‘Ajimobi Has Re-Defined Governance In Oyo State’ Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi achievements will earn him a re-election, says his Special Adviser (Media), Festus Adedayo, who observed that Ajimobi has touched the lives of many people, just as he berated the opposition for not acknowledging his development strides in the state. WHAT has your boss done differently from previous governors? The greatest achievement of Governor Abiola Ajimobi can only be seen if you lived or used to come to this state prior to May 2011. You know, as human beings, there is the tendency to forget so quickly the pains one underwent, except upon a very deep reflection. The governor’s greatest achievement is peace. Those who lived in Oyo before the advent of this administration would tell you that it was a state of anything goes. Violence was the order of the day. When we left our homes in the morning, we asked for situation reports of the city in its entirety, because many of our kin left their homes in the morning and never returned. You needed a travel guide to move from one part of the state to another. God help you if you ever needed to pass through Iwo Road, Olomi, Molete and many other places in the state. Such was the state of violence that we inherited. Virtually one family or the other has the burial grounds of its loved ones as sad mementos of the violence that seized our state during this period. Today, Oyo State is so peaceful that you would begin to wonder if this was not the same place that was sworn to violence some few years ago. Upon coming to government, Ajimobi merely stopped interfering in the affairs of the warring factions of the road transport unions and showed them that being non-aligned to the crisis, he would invoke government’s powers to deal with fomenters of trouble. He met the leaders of the union and told them that they should run their affairs themselves and he was less interested in using them as objects of political violence. He constructed modern motor parks for them and left them to their destinies. Today, their officials undergo computer trainings in their parks and Ajimobi, unlike the Alao-Akala and Ladoja governments, who abetted the violence and brought out the beast in the union leaders, has brought out the dove in them. Again, before Ajimobi came into office, government was perceived as comprising the worst of the people. A month or so after he became governor, Ajimobi went to Abuja to make a power point presentation to one of the international agencies. They were so pleasantly shocked that their boss said that it was a refreshing departure. Development partners saw Oyo as having disappeared from the radar of development that they no longer reckoned with the state, as its leaders were too intellectually lazy to articulate the cause of development. Today, however, government is no longer perceived as dumping ground for the flotsam and jetsam of society. You now have a governor you can be proud of, in his articulation, brilliance and even in the disdain for worldly ornaments. Having done this, government constructed what it called a pyramid of development on top of which was peace and order. Today, the fad of government constructing roads that lasted barely six months is disappearing, as world-class roads that you see only in Abuja and Lagos get constructed here. We have dualised so many roads in the capital and the entrance of all major towns in the state. Water is flowing in the state almost 17 years after and our education and health systems are being given the priority that they never had before now. But the opposition parties say he has failed to meaningfully impact positively on the lives of people, especially in the area of welfare? Before now, the norm was to call the governor an ATM, a spendthrift, who flung money on the streets. Part of the freshness we brought to government was to stop this unfavourable image for our state. What people do not know is that the money being flung about was their money and not the fellow’s. They paid for those Father Xmas spraying of money through less-than-quality roads and decadence in all sectors, because it was their money meant for development. After the aggressive infrastructure, stomach infrastructure was next on the cadre. That is why you have the governor assisting traders with multiple of millions now and giving them succour in all ramifications. That was on the card long before the stomach infrastructure thesis came about. What further impartation do you need from a governor who has given and earmarked almost N1billion to assist traders? Senator Teslim Folarin has scored this government 20 per cent, in terms of performance, citing the state’s poor grades in the recently released WAEC result. How will you react to this? As an aside, I must state that Folarin is the least of persons qualified to talk about performance of a public official in government, because, while he was a senator, he performed so woefully that even Adedibu regretted that he brought such a character from the United Kingdom (UK) and offered him his first concrete job in life in that exalted office. His eight years in the Senate and four years as Senate Leader were barren years of the locusts, as he cannot point at a specific project he brought to the people of his constituency. Neighbours of Folarin, even when he was Senate Leader, at the Oluyole area of Ibadan, came to seek his assistance for the reconstruction of a pedestrian bridge that links the area with thousands of inhabitants of a place called Olusoji/Elebu. Not only did he walk the landlords out, he refused to intervene. It took Ajimobi, who was a mere aspirant, to fix the bridge and today, that bridge has saved several lives. Having said that, education is not the mantra of Rashidi Ladoja that he had 30 pupils in a class or that of many who believe that it is a school structure. It is the totality of pupils, teachers and infrastructure. To us in Oyo, education is that tripod. Even though we inherited rot of the entire tripod in the state, today, we have lifted the banner up, though I must confess that the rot was so pervasive that our contributions to its uplift may look so insignificant. We have paid about N1.7 billion WAEC school fees so far, constructed hundreds of school buildings, bought thousands of furniture and improved the welfare of teachers. We are at the moment constructing model schools in all the zones of the state. When we came on board, the position of our students in WAEC was around 32nd. At a time, we took it to 13th. We understand that it is a general national failure that WAEC must look into. Many strong APC members have dumped the party. Don’t you see this as a major setback to its fortunes in the state? Why are you not talking about many members of other parties who have joined APC? Do you think APC can survive the onslaught of the PDP and Accord Party in next year’s general election? Most of the people who postulate this are people who take the electorate for granted. But the electorate are not dunces. What we have in PDP are yesterday men who are energised by the pyrrhic victory of (Ayo) Fayose in Ekiti, but when everything comes to its brass-tacks, Ekiti is different from Oyo. Like the governor always says, when they come, don’t fight them, just ask those who had been in office before what they did while there and those who are just coming what they had done before. Ajimobi has redefined the concept of governance and the state can never be the same again. In the area of comparison, Ladoja demolished some shops in Aperin and other places while in office, but was never recorded to have built a single shack for traders. He never gave loans to traders, but Ajimobi relocated traders from the streets, built new markets and gave them free of charge. He also instructed local government chairmen to build markets, which are at advanced stages of completion. He has given over N200 millions to traders and is still planning to give more. So, when I hear people say the government lacks a human face, I begin to ask myself what their intention are. What is your reaction to allegations that over 70 per cent of this government’s projects are concentrated in Ibadan, thereby neglecting other towns and communities outside the capital city? While I will not dispute their claim, I will dispute the figure they gave. Yes, the state capital is getting the advantage that all state capitals get, in terms of concentration of developments. The unwritten belief is that, show me your state capital and I will tell you who you are. Many who seek to invest in Oyo State approximate the capital as the state and I tell you, before now, Ibadan was really very bad and labeled the dirtiest in Nigeria. So, it is understood that this would be the hub of concentration of urban renewal efforts. Secondly, this is the metropolis, where there is migration to and as such, public utilities and infrastructure are bursting at their seams. Governments needed to concentrate on the capital. However, other parts of the state are also witnessing development, such as the road dualisation going on in virtually all major towns in the state and water projects I spoke about, among others.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:38:14 +0000
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