Abimbola Adekanmbi is a University of Oxford-trained accountant and  deputy Chief of Staff to the Oyo State government. In this interview with DARE ADEKANMBI and SEGUN ADEBAYO; he speaks about the ACN government in the state, the achievement of the administration in the last six months and the essence of good governance. Excerpts:

WHAT would you say brought you into politics?
Challenge. His Excellency, Senator Abiola Ajimobi, threw a challenge at me.  We met and had a very long discussion. He told me that the state was facing a lot of challenges and he needed me to come on board. I know the governor to be a very down-to-earth man who understands the problem of the people in Oyo State. I was also challenged by the level of commitment I saw in the governor. You know that when you are not in government, particularly those of us who don’t reside in the country, we tend to criticise a lot by posting our comments online to voice our discomfort at the way things are being  done in the country, which is not the best. So, I met the governor and he spelt out what he would want me to do to help the state achieve its goals.

Who or what facilitated your meeting with him?
I met the governor after the 2007 election. I had before then always observed him from  afar, but we had the opportunity to sit and talk one-on-one later.  He won the election, but the victory was snatched away from him, to use the appropriate word.  When I met him, I was expecting to see a dejected man who would be bitter, but I met a different person entirely.   While the meeting lasted, I discovered that he was  very deep in many things. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, because he was a CEO of a company, so you can imagine how deep he would be. After the discussion, I asked why he joined politics. He told me he wanted to help the people of Oyo State. He also told me his plans for the people and why he wanted to help them. He was very sincere that day, looking at his passion and the level of his concern. We met in the United Kingdom.

Since you came on board, have you noticed a difference between the person you met in UK and the person governing the state?
The governor is very charismatic; he is also very smart. You can’t take rubbish to him. You have to be ready to give explanations before you take any proposal to him. You must be able to defend whatever you take to him before he approves anything. I really enjoy working with him, because he will give you room to prove your competence. Nothing has changed in the man I met before I came on board and now. He wants his job done without excuse. I like the governor’s spirit.

As the deputy chief of staff, what did you meet on ground and how do you intend to build on what you met?
There was nothing concrete on ground when we came on board. What we met on ground was chaos; there was no structure, no capacity and there were no tools. When I  say tools, I  didn’t mean chairs and tables. I mean there were no internet facilities, things that make your work easier. You want to go to meeting and you have to start distributing memos, whereas you can easily send it through the internet. Basically, there was no e-governance, there was no orgarnogram. The problem is that if a lot has been done before we came on board, there would be little or no more for us to do. Right now, there is a lot for this government to do.

What would you say the government has done since its inception?
The government is doing a lot. If you look at all the ministries before now, there were no good structures anywhere for governance. What we did firstly was to overhaul the structures of governance and it takes a lot of smartness to do that. The first thing the governor did when he appointed his commissioners was to take everybody to a retreat. He wanted to size up everybody and dish out the policy thrust of his government to them. He wanted each ministry in the state to synergise and get the best of governance. What we have done so far is to add value to job creation. Job creation should be value-oriented, it should be a function of capacity building, rather than floating a system that depletes people’s capacity for productivity. If you look at the YES O, the Oyo State Youth Empowerment Scheme, what the government intends doing with the scheme is to use it as a means to provide jobs that add values to the unemployed in the state.We want to raise their capacity to think, capacity to create wealth, capacity for independence and capacity to be productive. That is what  we mean by job creation. It must be innovative and additive. Essentially, it is not about creating jobs alone,  it is about embedding an element of capacity building to the jobs you create. We want things to work normally, we want a significant and appreciable departure from the past. We want a change of system as well as a change of orientation in governance. Governance is about adding values to lives; it must be people-centred, and not a platform to deceive and sweep public monies away. The governor will not put you in a place where he knows you can’t add value to the system. His government  is value-laden. He has told me many times that the office where I work right now is like a generalist office, where you do things that are inter-ministerial.

I can say that I have added value by being  part of the transformation team that ACN government in Oyo State embodies. I have contributed to the building of processes and structures required for creating enabling environment  for the government to operate.

There is this belief that this administration is moving on a slow lane and that  people of the state want a fast manifestation of governor’s promises he made during the electioneering, how would you react to this?
When you say the administration is moving  slowly, you have to clarify it. Moving slowly? In relative to what? I don’t know may be you are comparing us to states like Lagos or Osun. In Lagos, there was no change of party or power, it is a continuous government, and in Osun they started way back before us. If you come to Oyo State, where things have really deteriorated and  become rotten, you can’t start building on something that is rotten; you have to clear the rot  before you start building. What you call slow governance is what we call fundamental change that leads to radical increase in performance. If you come in as the sole administrator of a state where there is no structure on ground and you have been the CEO of a multi-national company before, you can’t just jump at work and start performing miracles. If we had met something concrete on ground, perhaps there would have been continuity. If you look around, you will see the crop of young people that the governor has brought together, those who have done excellently well in their different fields of experience. If you don’t put the structures in place and you want experts to come in and start performing, you are only joking, because you will fail. I know that the man in Beere or Yemetu doesn’t want to hear anything like structures or mechanism, all he wants is water, roads and enabling environment to do his business without any hitch, and that is what we are doing.