By Biodun Awolaja
If the Oyo State governorship debate held at the International Conference Centre, Ibadan, and organised by West Midlands Communications, owners of Splash FM and Lagelu FM, during the week showed anything, it is what has made the state to continue to answer the oriki: Pacesetter State. Candudates of all major candidates were present except that of Accord Party, Adebayo Adelabu, whose stand was empty throughout. The debate touched all issues and sectors and was as entertaining and knowledge-driven as it was heated, at least on one occasion.
The incumbent governor, Mr. Seyi Makinde, maximally used the opportunity to showcase his cool brilliance and, at a point, warned the people never to kill or get themselves killed because of politics. The APC candidate, Senator Teslim Folarin brought into the debate his own idea of governance with his distinctive Ghana English.
They started with agriculture. While many of the candidates purveyed starry-eyed idealism, Makinde contended that governance must be data-driven. Some of the contenders spoke of farm settlements but the governor said he had already established farm estates with agribusiness companies already drawn to the state.
Hear Makinde: “We’ve turned farm settlements to farm estates and even though under construction, it has 100 percent subscription and occupancy. In Oyo State, we’ve spoken about cassava revolution. I commissioned, a few months ago, the cassava-to-sorbitol factory. It is the second of its kind in the world and the first on the continent of Africa. When we talk about agribusiness, infrastructure is very key. That is why we’ve linked Oke Ogun, which is the bread basket of Oyo State, to Ibadan with a very good road. We are linking Oke Ogun to Oyo and Ogbomosho; we’ve linked Oke Ogun to Ibarapa.”
Opposing most of the candidates’ position on local government autonomy, Makinde contended that the bone of contention was actually “the federal allocation,” which was already “drying up.” As he argued, “Oil is the main earner of forex. Oil will soon be a thing of the past; coal is now a thing of the past. For us, we are concerned with how to create wealth at the local government level. The constitutional issue that we have is that local governments are not allowed to be a source of wealth for our people. Yes they are the closest to the people but what exactly are they doing?”
Here’s the gist: although the 1999 Constitution (as amended) lists 774 local governments as the third tier of government, the fact is that in federations around the world, local governments are not federating units. They are self-funding governance institutions established under the purview of states. Currently, if the LGs listed in the 199 Constitution are not doing anything meaningful in the lives of Nigerians, that is in large part because they were not created by the people but imposed by a politically naïve and ethnically unbalanced military establishment. In a restructured Nigeria, they have to be delisted from the federal constitution, giving states the power to determine how many local governments they intend to have in accordance with extant socio-economic/sociopolitical factors. And so even though his administration rightly allows local governments “to spend their own money,” Makinde is actually looking forward to properly constituted local government administrations that can make real impact in the lives of Nigerians; he was canvassing the restructuring imperative while some of the candidates just could not see beyond the present and “local government autonomy.”
Reacting to the position of the APC governorship candidate, Senator Teslim Folarin, on the health system, Makinde’s “data, science and logic’ mantra enabled him to put issues in proper perspective. Arguing that no system “improves itself” in the manner canvassed by the senator, the governor posited that progress “is the outcome of the hard work that put into it.”
He said: “When COVID-19 hit, people were saying that we should use our stadiums as isolation centres but we said no, let us improve our healthcare facilities and we used the opportunity to shorten the deficit we had in infrastructure. And what did we use? We used date, science and logic to arrive at a situation and Oyo State came out very well.”
The question the governor asked then was this: if you join the global bandwagon and turn stadiums into isolation centres, what happens when COVID-19 has been mitigated? Relying on expert advice, he decided to upgrade the state’s health facilities to serve a dual purpose: help in containing COVID-19 and provide functional healthcare thereafter. As he said during the debate: “We are not talking about theory; it is what this administration has done. We have 351 wards in Oyo State and we said that there must be a functional category III primary healthcare centre in each of the 351 wards. Out of the 351, we have been able to renovate at least about 250. The Labour Party candidate said he would get grants from the World Health Organisation. Again, it doesn’t happen that way. This is the first administration that got concessionary loan of 50 million euros at 0.009 per cent to improve our healthcare facilities. No state in Nigeria has it. And work is ongoing at the Adeoyo State Hospital on the secondary level. Out of the four theatres in there, one is fully renovated right now.”
Naturally, there were tense moments at the debate due, essentially, to the combative posture of the APC candidate. Dismissing the claim that there was no bloodshed during the tenure of the late Governor Abiola Ajimobi, Makinde pointed out that one “Beyioku was killed in Iwo Road.” And if, as many of the candidates said, the Park Management System (PMS) was wrong, “Why is it that other states are now copying PMS? Ogun State has copied it, Lagos State has copied it, Ondo State has copied it, Osun State has copied it.”
As Makinde explained, his government established PMS to curb the proclivity for violence by NURTW men during each change of government. He said to roaring applause: “This is the first time, and the first administration, when a change of administration was not accompanied by bloodshed in motor parks. I signed an Executive Order on NURTW. I am the executive governor of this state, the chief security officer of Oyo State and I have the responsibility to ensure that we maintain law and order, which is exactly what I’ve done. If there are challenges, we don’t have to ignore them. This administration has been frontal; we are not driven by populism.”
But the APC candidate had a question: if at all there must be a PMS system, why put an “ex-convict”, Lamidi Mukaila (Auxiliary), in charge of it? In return, Makinde wanted to know “who killed Eleweomo?”, a former NURTW boss in the state who was cut down in cold blood during the Alao-Akala administration. At this point, the senator, who was detained briefly during the case, flew into a rage, daring the governor to take him to court if he was sure that he (Folarin) had a hand in the episode. A governor, the senator said, must not be making wild allegations. And the governor countered: “I have the file. The file is with me.”
But the tension was soon calmed and other issues brought in. This segment gave the governor the opportunity to explain his attitude to the local council development areas created before him: “The constitution of Nigeria specifies the number of local governments in Oyo State, 33, and when you collect money from the federation account for local governments, it is for those 33” – not more. Then, he again hit on the restructuring imperative: “That is the kernel of us saying look, constitutional amendment should look at local government autonomy from the prism of the states having control over their own local governments. If we think that 50 or even 80 LCDAS is what we require in Oyo State, we should be able to create them constitutionally.”
Speaking on the modern bus terminals, Makinde dismissed the APC candidate’s promise to turn them into hospitals and libraries. As he pointed out, the ultramodern motor park in Iwo Road is actually right behind Bishop Phillips Academy where he (Makinde) went to secondary school and is not the right location for a library and hospital. His words: “We’ve all travelled all over the world. When you go to Amsterdam, you find that it is a transportation hub. In Oyo State, Ibadan grew out of its nodality; Ibadan grew from a nodal town to a big city. Everybody coming from the East and from Lagos to the North or other parts of the South-West needs to pass through Ibadan. For us in Ibadan, having a decent transport infrastructure is one of the means by which we can expand our economy..We have increased Oyo IGR from N1.8-N1.9bn that we met to about N3.5bn averagely, without raising taxes.”
This was where the debate got more interesting. Asked by Edmund Obilo, an anchor who took over proceedings later in the debate, why he (Folarin) was denouncing Makinde’s government that was “spending more than 20 percent annual budget on education,” the senator sneered: “And what is the result?”, to roaring applause by his supporters. Then Makinde stepped in: “When this administration came in, we met one and a half universities. Now we have three universities in Oyo State.” The applause this time could be heard miles away, but Makinde continued: “We have LAUTECH fully owned by Oyo State. We have the First Technical University and we have the Emmanuel Alayande University of Education. At the secondary level, we have renovated close to 300 classrooms, we have built over 60 model schools, we have provided about 26,000 chairs and tables to our children. We gave them textbooks, we gave them notebooks, and we stopped them from paying the N3,000 education levy. We have taken 60,000 out-of-school children back to the classrooms. That is the result.”
Yet the governor and the other contenders agreed on a lot of things, including the fact that the state needed to generate more funds from the PMS system. Said the governor: “I swore to the good people of Oyo State that I may not be right all the time, I may not be perfect, but I will be honest with them all the time. Right now, the PMS system through local governments is making at least N70 to N80 million every month. It was zero when the NURTW was in charge. We have moved from zero to between N70 and N80 million per month. We are making huge investments and in the years to come, under Omituntun 2, which will be sweeter than Omituntun 1, our target is to realize between N200 and N500 million every month from the Park Management System, and it will happen by God’s grace.” And the APC candidate concurred, saying that “Oyo is bigger than the five South-East states. I think we can get more. We can do better.”
However, none of the candidates could stomach the senator’s claim that critics of the naira policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria were being unfair to his party. According to him, “the governors that went to challenge the naira policy at the Supreme Court are APC. The candidate of the APC at the federal level, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has made his position known on the matter. I have also made my position clear on the issue. I mean, Edmund (Obilo), the Central Bank is supposed to be independent, so why are you blaming APC?” The anchor reminded him that an APC president is in charge. And one of the contestant roared: “APC as a matter of fact should not be considered for re-election.”
It was at this point that Governor Makinde charged the electorate to eschew violence because it “won’t solve our problem.” Rather, what would solve the problem is PVC. He said: “In 2015, at this same venue, Senator Folarin was in front of PDP logo. I was in front of SDP logo. So, political parties will come and go. Please, don’t kill yourself because of any politician.”
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