we came in and we discovered it when we came in and we have been having dialogue with the landlords. We have to use a softer approach.
They have realised that the land belongs to the government and there is a need for them to pay something. By the time they start to pay now, all of them will be encouraged to collect C of O. A lot of millions of naira will come in there. Beyond that, issues like street naming, having a sound data base, how many houses do we have in Ado. We can get taxes from some of these areas also. If investors are coming, it means more taxes for us, more revenue. I am not saying we can build it up to a million in a day but it is a gradual thing. Industrialisation is very important. In Lagos State, government business is not up to 15 percent. The bulk of business in Lagos is more of private. That is why the GDP of Lagos State is more than GDP of many countries in Africa.
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