Hon Kingsley Fanwo is the Kogi State Commissioner for Information and Communications. In this interview with JOY ANIGBOGU he speaks on the administration of Governor Usman Ododo, the various programmes and policies of the government that have impacted the lives of Kogi people. Excerpts:
First of all we want to congratulate His Excellency, Governor Ahmed Usman Ododo, on his victory at the Supreme Court. Would you want to say he has been magnanimous with his victory?
He has always been very magnanimous with victory starting from when he won the ticket of the party. He employed diplomacy and consultant. He went round to meet everyone Kogites that he considered could be of assistance to his administration regardless of party affiliations, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), African Democratic Congress (ADC) what he is interested is a situation where Kogites would come together to work for the interest and development of the state. Immediately he won the election he stretched his olive branch to everybody to come together for the interest of the state. That has always been his principle and policy. The Supreme Court judgment is just a confirmation of the legitimacy freely given to him by the people of the state. Now he will be more focused. He has always been focused. He was not been distracted by the legal fireworks. He concentrated on the job of delivering dividends of democracy to the people of Kogi State. He is going to continue with that and he is going to work with every kogite regardless of party, social affiliations.
When I was going through a number of projects that you have done. I discovered that they cut across the three senatorial zones. Out of the 167 projects that I saw about 70 have been completed, some are ongoing. Is the Governor trying to do this to settle the issue of zoning which was at the front burner when the Governor emerged as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC)? Recall that some people thought it should have been from any other zone other than Kogi Central, since the immediate past governor is from that same zone. From what the governor has done so far, are Kogipeople happy?
I think what you saw were basically projects of just one agency of government which is Kogi State Community and Social Development Agency. That agency has been deployed to effectively reach the grassroots on the state, providing health care facilities, educational infrastructure and all of that. The policy of spreading projects inherited from previous administration, the administration of Alhaji Yahaya Bello came with the mindset of uniting the state and one of the ways you can unite the people is to be fair and just. He was able to spread the projects and that is exactly what the present administration is doing. Whatever you are doing in Kogi Central you must be doing the same in East and in the West. Sometimes you may not do exactly the same thing but you will go in line with the needs of the people there because in our budget preparative we always go round all the 239 wards to interact with the people and get to know the needs of the people. We don’t do budgeting for the sake of it. We capture what is needed by the people. So when you address those things you are touching directly on the needs of the people. That is the reason we are having that spread. On zoning, Kogi is no longer having conversation around zoning. Our conversation is on performance. It is on effective leadership. It is on responsible and responsive leadership. The present governor has a personality that is humble that is desirous of ensuring development. He is desperate about it and is working very hard to be able to achieve that. If you need to be operated on and you get to the hospital, you don’t start asking if the doctor is an Hausa man, or an Igbo man, what you want at that point is to be healthy. So what Kogi wants is good health, fantasticeducation, and they need the right person to be there. Since inception in 1991we have always been led by people from KogiEast. When you calculate the number of years up to 2016 you will understand that what is happening now is not an aberration which I believe that the leadership have an understanding of how these things should go and that would also tell you the spread of leadership. Kogi East has nine local government areas, KogiCentral where the governor comes from has five local government areas, while Kogi West has seven local government areas. You can see in that election when you check the trend, you could see that the governor won all the local governments and all the wards in KogiCentral and Kogi West that is the strength. He was also able to win Bassa local government area, and did well in many local government areas in Kogi East. For the first time in the history of the state you will see people that you thought would never be able to work together politically to deliver the governor and that shows what Yahaya Bello worked to achieve in eight years was not lost. He was able to a large extent unite the people of the state to believe the Kogi project to be more important than an sectional project.
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Can you speak about some of your programmes especially in the areas of education and health, because we are aware of Kogi freeeducation and Yahaya Bello’s Zero-out-of school children policy? Is that particular policy still very much operational?
The present governor was part of the immediate past government. He was with the administration for eight years, not just an ordinary member of that government but played critical part of that administration. He was also part of finance team of that administration. He was part of steel and development for the two years development plan of the state and also what we call new direction agenda of Yahaya Bello and that is why he is saying that his own is continuity and consolidation and new direction. It is just an upgrade of what we had. In agriculture you talk about land preparation, cultivation and planting of the crop. So it’s a process. The bulldozer that is going to clear the land and the tractor that is going to cultivate that was what GYB did with. To a large extent he started GYB concentrated a lot in providing secondary and tertiary healthcare services. This present governor is working on improving and upgrading the primary healthcare centres. So it is continuity. When you talk about education, GYB did a lot in terms of all the strata in the educational system, the universal basic education, tertiary education, improvement of teachers and all of that. GYB was the one who came out to say that established fraud and corruption on the civil service should stop and he put in placeeducation committee that committee was chaired by this present governor. He was stepping on toes but he said it’s better for me to lose a second term than for Kogi state to lose its soul that is the stage we are right now because he has handed over the clean wage bill with integrity of the current administration Now local government staff teachers are taking their one hundred percent salaries just like others. So this is something that shows continuity. On the free educationstarted by GYB, he has improved on it. He has the political will to make education free. This Governor has taken it a bit higher. There’s a law in placemandating the state government to ensurefee education, not only making education freebut ensuring that the state government registers them for WAEC, NECO and JAMB. He has also done a lot in terms of bursary. He has learnt a lot from GYB, understands were GYB has done it very well and where he needs to improve on.
The N72,500 minimum wage as approved by Governor Usman Ododo is quite impressive but how sustainable will that be considering the economic challenges of the time and the fact that some states are still struggling to implement the N70,000 National Minimum Wage?
Leaders that are trusted don’t break promises. Trust capital is the major issue in political establishments especially in Nigeria here. They tend to see everybody at the political office as being insincere as someone who doesn’t have the interest of the people at heart. They see that person as someone who must not be trusted. He came in with his own agenda to consolidate on what has been done right and improve on what he thinks need to improve on and immediately he came he started improving on the percentage being paid to the local governments because that is the major issue under the past administration despite all the explanations that what is coming in is grossly inadequate. He took it up to 80, 90 and now they are taking 100 percent. So they have confidence that this governor has their interest. Not only that, he immediately he picked the ticket of the party he decided to appoint a unionist as his running mate. A classroom teacher who was a former National Union of Teachers (NUT) chairman of the state, he nominated him to run with him, that gave confidence to the labour community that this person is coming to serve and they are going to be a part of his administration. As we speak now not less than 10 people from the labour community are serving in his government as special advisers, special assistants’ etcetera. So it is going to be very difficult for you to get it wrong when you have this caliber of people. The current Special Adviser to the governor on labour matters was the immediate past Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) chairman in the state. They will be able to guide you to take the right decisions. When the issue of minimum wage came up. It is a constitutional matter, not a matter of choice. State schools put in place some administrative bottlenecks here and there made sure they delayed a bit before starting but he constituted a committee. The committee met only four times and all the agreements were reached. The committee was chaired by the head of service. All the unions were represented and it was a matter of transparency at every meeting this is the allocation, this is what we are getting from. Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). So, what modalities are we going to use? So when they have that confidence in you it becomes very easy which is why we were able to agree on the N72,500 minimum wage in the state. If you listen to some of the civil societies, the labour leaders, they said they will be the only agents of the governor in 2027. That is the level of confidence and when he gave his address at the teachers Day ceremony he was having a meeting in Abuja but because of the teachers he drove all the way to Lokoja to make sure that he honoured them with his presence. The teachers were impressed, their excitement and gratitude with the way he has turned things around with their welfare and also to assure that they are going to lead his campaign. When labour says it will lead your campaigns you know why that means. They control the largest population of KogiState. Their children, their mother, with thier wives, and these are the people who vote and these are the people whose lives were touched with his policies.
The Governor in August appointed 574 Ward Special Assistants and 290 Local Government Special Assistants, are you not looking at the cost components?
I want to say that the reason the Governor will achieve this despite the economic situation of the country because of financial engineering, cutting down the cost of governance. Cutting down the cost of governance is achievable when you lead from the front, it will be very easy for people to believe you and for. The governor since he assumed office has not bought a single official vehicle. He is using the vehicle he used when he was Auditor General for Local Government and probably one or two vehicles that he inherited from the immediate past Governor. I am seated here as the Commissioner for Information, I was appointed since January, I have not been given any official vehicle. He locked us up in the exco hall and said that we were going to have a meeting. He said he was not going to buy official vehicle for himself and how would not buy for us now. He said we must find a way of ensuring the welfare of the people and workers. He said when we have achieved that we can now come back and consider the things to do for those who have been appointed. When the people see what you are doing they would have the confidence to believe whatever you tell them and support your policies and programmes. The people appointed to me is one of the smartest appointment strategies ever. You appoint commissioners who were probably in their villages, as soon as you make them commissioners they will relocate to the state and would no longer relate with their people back home. They will see themselves above the people. When you appoint special advisers they will do the same thing, move away from those places and probably leave these people until after four years that you would need their support again. Instead of appointing very large number of special advises and assistants you will reduce those ones and concentrate on the wards and local governments’ special assistants. The idea behind that is to have someone who sleeps and wakes up in that village, who is going to communicate government on the programmes and policies of his or her people, and will implement these policies and programmes there, who is going to be seen by the people. They will see the special assistant to the governor living in the village and they can go to him any time and ask: “what is the government doing about this? It’s a very smart one. The financial engineering there is that, there are three special assistants’, we have more ward special assistants. There are 239 wards in the state and we have three ward special assistants per ward. The three ward special assistants, their salaries are less than N450,000, which is what one special assistant would have taken. So instead of appointing one senior special assistant from the ward and paying him N450,000, we would appoint three ward special assistants and pay them less than N450,000. They are living and surviving in that village or villages even before you appointed them, so whatever you give them is like a bonus to them and the communities at the end of the month will have about N450,000 in circulation. It will enhance their standard of living. They will buy their food, yam, garri and others within that community. We’re not paying more by appointing that number, we’re actually paying less and getting more value.
