Comrade Adams Oshiomhole is the governor of Edo State. In this interview with News Agency of Nigeria, he discusses his administration’s huge intervention in the area of infrastructure, job creation and his mission to transform the economy of his state amidst the challenge of paucity of funds.
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Road construction and rehabilitation are cardinal objectives of your administration and the scope of what we have seen is quite large. What safeguards do you have in place to ensure the durability of the projects taking into consideration the huge cost and the difficult terrain of this state?
We identified road construction as part of our priorities because it is fundamental to the economy of the state. In the urban areas, we realised that to facilitate intra-city movement and enhance the socio-commercial life of the city, people should be able to move very freely. If the roads are bad, then intra-city movement can be a nightmare, you are most likely going to find avoidable hold ups because of potholes, cost of maintaining vehicles will be on the high side and people are not able to move from one place to the other. It affects the commercial life; it also affects investment and investor confidence.
So, it’s not just that you want to beautify the place; it’s that you need it as part of our long-term economic strategy to reposition the state for sustainable social and economic growth.
We also believe that the most pressing problem facing Nigeria today is the problem of unemployment and the growing poverty among the rank of the poor. People are getting poorer and even some of the middle class are beginning to join the category of the poor.
So, we felt that we have to open up the rural areas; so we are not just working in urban areas in terms of urban renewal, we are also working in the rural areas, we try to open up the rural communities so that, first, they can have access to carry their farm produce to the market and therefore get value for their effort in the rural communities. But we also found out that some of the key basic needs including water, education and health are to be provided.
Talk about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), you can’t even deliver without a comprehensive road network. For example, you cannot locate a health centre in a rural community that is not accessible. Even if you find a way to build it, you won’t find doctors and nurses that will want to ride bicycle to go and live in a village where there is no road; and so you also find that even to provide a borehole, the vehicle that carry’s the rigs cannot access the community if there is no road. So, some of the basic needs can’t be delivered without road network.
Around the world, you find that there are roads that last for as much as fifty years. They could have concrete base but it will cost more money. You also have the kind of road that the Federal Government have been doing on Lagos-Benin; that they keep repairing from military to civilian, from government to government. And that is because they settle for cheap and poor specification. Even at the time of construction, both those who designed it and the contractors doing it know it is programmed to fail in a short run. So in Edo, we have a policy that says: “look if we must build a road, it must meet with certain minimum specification.”
Number two, it must take into account the terrain. In some location, you find that you might be safe to rely on well compacted laterite base. In some other terrain, you will find that you need hardcore as well as stone base before you do asphalt. You may find that even in asphalt you might need to do bidders’ course, a weary course before you lay another weary course. Now once the design takes into account all of those factors, you are likely to come up with roads that will last.
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It is evident that you are in a hurry to develop Edo State, but are you sure the Civil Service will cope with your pace?
I believe that every political leader should be in a hurry to develop his environment because we are all contract staff. We are contract staff in the sense that we have tenure, and so every day that you’ve lost is lost for good. Now the Civil Servant may have a life guaranteed employment; not the governor, not the commissioner. And so, once you are clear of what you want to do, the good thing is that you can get the service to adjust to the vision of the governor. But I think in the first few months, we had some challenges getting the Service to appreciate that this is a new administration and its approach to public office is different. Some complained that they were overwhelmed by the number of projects that they have.
We are working on more than 33 roads at the same time. And this is a service that in the past may be for a whole year, they probably didn’t have to work on more than one or two roads, and also roads that were very poorly designed. We also found that they were not quite used to supervision. They had always assumed that every governor just wanted to put something black on surface and take money into the pocket.
What we’ve had to do was bring in external consultants, interact with the Nigerian Society of Engineers and assess seasoned engineers who are not civil servants, appoint them on consultancy bases and allocate them to various roads for them to design and to supervise the construction. So in that way, I have secondary opinion – the opinion of the civil servant, who is the Ministry of Works, and the opinion of the independent consultant who is not a civil servant and who reports directly to the governor. That way, we are able to have a sort of little check and balancing. But even at that, I would confess that we still had couple of situations in which some of the external consultants were compromised and we’ve had cause to fire one or two of them. But, overall, it has worked reasonably well. It has also helped us in terms of costing projects. Sometimes, Nigerians believe projects are inflated, and it is true. Part of the problem may be deliberate that someone wanted the project inflated so that he can pocket something. But also, there is some arising from lack of clear cut criteria for costing. For example, if a project is not properly designed; without proper designs you cannot have what we call “bill of engineering measurement”.
There is nothing to measure and if there is no measurement there is no basis to price. It’s just like a house, if you don’t have an architectural design, there is nothing for the surveyor to quantify and unless the quantity surveyor looks at the design and comes up with bill of quantities, there is nothing to tender for contractors to bid. So, if you then award a contract without those you are just doing guesswork. So, I believe, that sometimes we get the price wrong not because people want to, but because the foundation which is the bill of engineering measurement are faulty. So overtime, we’ve made our mistakes, but we’ve also quickly tried to learn from those mistakes and improve on it.
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What have you done on food security and job creation?
From Obama in America to Merkel in Germany, to Cameron in Britain, they have a duty to provide jobs. It is not a favour to create jobs for the poor; it is in the interest of the rich to keep the poor busy. And the more the number of people who are unemployed, the higher the risk of instability of those who have the wealth and who have invested. And it is the only objective way to measure whether an economy is delivering or nor delivering.
Virtually in every household, you have a graduate that is unemployed; some have up to two or three. Some parents come to me and say, “I have three children who have graduated, two have masters and none of them is working”. It means the system is not delivering.
There are couple of ways that we can approach job creation. First is that I do not accept the argument that the state has no business creating jobs. The state must lead by example. There are a lot of jobs which can engage a lot of our young people. Most part of Nigeria can be described as dirty and filthy; just getting people to clean them up will open jobs for hundreds of thousands.
In Edo state, we came up with what we call the Youth Employment Scheme, although I was a little more ambitious because I thought we could employ between the state government and the local government working together, that we could both employ about 10,000 persons. In the event, the local governments were under the control of a different political party at the beginning and they were not prepared to collaborate.
So, we went ahead with the scheme but we were not able to employ 10,000, but were able to employ up to 6,500. In addition, we got on board over 1,100 teachers and of course if you add those ones to the people employed by the various contractors who are working in various construction sites (Between them they must be employing couple of thousands). I feel we must have created 150,000 since I came in and just last month, we resolved to take another 3,000 off the streets because we feel that the challenge of fighting crime and keeping society safe require that we not only equip the place with weapons and gadgets, communications etc.
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Continues on Monday
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