Date: 2011-05-28

A few days before he took the oaths as the sixth elected governor of Kwara State, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, or simply Maigida, as he became known from the electioneering campaigns, sat for a chat in Ilorin with newsmen who were eager to gain glimpses into his administration. Eloquent and media savvy, he spoke for close to three hours, during which he answered every question posed at him. Political Editor Yemi Adurotoye and Business Editor Kayode Olasehinde were at the event and reported these excerpts. 

What will be the areas of priority in the development programme of your administration?

In the course of the electioneering campaign, we went to all the wards, telling them what we want to do if voted in and we got a lot of feedbacks on their areas of need. The requests largely cut across infrastructure and human capital development. We have been able to put together all the information gathered into a working document.

In our desire to move the state forward, we have identified three key areas. The first is human capital development and under this, Health comes first. Health is wealth. Sound health enhances productivity. We will drive our policy on health home, ensuring that every nook and cranny of the state enjoys healthcare services. We shall ensure that no community moves beyond 500 metres before accessing healthcare services. We shall further support the system by building and renovating more health centres and supply them with basic equipment and drugs. We will ensure that within a cluster of primary health centres we have a general hospital, which is the secondary level. We will promote referral centres to provide support to the primary and secondary levels of health care.

The next under human capital development is education. Our plan is broad-based and covers the formal and the informal areas of the sector. There will be programmes for skills acquisition and refresher training for civil servants, to develop their capacity for efficient service delivery. We will set up a vocational training centre in Ajase-Ipo to support the unskilled people and fill the gap of manpower need. Our plan for education is part of the current ten-year module of development out of which about three years are already gone. We are going to carry out the education policy reform agenda to the letter to ensure quality materials and quality personnel are engaged in the system. These are what will position our children for future challenges. There is in-built mechanism in the reform for input-output measurement, through monitoring and evaluation.

That takes us to infrastructure because it is key to development. Many of these facilities are not well-maintained and we have taken into cognizance these shortcomings. The biggest challenges we are facing in this state have to do with road, water and energy. We are going to face these challenges to enable our people have the minimum comfort even in the rural areas so that they can enjoy like their counterparts in the urban areas. 
No community will be left without electricity and every community will be connected to the national grid. The state will also have its own independent power plant, which will support industrialization. That is our own way of addressing the challenges of power. 

Water supply is another challenge. Though it is a global challenge, we will do our best in increasing the capacities of our dams because of the ever increasing demand as the population grows. We will come up with a scheme that will allow everyone to have access to potable water. This will also reduce the spread of water-borne diseases.

Motorable roads are important and the out-going administration has done a lot in that regard. Our attention will now be on rural roads. It is imperative we allow access to the sources of raw materials for our agro-allied industries so that industrialization will be taking a sound footing. Economic development is dependent on roads and we are prepared to move away from a public service-driven economy. And we are not going to operate a mono-economy but look into areas of diversification of the state economy, largely supported by the private sector. We will cause this by creating the enabling environment.

We will be looking at unemployment too. It is one of the feedbacks we had during the campaigns. We are going to approach solving it drastically. We have those skilled and kitted as well as those who had just graduated from schools but are unable to get job placements. We will create temporary jobs for them.

Do you intend to bring back members of the People's Democratic Party who left with the elder statesman, Dr. Olusola Saraki?

We have been able to go through the election process successfully. Our achieving what has been done is by providence, I mean having the victory at the polls. But for every step taken, there have been lessons learnt. We are all students of the Grand Patron of Kwara politics, Dr. Olusola Saraki, the Waziri of Ilorin. And for every success, we owe it to him. So, there is no issue of bringing back or taking forth, we have always been part and parcel of Baba Oloyee's political empire. Waziri still carries the glory of our victory as it is today. Our victory is Oloyee's victory.

Do you have plans for places like Offa, Oro, Omu-Aran, Jebba by way of turning them into focal points for regional development, to reduce burden on facilites in the state capital?

I first talked about development of Ilorin because it is the first entry point for outsiders, particular prospective investors. And when you look at the linkages it has with most parts of the country – there are road, air as well as the rail travels. We shall also look at other support areas with necessary ingredients that quickly fit into the support scheme we are giving to Ilorin for the purpose of investment drive. We are looking at other areas that have the potentials, having the comparative advantages to the state capital; for instance, we have the Owa-Kajola area mapped out for cement production because of the presence of marble and limestone deposits.

Two other areas we have not explored are tourism and solid minerals development; largely due to the huge capital demands and because we have not been able to get the right partners. In all cases, we are able to come with our counterpart funding. But the right partners must be able to come with their own equity support.

How do you intend to check the indiscriminate use of land resources in the state capital?

In terms of control of physical development, the Town Planning Authority is being geared towards regulating development because we want to bring sanity into the development of land resources. We are beginning to see that it is imperative to properly restructure town planning process to be able to pay the kind of levies due, so that the state government can also support with necessary infrastructure. When you build on areas where there are supposed to be pipelines or water pipes, it would be difficult to adjust the structural development. The agency will have to go round and educate our people on all these.

What are you doing about having the kind of team that will work with you in realizing your set targets?

I was in government for seven years and I have seen the success story. The biggest support that made the outgoing administration successful has to do with the human capital side. I am not unfamiliar with the good hands which are within the system and outside the system. I must let it be known that we shall be informed by the desire to provide good services for Kwarans so we will ensure we engage professionals who can deliver results.

Are you going to involve the opposition in your government through what is called the Government of Unity arrangement?

Once you have won an election and you become a governor, you are no longer for one party but you are guided by the manifesto, policies and philosophy of the party. We will run an all-embracing government to the extent that the opposition will be allowed to criticize our programmes and policies. We will allow those who want to contribute positively because development will not be on partisan lines.

It is just four years to the terminal date of the MDGs. What are you going to do to ensure the goals are realized?

Millennium Development Goals have been the fulcrum on which our policies were defined and that is going to continue. We have used MDGs guage to define our education policy, water policy, road policy and others. Because we are coming from a little below zero, that is the reason why we seem to be short of where we should be. Of course, there are other inhibitors that are slowing down the rate. That does not mean we are not complying.

Kwarans made the plea for the reduction of fees payable in KWASU. What are you planning to do?

On the school fees, we need to go back to the basic and understanding how the system is run. If you want quality education and with a process that stand sthe test of time, it doesn't come cheap. Too much subsidies cannot make government sustainable. But we have to come up with a process so that the university will be able to relieve the students of their burdens in between current level of fees payment and quality education. When the University is able to come up with that system we will partner it to raise fund. The university is after being world-class, so it has to be at that level of operation but a support scheme will be put in place.

What is your position on Joint Account with Local governments and scrapping of local government?

Joint Account is to the advantage of the local government, the council chairmen should be the ones struggling to have it in place because most of them cannot fund capital projects after paying salaries and overhead cost. They are the ones benefiting the most. I'm not in support of scrapping the local government as third tier of government.

What are your plans to bring Kwarans out of the present poverty level? 

We have a lot of programmes at hand. Our first level of support will be via agriculture. We have seen how we can support our subsistent farmers and improve standard through best practices. We are going to support from the level of farming to processing and then to utilization. We will look at improvement in yield. The Federal Government has also promised irrigation. This is another area we will train our people to tap into. We will encourage our people to take farming seriously.
Tourism is another area we are going to develop to be able to absolve our teeming youths. Establishment of the cargo terminal is another level of business that will create multiplier effects much more like that of the Aviation College. Theses are areas we have put together to begin to empower our people. For the rural level, we will be empowering through agriculture.

How have you been managing the process of transition of power because it has been the subject of controversy in some states?

In Kwara state, we are having a transition passing through a smooth phase, not just a smooth phase but an outgoing governor is handing over to someone who has been part and parcel of the outgoing administration, someone who has been part of government business in the last eight years, someone who has been positioned to know the policy formulation and implementation processes. I've been part of the block-building process of the outgoing administration. I've been part of the finance management team. I've been able to see the successes of the outgoing administration and the advantages of programmes and policies put in place. By and large, the transition cannot be smoother than what it is today because we have an incoming governor whose mindset is in tandem with what is already in place. We will have to just improve and consolidate on the current policies without experiencing any truncated process.

In line with the 35per cent affirmative action of involving women in governance, how many women should we expect in your cabinet?

We are in support of that policy but appointments will be exigency-driven. We will not be giving position to women for gender reason but because we have noticed the person has capacity to deliver results.

Civil servants are interested in knowing when the new minimum wage will take effect. What is your take on this?

We are very much willing to pay, we will try everything humanly possible to see to its early take-off. What I want us to do is to support one another in pursuing the ingredients that would make it easily possible. One of the ingredients is to skew the revenue allocation much in favour of the state and local governments so that it can be easily shouldered. Beneficiaries need to join hands with government to put pressure on the Federal Government.

When will your government bring the other two KWASU campuses on board?

We are trying to see if one of them could be brought up in about two years. But it is going to be largely based on the availability of resources because we will have to first strengthen the one at Malete.


We shall explore tourism and solid mineral development - Ahmed