In a no holds barred interview session with selected medium, Edo State Governor Godwin Obaseki whose tenure expires by November 11,2024 had highlighted his transformational legacies in Edo State with a declaration of unfettered durability already ingrained in the Edo people. Olanrewaju Adesanya brings excerpt.
Your administration is quite popular for its transformative reforms, especially in public services. You are known to say that all local governments and states, if you go there and even the Secretariat, even if you go to the Secretariat, you’ll be wondering if it’s a public service place. What moved you to prioritize civil service reforms? And what were the key challenges you faced in implementing these reforms?
                                                                                                                                                  I have always said that if you imagined government as a vehicle that is moving the people in a certain direction, then the engine of that vehicle is the civil service and if that engine is faulty, that vehicle is not going to move, it is going to be stalled.
You have to understand that for government to work then the civil service bureaucracy has to work. Which means that whatever the government has decided it wants to do, whatever the policy, the people that would make it happen is the civil service and they have a process through which they make it happen.
So, if that institution is not working, if it’s being castigated like we’ve done in the past, if there is uncertainty of course you won’t get much out. The owners of government are the civil servants*and what we’ve done for the last 30 or 40 years is to denigrate them.
To make them feel like they are the problems, we’ve not encouraged them, we’ve not supported them, we’ve not enhanced their ability to deliver. First you go to their premises and areas where they work, you will not encourage your children to go into the civil service when you see your infrastructure.
Sometimes you call an officer, a director or PS where is so, so and so they will say he is not on seat, why? He has gone across the road to a filling station to use their toilet because the toilets in their offices were faulty, it was that bad!
I then say see let’s restore respect and dignity to them. Now you will want to be a civil servant, because their offices are the best office or work place, they have everything because fortunately we partnered with Osiomo Power, they have 24/7 electricity in their offices so there is always light.
We have connected fiber optic a high-speed internet, now they are all digital so, they don’t carry files again, no file gets missing in Edo o (laughs). File no dey loss again, because everything is digital in an ARP.
The other thing really was training, you know you had people who say the way they’ve done it since Lord Lugard is the same way they are doing it, meanwhile the environment has changed. You’ve not trained them, you’ve not updated their skills, now one of the good things we’ve done by setting up the John Odigie-Oyegun Training Centre is to just continuously train them and reduced the cost of training by having our own training centre.
So rather than send someone, we say you come and offer the training in Edo and more people can participate. Another thing we are doing is there are compensation and remuneration. Edo has never waited for the national to set minimum wage for us, we just believed that if you don’t pay people well you won’t get their loyalty.
It is like what you call pay in civil service is not fantastic, everywhere in the world people don’t become millionaires by working in civil service but they lived a very comfortable lives, they can raise their families, that is what we intend.
So, we’ve tried to begin to approximate that to say okay if you are in the civil service there are certain benefits you’ll get, you get good health insurance, we are building the school systems so you don’t have to take your child to a private school for your child to get a good education, all the things that the service supposed to or used to be we are trying to rejig.
Then lastly, one of the things we’ve noticed in the intension of President Obasanjo committee that set up the new pension scheme administration is that certainty after work is so important. If you looked at those who were their before you, if you see them in penury, you realize that this people no provisions was made for them while in office, why would I wait to be in their own state?
I will now begin to see how I can help myself, but when you know that when you finished work, you will have a lumpsum amount that helps you start life and that every month you will be getting something that will sustain you, except people who are extremely greedy. So those are the things we did to reinstate a sense of belonging, a sense of pride for the public and civil servants and today honestly many of our civil servants in Edo state do wonders.
You know we work a lot with the world bank and most of these multinational agencies. When you see some of our civil servants you engage them and they stand on their feet, I am proud it is like the kind of quality of staff I work with in the private sector. So that is the reason why we did what we did and for me if Nigeria is going to move forward, we ought to rebuild the civil service.
Edo is hailed as Nigeria’s most digitalised state, particularly in e-government, which the world Bank expects Africans states to adopt. How has this digital transformation enhanced governance, and how do you see this evolving in the coming years?
The truth is today in the world it is all about digitalization, it is about data, it is about internet of things, it is about artificial intelligence, that is where the world is going, so anybody who expect to participate in this new world order and you are still analogue, you know you will be out of date and you see the greatest mover of change is government. Once government does something the citizens follow. So, if a society is going to digitize it starts from government. Right now, in Edo our teachers can’t teach without digital. Now in Edo we have a teacher with a tablet a handheld device and everyday you come to school you must synchronize them with that of the head teacher, if you don’t you are not teaching that day.
So, I can tell you that we’ve dropped rate of absenteeism, if a teacher is not in class, then definitely the child will not learn. That device we’ve given to you takes attendance of the children so we know a child that is in school or not we have data. It also has your lesson notes you delivered that day and the tools to help you motivate the children. So, our children want to go to school because they are learning.
In the area of healthcare, every primary healthcare centre you go have computers, you see a device so as you go in there, we take your data, somebody knows that you visited, somebody would follow up from the centre, to say that patient with a particular disease given the gathered vitals, please call them to come to so and so place for further care.
In the case of land administration we’ve mapped the entire state, we’ve flown over so we have the area surveys which has now made it easy because we are the best EIS state in the country. We issue the C of O within sixty days and you pay less than 60,000 naira. It is there, from the time Edo state was set up in the mid west region till the time I became Governor the total number of C of O issued was about 2000, in three years I have issued 30000 C of O’s, it is all because of digitalization but for you to be able to digitize it is not just about the computers.
First you have to have infrastructure, you should be able to link the structure so if you collect data in Aghenebode and that data I don’t see it in Benin of what use is the data? So, infrastructure is key, that is why we decided to invest in fibre optic cables, we are the most connected state in Nigeria today, we have over 2000 kilometres of fibre, every local government is connected.
So the implication of this is that for a function of a cost the best service is done, we don’t need to wait for someone coming from far away to Benin for a meeting, I can say we have a zoom meeting at 9 o’clock so all local government chairmen please be on a call and we make the decisions, so digital is the way of the future, all the data you collect helps you to start decision making and once government takes the lead everybody else will follow. Many people will go into writing solutions, writing software’s to support the economy and there is a big market in it, so that is what we’ve done in Edo.
The Edo health insurance scheme has been pivotal in making health care more accessible. What were the primary obstacles in setting up this scheme, and what strategies are in place to ensure its sustainability?
The biggest issue with health today in Nigeria, is cost. Most people don’t like to go to hospital or to go and seek care because they feel they don’t have the money to pay. Once you get there, they say, this is how much you pay for a card and all of that stuff. So, by the time people are reporting illnesses, sometimes it’s already too late and too expensive. So, what has happened everywhere else in the world, which we introduced to Edo, is to say, look, just pay something.
Look, Mama, every day you come to the market. In that market, somebody comes around and says, save something for Esusu? Put 50 naira, put 100 naira, put 200 naira a day. I say just give us 50 naira or 100 naira every day, and you can walk into any primary health care centre, any hospital, and they will treat you, that’s what we’ve done. Today we have one of the largest state insurance schemes in the country. We have almost 350,000 enrolments. Just imagine that token daily and not everybody will be sick at the same time. So, there’s always money. The other obstacle, is first, after you have paid, you want value. So just getting the outlets, if I’m sick now, where do I go to? Where’s the hospital? Where’s the clinic? So, what that PHC has done for us is to unify everybody. The Ministry of Health registers every health centre, every health clinic, every pharmacy where you can get primary care. So, once you have your card, you just go in there. Because, God forbid, you are ill, and they need to take you.
You can’t determine where you are going to go. So, what we’ve done is we’ve centrally tried to sell this idea. The biggest obstacles have been, first, the trust. Two, the outlets. You want to go to somewhere, a place, and let the people be able to deliver the service they promised. Not that you go there, they say, oh, the nurse is not on duty, this one is not there, no. So, training the capacity, the human capacity, to manage health centres has been a problem, which we’ve tried to overcome by moving it out of the local government into a separate agency. So, we have the Primary Health Care Development Agency, where it’s no longer within the total control of the local government. The local government contributes on some staff. It’s autonomous, we train them. The local government pays 60%, the state pays 40% to maintain that agency. So, the other obstacle that I would say we have had, and it’s really not an obstacle, is that there are so many people, in spite of insurance, that cannot still afford it. Fortunately, there’s what you call a federal government basic health care provision fund. Okay, what they pay as premium is not as much as what we collect, but it still can make the gap. So that has helped us also to take care of the poorest of the poor, people who cannot contribute, but we’re still able to treat them almost free.
Thank you, Excellency, for this opportunity. Excellency, I want to ask a question on the John Odigie-Oyegun Public Service Academy as one of the achievements of that administration. So how does this institution contribute to the modernization of public service and I want to also ask, how can you compare this to other institutions across the country?
You see, when you are undertaking change, reform, it’s not enough to say you want to this, no, you have to hand-hold the process, right? Somebody who has been used to writing letters, I am directed to this, you don’t say, use computer. You have to help that person. You have to be able to nurture that person, make the person say, okay, everyday, come and spend two hours, this is how you do it, this is how you copy, this is how you paste, you’ve got to help train people. Don’t expect, because I’ve said it, it will happen.
So, the JOOPSA, as we call it, the John Odigie-Oyegun Centre is like a world-class academy. You want to go there, because one of the things I told them in the beginning was that the thing that will attract people there is that lunch must be super. So, people go to say even if it is for just the lunch, let me go for this training and because it’s very well thought out, and it’s practical, it teaches you what you need at your workplace every day? It’s not theoretical. It’s relevant and because of the changes we are making, we now need this centre to help teach people, train them, nurture them to be able to cope with the changes.
And also, train them on other aspects of life. If you go through the profile of some of the people and their comments, they are very excited because you are showing them things that they never knew. So beyond civil service rules, you are training them on other life skills, on other areas about life that they need to know about. So, it’s been very useful. It’s helped us build capacity and build confidence in public service.
How do you compare this to other training centres?
I don’t know how many exist. Because I think we used to have the federal government one in Badagry we have ASCON right? I would not want to compare because what we are doing, many states are not doing. We’ve gone totally digital. That means I don’t treat files manually again. Everything is on e-gov. I don’t know any other state that has done that. So, I need to tailor my own training to my people for it to be relevant. I can’t compare what we are doing with other people who have not undertaken the reforms that we have undertaken.
So, my questions are twofold. EdoBest has been acclaimed both national and internationally for its innovative approach to education. What plans do you have to further this progress, particularly in the areas of secondary and vocational education?
Let me just spend time and explain what we did. When I came in in 2016, one of the biggest issues confronting us was human trafficking and irregular migration. You remember then? When the comedians joking, they say, what is the capital of Italy? They say, Edo. In February 2017, the International Office on Migration came with a report that showed that there were over 30,000 Edo boys and girls in Libya trying to cross. So, if you had 30,000 children or young youths in one place in Libya crossing the Sahara, can you imagine how many would have died together? And there was no boat crossing that had an accident that you didn’t find our boys and girls inside it. So, there was a process of massive repatriation because we then joined them, set up a task force, and we started bringing them back home. As they came and we received them, we documented them, we got the data to find out the root cause of this mass migration of people from home. And one thing that came out was our poor education system. Education systems had broken. So how can you, okay, you finish school, you’re a barber, you’re a tailor. Somebody comes to say bring $2,000 at that time. They’ll go and give you work in Europe. You too, you sell up, give them the money and follow them. I mean, if you had gone to school well, you can read. You will ask more questions. Isn’t it? So, we knew that the main thing we had to do was tackle the issue of education. You ask people, how far? Say, I have finished school. Okay, I’m in this polytechnic, I’m in that polytechnic meanwhile they cannot read. So, what happened? We then said, let’s just be frank with ourselves. We need to go and fix it. What’s the issue? The issue is actually teachers. There was so much absenteeism. The teachers, we recruited teachers politically. Many of them, would say, a driver would say oga they give job in SUBEB ooo they say, If you can give me notes, they will call me. You, that was a driver, that didn’t go to school. You become a teacher. So, we then focused on teaching.
How do you retrain the teachers to be able to teach? So, like I said earlier, absenteeism was a big thing and one way to track it was, you know, by giving them devices and monitoring them. The other was retraining them, right? So we had this big training. And once we started, and then we then changed the pedagogy. The way we teach the children in school, that’s different from the way they taught you when you were going to school. No corporal punishment.
They don’t beat any child in our schools. They encourage them. They make school exciting. When I go into some of the classes, they have their chairs. When any child does something, there’s a way they praise the child and the child gets encouraged on what to do. I need to just give you a side story. You know, after a term or two of implementing EdoBest, a parent came to me, a woman. She tried to see me, and I tell her, what is the problem? She said, I have two sons. One is six, and one is 10, right? Since you introduced this to your EdoBest, they’re no longer playing as they used to play together. Say, because the six-year-old, when he comes back from school, he’s reciting his rhymes. He wants to do his own work. And he’s already, after one term, almost beginning to read at six. But the brother who is 10 cannot read. He comes from school. He wants to go and play ball. The younger one doesn’t want to play ball. He wants to do his work. In the morning, the younger one is the first to wake up.
You see, if you don’t give him his bath early, he will make so much trouble with you. He wants to be in school on time because he wants his name to be on the character board. So, we changed the face and shape of education. The children now began to learn. You know, when you see the performance and the confidence of these kids in our public schools, you will know that we really made fundamental changes. And we’re not talking about quantum now. We’re talking about almost 400,000 children. What we’re teaching in Sobe is the same thing we’re teaching in Igara. The same lesson notes to be delivered across board. So that’s what the world is acclaiming. And in fact, I just got back this morning from the Global Partnership on Education at a side event of the World Bank, trying to share experiences of what we’ve done. They are countries that have been nominated as accelerator countries in education, countries who are partnering in education reform globally, about eight or nine countries. Countries! Edo is the only subnational on that list, like a proxy for Nigeria. So, we fixed P1 to P6, primary one to primary six. But the law is that basic education is P1 to P9. That is primary six plus JSS one to three. After 25 years, we never disarticulated.
We didn’t separate secondary in those days. You find out that secondary you attended is the same secondary. You have junior on one side. You have senior on one side. The junior is regulated by SUBEB and UBEC law. The senior, if you are lucky, states that is regulating that. So, the way they pay the teachers in basic is different from the way they pay the teachers in senior. So, it’s just been confusion. So, to answer your question, we’ve gone to P6. We said, OK, let’s go back to the national policy on education and understand that basic education is nine years, not six years. So, the way you’ve treated these children from primary one, you must take them to JSS three. And for us, we’re so committed to that. You know why? Because when we looked at that data, we then saw that the drop-off ratio between primary six and SS one is 50%. Have you ever asked yourself, why do we have many alaye boys and girls? Have you? All this alaye syndrome is a result of that. And when people finish primary six, you don’t see them again.
Half of them end up in secondary school. They disappear. Then you also ask yourself, what do you teach? Why must people be in junior school? What do you teach them for those three years? So, it comes to the heart of the question you asked. And that’s what we’ve been figuring out, and we started last year, to say, first, we don’t do primary six exam again. Your first exam is your basic school-leaving exam. When you get to P6 and you want to start JSS one, what are those things we must teach you? So that in case you can’t continue after JSS three, can you have handwork? That is what federal government has just adopted. We started it two years ago to say, okay, while you’re in JSS one, yes, you’ll be learning, you’ll still be training, but you must have a vocation. Train you to do tiling, to do, you know. So, once you finish JSS three, you want to either go to technical school or you want to go to Secondary school.
If you cannot even continue, you want to go and be a hairdresser, you want to go and be a tailor, you want to go, at least you have some basic training. In that, your JSS school, they will show you, this master tradesman will come and show you how to measure, how to sew, how to, so that when you leave school, you have handwork. Because you go to building sites, all those boys who come from Togo and all of that to come and do POP, how old are they? So that’s what we are focusing on. But you have to first, the biggest issue you have are the tradesmen. The teachers to teach those things. They are not there, so we have to train them. And that’s what the university is about, training the teachers.
Training the teachers. If I may add a little with your permission, sir. Do you have an idea of the number of school boys that this concept has been able to incorporate back into the school system?
They are not dropping out anymore, because we don’t allow them to drop out. Once we catch you for primary one, we are holding you until JSS three. You are not dropping out. You understand? Because you drop out where? You won’t have any, and we are monitoring you. You are not paying, so why should you want to drop out? Do you get it?
My question really, sir, is that you said it was because of the human trafficking, migration, and the rest of the profiling at that time?
That is what raised the alarm, that we have a problem. There are too many people who are growing up, who claim that we are training, we are sending them to school, but were not learning. And they don’t know anything. So, let’s focus and make sure that we improve the training. Today, nobody is traveling from Edo. If anything, other people are coming in from other parts. Because by the time you finish, you can find work.
The Edo State Oil Palm Programme is regarded as one of the most ambitious agricultural initiatives in Africa. How does this programme position the state as a leader in agriculture, and what are its anticipated impacts on local farmers and the economy?
You know, one of the things that has happened in Nigeria, you know we can talk. People talk about this program, but you can’t, after a while, you don’t see it. What we did in Edo, we said, look, let’s not speak too much English, no grammar. What is Edo known for? Edo is the home of oil palm. In the 60s, the Malaysians lived in Naifort, in Benin, and they were doing research together. It is those same seeds, those same things, they took back to Malaysia, and made Malaysia what it is today. So, palm is a native of Edo what we did was, first time we went to Malaysia, and Indonesia, to try and understand what we need to do, few things. Agriculture is a very risky business. So, to help, to be successful, government should try and help farmers reduce their risk. Government cannot and should not be a farmer. Government cannot farm. When government is saying, we will….no government’s role should just be to support. What are the challenges of people who want to do serious farming?
First, access to land. Okay? C of O, the fact that I gave you C of O, does not make it that you have the land. Because you can go there and you meet the community and they say, sorry, this is our ancestral land, we will not let you farm, so beyond giving you land, I must also work with you, assist you, work with the communities to make sure you can access the land. Having access the land, what other problems do you have? Infrastructure. How do you get there? Because if you now have to construct your road, the cost of road alone has taken up all your capital. And that is the responsibility of government, where I will build the road to take you there.
Okay? And then, rather than give one, two people, we call 10 people, to say, okay, look, 10 of you come for the first phase. Take, take, take, take. In this arrangement, you must involve the communities. You must have a community action plan. You must receive the free and prior consent of the communities and the owners of the land, people who live there. You must create a buffer for the community too, and people who want to work. There must be a small out grower plan. Because you can’t chop alone. People in the environment suppose chop with you now. What we did was to bring the practices of modern farming. Because when we say farming, farming, farming, today, you go into most communities, how many, by the time you use a hoe and a cutlass, how many acres can they cultivate? But you that have 10,000, you bring the equipment, bring everything, and you can prepare land on large scale. So, if you prepare your own land, and you want a small farmer to help you, to support you, why not prepare for that person and say, okay, when you make me money, when you start cultivating, you pay me with crops. So that’s what we did, to say, look, you know what? Farming is serious business. It’s not cheap. Let’s get those who have the capacity to do it. So, we encouraged. people like flourmills, people like Dofills, the people that make Indomie, Saro, all those people, are the people we are encouraged to give land to. And sat down and worked with them, to say, okay, what will it take for this to happen? And today, you see, we have one of the most ambitious programs on agriculture in the continent. Because when one farmer comes in, you know what it takes to plant 10,000 hectares? The whole of Victoria Island is about 20,000 hectares, the whole of Victoria Island. So, by bringing in big players, who have capital, who can work with smallholders, it becomes a win-win for everybody. And oil palm is a long-dated plant. Takes about three to five years to mature fully. But once you have it, for the next 20, 25 years, you’re making money. And nothing goes to waste. So, we are using that to kickstart the agricultural revolution. Because if you can do a f you can do cassava. You can do rice, which is only three months.
With the same method, you need to prepare the land on a scale. You will need agronomists. You need people who understand soil, soil scientists. Everything you need for this process, the people who are doing oil palm has started that for us. And most important, what we have done, and we noticed it, is that you don’t have trained personnel. All of you is journalism, international affairs, this one. No farmer, none of you. That is a big problem we have. So, we can speak all the English. But you need farm managers on a 10,000-hectare farm. You need maybe 200 managers, farm managers, who manage a lot. Where are they? So, we then said, okay, let’s rebuild our colleges of agriculture. And to say, okay, this college of agriculture, even though government has a duty to it, it’s government and you that will manage it. On the council, the governing board, you, private sector, you must be on it.
What do you need? What qualifications do you need for people who work in your farms? Yeah, let’s define it. Bring some of your people, let us train them. So that as you come into our school of agric, you didn’t come for certificates, you came for work. Because even while you are in school, you are interning already in these farms. Because, I mean, we’re doing forestry, for instance. All the people that we’re hiring are Ghanaians. We can’t find Nigerians, because we don’t want the people. So, a human capacity is the biggest angle to agriculture. And human capacity along the line, not just the big, big ones, from the person who will do the planting to the person who will do the pest control to the person who will do the, you know, all that, there’s a size to it. That’s the only time you can farm on large scale. And one of the things we don’t do and we don’t realize in Nigeria, we’re a very big country. The amount of food we need to feed 200 million people is a lot. So, you can’t be doing agriculture acre by acre. It can’t work again. And it’s easier to secure those large farms. So, I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.
In terms of infrastructure, you are right what should be the role of government? The problem we have is, government gets being dragged into too many things. And government doesn’t have the capacity to do too many things. The role of government is to create an enabling environment for citizens to do what they need to do. That’s all. Once you’ve created the enabling environment, if I build a road now, you will go and sell the land there and build your house, isn’t it? But if there’s no road, you can’t get there. So, my own role as government is to build that road, plan for people to do that. Because that’s where government has the money to do so, because it collects taxes from everybody. What are the critical infrastructure we need today? Fundamentally in Nigeria, electricity. Because without electricity you are not going anywhere, we are lucky in a way. That because of our location, we are a core, a hub for electricity. Because in Nigeria, well, the cheapest form of electricity is powered with gas, gas generation, or it was hydro and then gas, right? In the 60s, 70s, we did a lot of hydros. Today, gas. Edo is the cheapest point to generate electricity. You know why? Because it costs you about a million dollars a kilometer of gas pipeline. And it also costs you about a million dollars a kilometer of transmission, do you get it? Edo is that point where transmission, electricity transmission meets gas transmission. So, if you generate electricity in Edo today, you can upload and sell it into the grid. Whether they will pay you is a different matter. So, and then, Edo also has the largest onshore reserves of gas.
Most of our gas is either deep offshore or in the swamp. Which means today, I can practically just take a turbine, go to Edo fields, go anywhere, locate it, take the gas from the well and generate. And that’s what we’re doing in Osioma. So, we have been pushing on electricity. That’s why the whole fight with BDC, and we’ve been able to get one or a few states that now can have our own electricity market. So, if you want to generate electricity, come to Edo, I’ll give you a license. You don’t need to go to Abuja. Want you to put, well, at least as long as you’re doing it within our state, we’re one of the few states that are doing that. The other key infrastructure is fiber optics. Because without connectivity today, you’re not going anywhere in the world. Look at you now, you guys are doing your stories, you’re transmitting. So, we have also invested. I got the local governments to bring money, we brought money, and we built networks across all the 18 local governments in the state. Roads, key, to answer your question directly. Before, when I was the chairman of the economic team in the state, we had worked with the World Bank on a model for road construction. That model involved a lot of local labour, CFO. And we found out that by using local labour in road construction, well supervised, you could actually construct roads at a substantial discount relative to what it would have been contracted. And for those inner-city roads, there’s no road.
Tell me one road in Lagos now, in your neighbourhood, that is more than a kilometer. What’s key to road construction in a place like Edo, which is in the rain forest, is drainage. Because the problem with roads is water. If you construct a road, you cannot remove the water. I bet you, after one season, you’ll come back to do the road again. So, key is essentially making sure that there’s drainage and showing the local contractors how to make sure that they have the capacity. So, before you’re doing it, you first do the drainage. And have people, okay, and that, you can see some of that in Lagos now. And then once you do, and that way, we found out that we were constructing for the same, about a kilometer of roads, we’re doing it at maybe, say, two-fifths of the cost by major contractors.
So, at that time, maybe a kilometer of road would cost us, cost a major contractor $100,000 a kilometer. We could do it at $60,000. Because if we start, so we were able to do more. And then also remove the element of corruption. And give it to those who know how to do the work. You know how our system is. Ah, ah, no, give me contract now. Okay, which kind of contract, I have road. Anyway, I have no road company, I have no, that means you give it to him, instead of at $60,000, he will say, okay, I will do it at $120,000 for you. Hmm? Because he will take it, he will go and sell it to somebody else. Depending on the arrangement, that person will now use substandard materials because he wants to make his own gain. So, removing corruption from the process is also key. It’s one of the things that helped us. But you know the consequences. You have to, you need a lot of political battles. You know, those are some of the things you have to do. So, that way we were able to build a lot more roads. And roads that are relevant and useful. Because I have people who say, oh, I’ve been in politics for how many years now? But since I’ve been in politics, my road has not been constructed. I have, you know, I don’t know, those of you who went to Uni-Ben around there. The whole community around there, Ekosodi and co. If you go there today, we have touched everywhere, and when we touch, we take the control of the place. You just don’t do one road. Because you can’t finish constructing a road. Where will the water go? So, you look at the whole neighbourhood and plan it, and say, okay, this is where the water will end up. So, you now do the roads linking the whole neighbourhood so that the water can go, that’s part of what. The biggest challenge we have had is federal government. Federal roads. Because Edo has a disproportionate number of federal roads. Because of our location. If you are coming from Lagos, you must pass through. If you are going to the east, to the south-south, to the north, you must pass through Edo. So, the Lagos-Benin Road, that goes right into Ring Road, is a federal road. The Benin-Sapele road, going to the south-south, federal road. Benin-Agbor-Asaba Road, federal road. So, all around us are federal roads. And we can’t be constructing those roads. First, to even get permission is a problem. Except it becomes so bad, then we now go and do palliatives, so we are hoping that, I mean, we will be able to get them to understand that it is cheaper. Since we don’t have rail, we just need to fix these roads.
Excellency, I have a concern. Now, your tenure is winding up, and you are going to hand over to another administration. Unfortunately, not your party, are you concerned that the continuity of most of these things you’ve done will be a challenge? Some of them, they may want to look for a way to shine for themselves and want to kill some of the things you’ve done. Are you concerned?
It is a risk. But Edo, I’ve always said, is a different state. The people are very aware. The people know. And I doubt if they will keep quiet for long, allowing things to go back to what it used to be. They will complaint, they will shout. So, the way I see it is that sometimes in life, it just can’t be up, up, up, up, up all the time. You may need to slow down before you continue to. It’s like a stock market. Stock markets, sometimes it’s unusual for it to just continue to go up. Occasionally, it will go down, rebound. But the fact that people know that roads can be constructed without you lobbying, says that one day, my own road will be done. And they will agitate. Because when you come to my office, I have packs and packs of letters. Because they’ve now realized that government can build roads. So, they say, please, my road, my road, my road. Okay. The parents of these children in school, they feel it. They see it in their children every day. And that’s one thing you don’t play with and we are not talking about children of big people but children of market women, houseboys, you know. They feel it. All they have is that. And they can tell when the children are doing well or when they are not doing well. The other thing we’ve done in some of the reforms, we’ve allowed for community participation. Take education, for instance. In every community, we have what you call the school-based management. The Odionwes, the elders, they come in to just support the teachers, what is going on. Take an interest. And I don’t think because there’s a change in government, they will disappear. Even if the government doesn’t support or encourage them as we used to, they will not disappear. So, beyond these things, the reforms we’ve undertaken, we’ve institutionalized or started the process of institutionalizing some of them. And don’t underestimate the power of social media. Even with what we’re doing, we saw the criticisms we are getting. Not to talk about why you don’t do something. It’s to be heard. So yes, there’s a risk. But I’m optimistic that it will last.
The last question. Growing up, the problem was very narrow. How did you secure these things?
I would say there are several factors. First, you know, Edo is very porous. Like I said, people come from everywhere. So, you need the cooperation of the federal government. I was lucky that we had some real good commissioners of police I worked with. One of them ended up being IG. And while we were in Benin, we started talking and conversing about community policing, integrating what the community policing system would do with what the federal policing system would do. So, what we did was to now, in our own little way, restructure our security architecture along our structure. At the, let’s call it unit level, right? At the community level, we used what they had. Many communities had vigilantes. So, you see market people come together, and they pay for people to guide their markets. Those structures exist. So, we registered them and brought them into our security architecture. At the ward level, the police then came up with these community policing arrangements, where we then had constables who were like a liaison between the DPOs and those vigilantes. At the local government level, you had the states, the police, and the DPOs, and all of those. So, you had that very good flow of information. If anything happens in any community, it was easy to find out from either the vigilantes or the constables what happened, who did what, where, you get. But it’s not cheap. You’ve got to continue to service that structure. And one of the things we did for coordination, we then invested in the police training school in Bogota. Put a lot of money, formed a barracks, trained their training facilities, the obstacles, everything, and accommodation. So, every vigilante gets trained. The police, the DSS, the military put up a curriculum for them. So, every year, I tried to train them once. And we have over 12,000 of them. Now, during that training, we were able to document them take their fingerprints, those ones who have arms, what type of arms. So, there was some coordination. Then, technology. So, we have communication systems then we have a command-and-control centre in Benin. Now, we’re trying to build one in Auchi, where every incident, kidnapping or rape, gets reported and documented. And we’ll follow through. So, you know that there’s no hiding place. Once we see kidnapping here, we begin to trace them. There was one incident a couple of weeks ago, where one of Soludo’s’ aides was kidnapped somewhere in the Edo States. And within a week, we found them somewhere in Bogota. And we were able to locate their camps. Clearly, we also have technology, drones, and things like that. We have Cameras you can’t come into the city without us knowing. We track your number, your number of plates. So, and but on the line, all of this, there must be economic growth. There must be opportunities for people to do things legitimately. That reduces. So, no matter if people are not eating, people are not having a hope of things to do, we have to cut the crime. So economic growth is the key. You can see that we’ve actually grown the economy of the Edo States.
