Edo 2016: I didn’t sleep after the APC primaries, says Obaseki

The candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the forthcoming Edo governorship election, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, spoke to ALEMMA-OZIORUVA ALIU in Benin City on the outcome of the party primaries, his plans for the State and other issues

Have you made efforts to reconcile with your fellow aspirants who lost to you during the primaries?

Immediately after the primary election, I didn’t go to bed. The first person I visited was the deputy governor Dr Pius Odubu. I went to his house with some party officials. I went to talk with him and to extend my hands of fellowship and it was warm and cordial. He expressed his mind as to what he felt. He was also very open to reconciliation. He said that people are calling him, but he wanted to assure us that he was not going to leave the party rather he was going to work for the party.

He admitted that he felt hurt and there were things that he felt should not have happened but he was prepared to work with the party and me. The following morning I went to see Engr. Chris Ogienwonyi, whom I have a cordial and very warm relationship with, and we spoke. He felt hurt and needed to exhaust the process to convince himself that the primaries were properly conducted.

Later that day I went to see Gen. Charles Airhiavbere and we spoke, he opened his arms and said, he is open to me and that he was willing to work with me. I have not been able to see Imansuangbon, he sounds very angry with me. I heard he travelled, so he’s the only one I have not been able to see but I guess with time when he calms down, we will have a meeting. I have spoken to everybody else. That evening Prof. Osunbor shook my hands and embraced me. Peter Esele called and pledged his support.

Are you not worried that Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu emerged the PDP candidate for the election?

I don’t know if he’s going to be my opponent, but I sent him a message congratulating him on his victory. I also advised on the need for us to conduct ourselves in a very civil manner before, during and after the election. By God’s grace I am going to be the governor of
Edo State.

How do you react to the allegation that you are being investigated by the EFCC?

I don’t have a case with EFCC.

Is it true that while in government, you played a major role in increasing the state’s debt profile?

I think the press has a major role to play here. How do you determine the debt of a State? There is a Debt Management Office of the country. If you check their office, you will get a profile of all the states and what they owe. Edo State owes about N41 billion. Edo State’s tax in a year is about N24 billion, so in two years we can pay whatever we have outstanding.

I don’t know where this whole contraption of debt is coming from. We don’t owe a bank a dime because all the bank debts have been rescheduled and refinanced so all you need to do is go to the DMO website, and look at all the states and what they are owing and you will see what Edo State is owing there. It is not a secret or an issue for contemplation.

With two years of current tax revenues we can pay our debt. But some of the debts have been restructured to 10 and 20 years. The one we borrowed from the market, we will finish paying next year so what have we done wrong financially?

Unlike people who borrowed, you can see what we have used the money for. You can see the infrastructure we have built, you could see the schools we refurbished. We met debts from PDP, we cannot see what the money was used for, even their phantom industries you can’t find them, so we have to be careful that we don’t get people who would misbehave, who have destroyed us and now singing Hosanna today. People who should be in jail, saying they want to come back and govern the state.

What are you bringing new to Edo if you become governor?

I am bringing new things with me. I come from a background of working in the institutions. So for me I look back and look at institutions. When I first came into the race, people were laughing at me, saying all I know is computer and that do I think it is computer that is used in winning elections.

But what we did was we got the names of delegates, their wards. We mapped that data, we tried to understand how these delegates evolved. During the last congress, these were the leaders who brought about the nomination of these delegates. These are their phone numbers and sometimes, these are their birthdays. So when I’m going there, I now know that rather than just barging in on these people, let me call. The key thing I want to do is to use technological information to run government. We have to run a very smart government because we don’t have the kind of money we used to.

The first innovation I want to introduce as the governor is the use of ICT. The other thing I want to do is to focus attention on what government should do, which is to provide the enabling environment for the private sector to thrive because we will need a lot more private capital to drive the economy. Look at two investments we have made in the State, those two projects alone are worth two billion dollars. If we can bring in a lot more of such investments then the whole issue of unemployment would reduce.

I will dedicate a lot more of my time to bring private investments into the state. We need to focus on the economy so that we can take advantage of the unique position of Edo state.

There are key drivers of a state economy, for us agriculture is it. Agriculture is part of us. In stock exchange today we are one of the two largest agricultural sectors. We have two large agricultural institutions in the state. What we now need to do is expand and modernise it. We already have a basis to start from.  We have a tradition of commercial farming in Nigeria. We just have to leverage on that significantly.

There will be employments in my government. The past PDP administration destroyed the civil service of Edo State. They took out a whole layer of people who were trained out of the civil service, believing naively that they were saving money, but forgetting that those people were going into the list of pensioners and they did not pay them what was due to them. If I forgive the PDP administration for what they did to this state, one thing I cannot forgive them for is what they did to the civil service of Edo state. The experienced civil servants were taken out, leaving the amateur ones to rise in rank without anyone to train them.

That is the surest way to destroy a system. So the problem we have now is to get people into the civil service and to rapidly retrain them to cope with the challenges of modern government. People will not just leave and say we want to go and see culture, most times you have something else taking you to a particular place and then in free time you can go to see the culture, so first you have to build infrastructure. Eight years ago, transportation in Edo State was bad, but now you can drive from the beginning of airport road straight to Ugbowo, you can drive around the city. What we now need to do is to increase tourism and make it attractive.

How will you react to the insinuation that you may sell the State to your friends like Alhaji Aliko Dangote and others?

I have spent most of my last 30 years in investment banking, and the only people I deal with are people who have capitals, so there is nobody in any big business today that I have not interacted with. Dangote is the most successful of them. The house I am using today for my campaign was given to me free by Hakeem Bello Osagie. He is the Chairman of Etisalat. I worked with him to divest from UBA. I have worked with almost everybody. Finally God has woken us from our slumber. How can a country that is endowed with people like you and I and all the resources we have, spend 30 billion dollars importing goods and services we can produce because we had oil revenues. We just thought it was abnormal. We have been talking about diversification but as time goes on we always stray from the plan.