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.
Continued from last Friday
Some of your critics don’t seem to be happy about the substantial increase in internally-generated revenue thinking it is at the expense of the comfort of your people. What is your take on this?
No. I think people are happy; if they are not, I am happy. There must be critics and I must encourage them to criticize. They can help us when they think we are making mistakes. We look at it another way and adjust, but those who have to criticize for its own sake, you have to allow them to have their day. That is the beauty of democracy. When I assumed office, our monthly receipt was about N300 million a month on the average, sometimes, it drops off to N250 million a month and our wage bill and overheads averaged about N2 billion, so what that meant is that if we don’t receive money from the federation account, we cannot even pay salaries.?
Government doesn’t earn money other than through taxation. It doesn’t have any other sources. I am not sure whether we should say we are fortunate, but we are in an unusual situation in Nigeria where we extract dollar from the soil, and then we share it on monthly basis and like any lazy man who wins pools all time, we no longer think, we no longer plan. We just wait for 30 days to go to Abuja, How many dollars did we extract this month? This is the amount. How much is the federal government ready to put on the table?
Because it is not everything they put on the table. Like a bad dog. It kills two grass cutters in the bush, it chooses to bring only one to the house; it is only the one it brings to the house that the natives will eat. The one that it eats in the bush, you may suspect that it has eaten part of it, but what can you do? It’s the dog. It can even refuse to go back to the bush, so whatever they bring to the table, we share, and then we wait for the next month. I don’t think that is development.
When I was in the NLC, I had argued that if all governance entails is to pick a cheque from the centre, share it, go home and pay salaries, then what we need is just pay clerks, we don’t need governors, and we don’t need all these experts to pay salaries. You just need one competent cashier and one competent book keeper. They collect the cheque, share it into salaries and wages, buy batteries, buy fuel and wait for the next month. I think that governance and leadership is about challenging the people to work and government to create the environment to enable people to earn and then you tax that earning to provide infrastructure which will enable the people to have the right environment with which to work and earn their keep. Nobody can lecture me about poverty, because my parents were poor… nobody in my village could say I was poorer than your father, because we are all lived on the farm, except to the extent that he put in so much and you choose to put in so little, but the environment was the same.
But as poor as my father was, he thought it was a shameful thing if he was not able to pay his tax and so he paid his taxes from his meagre income and he wasn’t alone. Every villager paid his tax and when the whole village was meeting, those who did not paid their taxes were considered as not fit and proper to attend community meetings.
But with the advent of oil, so many things have changed and we all think we can make our omelette and yet keep our eggs intact. Nobody wants his eggs broken, but all of us want to enjoy omelette, it just doesn’t work that way. So I had to tell our people that I didn’t rig myself into office. I was elected and that makes the difference. Those who were not elected don’t have the courage to ask those whose votes they stole to come and pay taxes. And I think some governors have that challenge. That is the crisis of legitimacy. You don’t have what it takes to look the people in the eye and say pay your tax.
All I promise is that I will apply state resources judiciously. And so, we have to enforce the pay-as-you-earn. The law has always been there. To govern means mandate to collect the tax, according to law made not by me, law made by parliament. And for those not covered by pay-as-you-earn, the Land Use Act is clear. When we give you titled documents, you are supposed to pay some fees for land use. Whether it is tenement rate or whatever it’s called. You want a titled document, C-of-O; you are supposed to pay for it. You are a trader, a businessman, you make so much money, alright it’s good, and we encourage people to make money because we have to create wealth before we distribute it. But one way to distribute the wealth is that you pay your tax and it is in the interest of those who are rich to pay tax so that the poor can be provided for so we can create a basic social safety net. Right now, we are at N1.5 billion. We got to N1.5 billion last month.? But if you take into account the fact that we are coming from N300 million to N1.5 billion, that is quite something, but we think we can get up to N2 billion with a little more effort and we are hoping that before the end of the year, God helping us, we’ll get there.
You drew an analogy and told us the story about a bad dog killing two grass cutters and bringing only one to the table. I am of the opinion that corruption is not limited to the centre. In Edo State and in all our states, there are corrupt people, have you been able to plug some of the areas from where corruption thrives.
Corruption is widespread, federal, state, local governments, private sector, public agencies, everywhere. We are even beginning to hear even some religious organizations accusing each other of corrupt practices. The truth is that there are a lot of abuses in the management of the federation account.
You heard last week that the Commissioners for Finance had to adjourn their meeting because NNPC overnight doubled the amount they claim they are using for fuel subsidy from how many billions to two hundred and something billion in a month. And we are saying even if every Nigerian is drinking petrol like pure water, what is our consumption per capita of PMS?
We are not talking of diesel, we are not talking of black oil. And it is the diesel that the business people use. We are talking of PMS which only those who drive small vehicles, big buses don’t even use. So, we believe that there are lots of abuses there. And the constitution is also clear about it that the NNPC does not have the powers to spend money at source that has not been appropriated. NNPC is not a government. It is an agency of government. What it spends must be based on appropriation and it spends money that has not been appropriated. So that is what I mean by a bad dog that kills so many grass cutters and brings only a part to the table. I need to expatiate on that.
That is not to say that there are no issues in the states.
There are a lot too. Federation account collapsed by the time I assumed office on Nov. 12, 2008. That was the peak of the world economic crises. Our total receipts dropped to N1.6 billion, while our wage bill was about N2 billion and our local revenue was about N300 million.
Everything added together was below what we need to pay salaries. And if you are coming from my kind of background, it can never be my lot to tell workers that sorry for whatever reason on the planet, I cannot pay salaries as at when due, so I just said, look, two things I have to do. One is to look at the pattern of expenditure and also look at the possible sources of income and I identified the leakages and blocked them.
The first year we saved almost N5 billion in the cost of running government. That N5 billion naira is now ploughed to capital projects and of course we also collected and aggressively pursued tax revenue drive, so this is not to say that all is now perfect. We realised that the long-term challenge of eliminating abuses, corruption and others in the system required that you begin to find a way to doing things differently because if you apply the same old tool you cannot expect different result.
So, we made some investment in the area of ICT and tried to eliminate as much as possible manual recording and paper work in our administration, including land administration, tax administration, salary administrations, and the much-talked-about ghost workers. We introduced biometrics, pensioners now have to thumbprint and we found that those who are dead are dead forever because they can’t be around to do thumbprint, so we do biometrics and that way, we are able to eliminate abuses in public sector salary administrations.
We eliminated a lot of wastage. We are able to track records more accurately. We saved on time and with these and several other interventions, we have eliminated a lot of leakages in government, but there are still leakages. What I say to our people is if you lose N10 out of every N100, it is probably better than when we were losing N60 out of every N100 and if we sustain the process that we have started building institutions, then one day I believe we will get there. Just yesterday at the council meeting, we passed a draft bill, set up a special agency for ICT unit so that we can retain knowledgeable, high-skilled communications people who can manage our computer systems and other things so as to eliminate as much as possible paper work.
In the past, preparing vouchers was handled by different ministries, now just five guys in our ICT units generate the pay slips and it is difficult for the dead to come on pay day to receive salaries and return to the grave as they use to do and some couple of other things we are doing. That way, we are blocking wastage while we are generating more revenue and that translates to development which people now asked me the question. Comrade, they used to say Edo is so poor that you can’t even construct roads, so where are you getting the money from?
Politically I used to tell them that it is what the godfathers used to eat, we have stopped them from eating and we are giving it to people but I can tell you that in addition to stopping the godfathers from eating, we are also blocking the loopholes and looking at possible sources of generating legitimate income for government. For example, we find that there are people who occupy 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 square metres residential plots and they are supposed to have their certificate of occupancy “X” thousands per year as ground rent and they are not paying, now so come and pay us in arrears. People who were making so much money they spend so much on socials, but their tax receipts is in hundreds, now they pay in millions. Our philosophy is put the tax burdens on the shoulders of those who can bear it and the first response people tell is that when you do that you are not going to be popular. I say governance and government is not really a popularity contest. It is about issues; about challenges and about leadership and then people remind me when you were in the helm of the union, you used to fight lot of us here, only God, I myself I can’t count how many strikes I have organised; some successful, some failed, but I have never organised a strike against payment of taxes.
In all my union training, I was not told that tax can be avoided. I was only told that you can design your tax in a way to favour the poor or designed it to favour the rich depending on the orientation of the government, but everybody must pay, which is what we are now doing in Edo State.
Concluded