Kwara State Governor Abdulfattah Ahmed has been saddle with affairs of the state in the last five years as a second term governor, in this interview with selected journalists during a media parley to mark this year’s Democracy Day, he gave a retrospective review and prospect of his administration in the state. NATIONAL PILOT'S GENERAL EDITOR, JOKE ADENIYI was there.
Excerpts:

What is your reaction to the President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day broadcast vis-a-vis its economic implications to Nigerians and Kwara State?

I listened to the president’s broadcast and I see a picture of where Nigeria is today, I see a picture of where we are coming from, the picture of where we need to go to, I see a picture of what happened to get us to where we are and I see a picture of what we need to do to move us to the desired level. This is because we have consistently watched the system breakdown down gradually in various facets; economic, social, infrastructure and this is not unconnected with the fact that we allowed too much of politicking to eat into useful time of governance. It hasn’t allowed us to pay lot of attention and resources of course to areas that affect us as a people. And that has brought us to where we are today.

So, this tells me that time has come for us to truly recognise our strength and challenges, and that is the first step forward. Secondly, we have to look at our comparative advantage, and thirdly, we need to create a sense of determination of togetherness to move to the Promised Land. So, the President has rightly put it to us that yes, there are challenges, but there are opportunities. And as a state, we have since key into this policy of seeing opportunities and advantages even in this time of economic crisis. This is what we hold on to so as to be propelled to a desirable level. So I see a sense of congress in the president’s speech in terms of economic expectations, social comfort and of course improved lifestyle for average Nigerian. And that is what we have key into as a state in policy terms.

Lately, we have seen great reduction in terrorism; Boko Haram, another security challenge that is rearing its ugly head is the herdsmen killing people, what do you think is the best way to handle this issue, and what in your own view, is solution to pipeline vandalism?

As a country we need to have a retrospective review of where we are coming from. Why have people who have hitherto lived together begin to take arms against themselves? One thing comes as clear as crystal-economic because perpetually man is always in a race of strifing for control of power, resource and income and that propels him to key into opportunities, in the course of this, situations will arise that people will react differently to.

The concept of cattle rearing clashing with farming shouldn’t arise at all, but this is so because agriculture has never been streamlined to be driven as a major focus of revenue generation for Nigeria, otherwise we would have put regulatory systems in place that is, farmers’ protection platforms, produce protection platforms, land management issues with respect to either cattle rearing or cropping, strong research institutions, we would have created areas where our farmers can operate. Imagine a situation where the cattle farmers are in a designated area where they can grow grass to feed their animals and as such less energy is being expended by the cattle in moving around. In such situation their cattle can be properly attended to and they too can go to school, contribute their quota to the economic system.

All these are possible when the right policies and orientation are in place. Our agriculture reforms have largely been concentrating on crop farming, we haven’t given attention to this sector in terms of strong support, strong organisation and optimal benefit. This is what we are required to do without sentiments. Time has come for us as a country to truly look at cattle rearing as an area of farming that requires deliberate policies. And, the cattle rearing platform will be fully incorporated into our agricultural policy and the benefit can be optimised. If we allow it to continue to be driven under the current ethno-political colouration, we would not get there. So, that is my position. There is no policy in place for cattle rearing to be seen as business in Nigeria and that is what, we are required to do, once we get it done, anybody can go into cattle rearing. It is not the exclusive preserve of the Fulani or any other ethnic nationale.

If we begin to see it from that angle I think the challenge will begin to reduce through cohesion of ideas and bringing a sense of congress that will drive our policy in the right direction. And once these policies are put in place, we have to work out an implementation platform. And again, these policies can only be truly carried out if the sub-nationals are part of policy formulation and implementation, that is only when we can begin to get results. You see when policies are formulated and allowed to be driven from the central government through the sub-nationals it will work out. And that is what we need to get there.

On the issue militants in the South-south blowing pipelines, it is unnecessary. The militants have no reason to blow up pipelines, if they have grouse with the system. There a thousand and one ways outside blowing of pipes. We can sit and resolve issues; through dialogue.

Before now payment of workers’ salaries, was very easy for your administration, but at what point did things go wrong and what is the way out so that the state can go back to that glorious era when can easily access their salary?

I feel very sad that people work and find it difficult to get their salaries. Salary collection should not be a problem for workers. And, I had always feared this situation. My fear was not unconnected with the fact that I saw the way and manner the economy of the country and sub-nationals ditto local governments were running and saw danger in it. Apart from being a mono-economy dependant on crude oil, very little activity was happening outside the civil service. If the civil service was driven with funding from Internally Generated Revenue, then I don’t have a problem with that. But, civil service is run with money accruing from proceeds of crude oil, the pricing of which is exogenous to us, which is a challenge to us. It is not a sustainable level of driving governance.

However, be that as it may, we have found ourselves at this level today, the challenges are huge. And, don’t forget that we have always been saddled with high level of unemployed youth that make up 65 percent of the population, this is huge. But, as people in government our responsibility is to make the environment enabling for people to unleash their potentials. And what are those responsibilities? One, security; it is a social contract, two, infrastructure and three, economic stimulus. This we must start to put in place.

Unfortunately our capacity to put it in place has been gradually reduced by consistent drop in the price of crude oil, which has affected our earnings and the money that is distributable. For us in Kwara, we have been managing our resources by ensuring that we don’t overstretch our borrowing capacities and we try to work within frameworks that allow our capacity to repay to be hinged and determined by our IGR capacity. That determines our borrowing capacity in the market. So, that is why we have been consistently managing our resources as it is. The only challenge now is that the federation allocation is consistently reducing and making planning difficult. So, we find ourselves augmenting salary payment with the IGR because it is a primary obligation. But we cannot continue to use everything we get to pay salaries and that is what has prompted us to cut cost of governance. The two major costs are personnel and overhead.

Overhead cost we have been able to reduce drastically by using what we call zero budgeting system. It has enable us to review all our cost heads and determine them on need basis and allocate our resources as such. In fact, this has brought our overhead cost to manageable level; close to 60percent savings.

For the personnel cost, the only way to do that is to determine who is employed and who is not employed with the state government. That is what informed the ongoing verification exercise using the bank data generated under the BVN process. We see it as the first leg of input into checking our payroll. After then, we will still go into certificate and employment letter verification. It will be a continuous process until we get it right. A process after which we will be able to sit and know exactly what the cost of running Kwara State civil service, personnel and overhead cost is. Then from that level we would have generated a platform for planning because we will know how many people we need in the system and we will see the right openings for new entrants who want to work in the civil service, because right now everything seem blocked as a result of our inability to pay those that are currently there.

By the time we finish the exercise, we expect to have realise some savings, which will enable us see the deficit areas and fill them up. It is a database that is long overdue, required to put in place to aid planning. Planning includes promotion, retirement, new intakes, training and so many other things, strengthening the civil service and making it truly professional. It is a beneficial thing that is happening now and subsequent governments will have good platform to plan on.

The most important thing in planning is data, if you don’t have it, you will be using estimate and assumptions cannot be correct. So to get it right get the right data. We have also improved on our IGR. This is an area where we did not put the desired effort in the past. Money was coming in from the federation allocation and Nigeria has not been truly driven by taxes, but it is now becoming clearer that we have to move to that area of improving on responsiveness and responsibility on the part of the leadership. And I am beginning to see a situation where with improved revenue there will be improved infrastructure as specific infrastructure will be tied to specific revenue generation.

Our revenue has started growing since we changed our revenue process; training the people on the process and technology, and we are still growing to a level, where we hope to move Kwara to a truly IGR dependent state. For now we have seen more than 100percent growth. We are expecting to see 300, 400 and 500percent growth in that area. What we have largely put in place is a process change. The collection process was a huge challenge and did not allow the money to accrue to the desirable level, but now that we have driven the whole process electronically, we will begin to see lot more funds coming into the coffers and we will be able to apply it to the required areas. So from this area we will begin to have inflows into revenue base.

What is the situation with the state-owned tertiary institutions like the Colleges of Education and College of Arabic and Islamic Studies (CAILS) that are going on strike?

The issue of tertiary institutions is not isolated from what I spoke about earlier. It is those ones that have not demonstrated enough capacities to grow their revenues that we are supporting because of the nature of their responsibilities. For those ones that you mentioned, we are still streamlining their revenue generating capacities and also looking at how much augmentation they require. Don’t forget that it is because of the fact that we have shortfall that we are doing this.

We are doing it because we want to reduce pressure and I am assuring you that if there is any institution that has been left out, it won’t go beyond this month before we conclude on areas of revenue generation, overhead and personnel costs, the gap that exists there and what we need to do to support them. With the situation of things in Nigeria today, one solution to it is not strike. But like I said I feel pained when people are unable to get what is due to them, that is why every effort that is required that we get smooth salary payment I am putting in place. We will pay the salary arrears but this is dependant on increased revenue from IGR because there is no external money coming in from the federation account, in fact it is going down. So the only solution now is to strengthen our revenue, which has potential of generating N5bn monthly. The potentials are there.

The potentials in Kwara is enormous enough to drive economy of Nigeria. If we can get even half of that, this problem of salary payment will be a thing of the past. We won’t have to wait for federation allocation to do all these things. So this is my dream, this is what I am putting all my strength into to make Kwarans see how we can jointly change our destiny. We can take advantage of this crisis and look at the opportunities. I don’t want us to see problems but opportunities. There is no way revenue will grow that I will not pay salaries. Government has become more transparent now.

Five years down the line, how do you feel being governor of Kwara?

I thank God Almighty because I keep looking back from where I am coming from. That is what I reflect on daily and it gives me sense of responsibility. God has a purpose for it. I think of how much more I can do in the next three years to change people’s lives. I had a dream of my own Kwara even when I was in school. Now God has put me where l can actualise it. So each day I see the responsibility to do certain things towards changing people’s lives and to create a path so that anyone that is coming in will be able to do much better for Kwarans.

What legacy do you want to be remembered after you must have left office?

I want to be seen as someone who has come to improve human capital development, education and health, infrastructure, who has made water available, who has come to improve on roads and schools, who has come to create enabling environment for youths to change their orientation and to want to be seen as someone who has come to change the economic environment of the state from civil service driven environment to a truly private sector driven environment. I want to leave a peaceful Kwara.

At what process stage is the proposed bond that your administration is seeking to access from the capital market?

In our quest to drive capital development in the state, we looked at the various platforms that we can borrow from. One, the capital market; two, the money market; three developmental institutions and four, the buyer’s credit systems. These are potential windows that institutions and states can access funds. But in all these sources of funding there is one common denominator and that is capacity to pay back. And that is the determining factor for how much you can raise. The two key things that determine the capacity to borrow money are the federally allocated funds and the internally generated revenue. Don’t forget that at the time we muted the idea of going to the capital market to raise money, we premised our capacity at that time on our finances and that was about a year ago. But as it were, the federal allocation has gone down and the IGR is something we have just restructured; growing from infancy to the desired level.

So, in a nutshell that has impeded our capacity to access the initial N20bn bond because of the consistent fall in federal revenue, which made us to look at how much we can raise, which made us to drop it to N10bn, which we are pushing for now, subject to stabilisation of the revenue. So what is stopping the bond per say is this revenue capacity. So we are reviewing each of these borrowing windows vis-a-vis our capacity to service whatever we take and in such a way and manner that it will not put undue pressure on current recurrent expenditure that is salaries and wages, overheads, cost of running governance and other areas.

There are others factors to be considered as well. We might ultimately go for the buyer’s credit, it depends if we are to structure terms with institutions, which will enable us to carry on with our capital projects with steady, strong repayment system, that gives a sense of comfort to the service provider. But one thing is clear we will be able to carry out these projects under these terms, there are not too many of them, but they will be big enough to make a difference to Kwarans especially in traffic management; we will get to do the underpass at the Geri-Alimi like the one in Maryland in Lagos State, because of the level of traffic growth in that axis, we want to ensure that the two campuses of KWASU in Osi and Ilesa Baruba ; Agriculture and Environmental Studies become functional, we want to extend the dual carriage to UITH because a lot of people’s lives depend on traffic in that area, then there is a lot of pressure on Ganmo road, hopeful we will be able to dualise it, we will do the Agbabiaka road to serve as a by-pass, we want to see that all the entry roads into Ilorin are dual carriage roads. These are some of the things we want to put in place to ease vehicular and human movement within the state.

We also hope to renovate the indoor sports hall at the state stadium to bring back the lost glory of what the state was known for. And we have some ongoing roads; a few of them have been captured in the 2016 federal budget, we pray that funds are released and the projects carried on, like the Kaiama-Kishi road, if that project is funded, it will be a great relief for Kwara State government ultimately Kwarans, the Share-Patigi-Bada road, Kogi boundary will also give us relief because we are currently doing part of it, so you can imagine the savings that will come from there. So also the Ajasse-Erin Ile boundary; these are huge savings. This is the best thing that has ever happened to Kwara in the last 16years. For the first time we are getting projects incorporated into federal budget, that we would have hitherto spent our money, projects that are very critical to our people, look at the Ohan Bridge; it is in the federal budget. When last did we have this opportunity to be noticed and getting projects captured at the federal level?