Agagu has re-invented governance in Ondo State - PDP Chairman

Tayo DairoOndo State has from time been registering as one of the hotbeds of politics in the South-West zone of Nigeria. If the state has started moving away from that condition, the reason, according to the Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state, Dr. Tayo Dairo, is because the governor, Dr. Olusegun Agagu has been re-inventing governance of the state. He explains the process to Idowu Samuel in this interview.

HOW would you rate the achievements of the PDP government in Ondo in the past one year?
It is all about the advantage of continuity. That is what we are seeing in Agagu’s administration in Ondo State today. When Governor Agagu came into office, he brought a lot of innovations to governance. People were anxious initially that he had a manifesto before coming to power, and that what is the reason for setting up project and planning implementation committee which comprised of intellectuals and people of diverse background to fashion out a blue-print for the state? Even some of us in the party queried the rationale behind it. But with hindsight now, we know that it was necessary to put up a proper perspective of how he would govern the state. The first18 months of the administration was a planning stage and the implementation of the programme was a total deviation from the standard practice of governance. So, people were grumbling about lack of dividends of democracy. But in the last 18 to 24 months, Agagu has now been coming up with the master plan that he designed some five years ago which, to my mind, will move Ondo as the foremost state in this country within the next five years. And I have said it a couple of times that we will be a reference point for Africa.

How?
Let’s look at the infrastructural outlay that he has done. This is the first government in this country that has tackled the problem of riverine area in a different way.In Ese-Odo Local Government, vehicle has never gotten to Agada-Ogbon of the Ijaw- speaking area of the country before. Anytime Honourable Kekemeke (the SSG of Ondo State) and his likes were going home, they were forced to park their vehicles at Igbokoda and take a boat. But now, access road will take you to Agada-Ogbon. Already, there is a plan to link Agada-Ogbon to Agadagba. Once that bridge is put in place, then all the Ijaw- speaking areas in the state will have their problems solved. Look at the Ilajes. This government has constructed a road from Igbokoda to Ayetoro. The Mahins, the Ugbos that have never seen vehicles ply their area before can now drive home and when they see what is happening in their areas, people start to wonder. When he was addressing the way he would distribute the infrastructure, he said 40 per cent of the road would be done in Ondo Central District, because Akure, which is the state capital, will have some advantage. 30 per cent in Ondo North, 30 per cent in Ondo South. In Akure town alone to date, 1, 109 kilometres of road has been tarred. In Owo, 57 kilometres of road is already with asphalt overlay. In Ikare, you have 27 kilometres of road having asphalt overlay. In Ondo town, there are more than 33 kilometres of road. You need to see what is going on at Okiti-Pupa. Secondly, our government did not say that the Owo-Ikare-Ajowa Road is a federal government road. Governor Agagu went to the Federal Government and said that it would cost 1.2billion naira to do the road. ‘If you haven’t got the money, can you give me the permission to do it and when you have the money you pay back to me?’ Up till now, we have not received more than 60 per cent of the money. So, that is so much about road. Electricity – for the first time ever, the national grids now get to Igbonla and Ayetoro at the cost of over 1.2 billion naira. For them to erect poles in that terrain, we have to pile the ground as far as 60 metres in some areas. If the Federal Government had been doing this, all the restiveness taking place in the Niger-Delta would have been avoided. Now, look at the health sector. The policy that we have here is that there will be a basic health centre in each of the 203 wards of Ondo State. There will be comprehensive health centres in all the local government areas. There will be a general hospital per local government. There will be a specialist hospital per senatorial district and, a centre of excellence in Akure. As of today, 198 basic health centres are already in place in the state. There is no local government, of all 18 of them, without a general hospital in Ondo State. The comprehensive health centres, we already have16, out of the 18 we promised. And you will now see, in our health policy, every woman that is pregnant now will have free treatment from conception to delivery. Let’s go to education. Apart from the buildings that were built by Chief Awolowo in 1955 at the inception of basic primary education, you will not see any other structure. Between 2003 and 2007, Governor Agagu built 280 blocks of six classrooms. Between 2007 and 2011, we are building a thousand in partnership with some voluntary donors from Canada. There are 3,000 computer units distributed all over our schools. Computer literacy is already on board. The National University Commission (NUC) conducted accreditation throughout Nigerian universities and our own Ondo State University was adjudged the best state-owned university and the seventh in the entire country. We are moving to be the best.

The impression within Ondo and outside is that the government is a non-achiever. What do you think is the reason?
Well, in the first place, we see that we did not at the beginning publicize what this government is doing the way it should be done. It was because of internal sabotage. The PDP was run by an executive here in Ondo State.We had the problem of PDP fighting itself. The main opposition we have today in this state is the Labour Party (LP) and I can tell you that 90 per cent of LP members are from the PDP. The governorship candidate of the LP, Segun Mimiko, was our former Secretary to the State Government before he became PDP minister, the Chairman of the LP, the deputy governorship candidate, was the former chairman of the PDP who occupied this seat that I am in now. The person who contested as the LP senatorial candidate in Ondo South was a secretary of the PDP. So, it was an internal destructive process that was put in place by these people because they had their plan of creating an exodus from the PDP and ensure that they knock the engine of the party. It was an act of God that made us survive their onslaught. So, the party that would have been propagating the policies of the government was not doing so. And I won’t speak for the government on this issue. I will say that they are publicity shy.

How were you able to bring some governorship candidate of other political parties into the PDP?
After the election, the governor invited those that contested against him to buy into his vision to move the state forward. Soon after that, I came on board as the state chairman of the PDP. He invited the governorship candidates for interaction and dialogue. But I said that was not enough. It is the party that is the father of those candidates – so that we should talk to the party. So, I engaged the party chairmen to let them see that the PDP is a party that has gotten the master plan to take Ondo State to the next level. Secondly, we realised that the PDP is not a party that knows it all. We told those people that: ‘you wanted to be governor, you have the master plan of how you will govern the state if elected, let us see your plan and marry it with the PDP’s plan to move the state forward’. We told them that we would give them places in our government. So, they relaxed, watching to see what we would do. Some positions were given to political parties who were interested in coming on board. It was not for them to join our party, but to throw their ideas into the limelight. And when we had the December local government election, we told them that out of every five supervisory councilors in each council, other political parties will produce one. And, out of five advisers, they are free to nominate one, depending on their area of strength. So, we told them to go to the field and see what will happen, using the April 14 governorship election as a yardstick to justify their relevance and contribution.The Action Congress (AC) was the most viable of all the political parties that joined us. We told the Labour Party (LP) to come and join us but they thought they could do it their own way. The other people came and they are at our local government as supervisors and advisers.

In a nutshell, you are talking about a coalition government?
We can’t call it a coalition because when they now bought into the vision of the PDP, quite a number of them have come on board. Seven governorship candidates from different political parties came on board to join Agagu. When they came on board, we discovered that they will be making useful contribution. For instance, Barrister Oluwajana, who was the governorship candidate of the Alliance for Democracy is the man that is in charge of Housing Corporation. Barrister Ademola Adegboroye is representing us at Oodu’a board level. They are making good contributions and we are getting along with them.

How would your party ensure that some of its members do not in the future become its strongest opponents as it is happening now?
Yes. For instance, the number of votes scored by the PDP and LP in the governorship election accounted for 92 per cent of total votes cast; I can tell you that the PDP is not a myopic political party that says the longer you are in the party will determine what you get. Dr. Agagu himself started from the APP before coming to the PDP and today he is the governor. I came from the AD. I joined the PDP in 2002 and I am the current state chairman of the PDP. The National Chairman of PDP, Vincent Ogbulafor, was the governorship candidate of APP in Imo State in 1999, he became the secretary of the party two years later. He is now the national chairman of the PDP. The PDP is looking for the best that will be able to deliver. It is not our concern that you cannot contest for governorship. At inception, joining a political party was a question of who you knew because there was no distinctive political philosophy that we could say were guiding the parties. Chief Bola Ige wrote the constitution of the PDP, AD and APP in 1998. The truth is that all the political parties have the history of sharing members in one form or the other.