It’ll Be Difficult For Okpebholo To Discard Programmes Initiated By My Administration –Obaseki

Out-going governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, in this interview, speaks on achievements of his administration in the last eight years and how the innovations he brought into governance are first of its kind in the country. PATRICK OKOHUE reports

Your administration is quite popular for its transformative reforms, especially in public services. What moved you to prioritise civil service reforms and what were the key challenges you faced in implementing these reforms?

I’ve always said that if you imagine government as a vehicle that’s moving people in a certain direction, then the engine of that vehicle is the civil service. And if that engine is faulty, that vehicle is not going to move anywhere. It’s going to be stalled all the way.

So, from that perspective, you have to understand that for government to work, the civil service, the bureaucracy, has to work because whatever government has decided it wants to do, whatever the policy, the people that will make it happen are the civil servants and they have a process through which they make it happen.

So, if that institution is not working, if it’s being castigated like we’ve done in the past, if there’s uncertainty, of course, you will not get much out. The owners of government are the civil servants and what we’ve done in the last 30 or 40 years is to denigrate them, to make them feel like they are the problem. We’ve not encouraged them. We’ve not supported them.

We’ve not enhanced their ability to deliver. First, you go into the area, their premises, where they work, I mean, you will not encourage your children to go into the civil service when you see the infrastructure. When I came into office, sometimes you call an officer, the director appears. Where is this so-and-so? She’s not on seat, or he’s not around.

Why? She has gone across the road to a filling station to use the toilet, because even the toilets in their own offices are not okay. It was that bad. So, one of the things we did was to say, let’s restore respectans credibility to them. Today, you want to be a civil servant in it Edo State because their offices are perhaps the best office or workplaces.

They have everything. Fortunately, because we partnered with Ossiomo Power, they have 24/7 electricity in their offices. We have connected fiber optics, so there’s high-speed internet. Now, they are all online, we’ve gone digital, so they don’t carry files again. No file gets missing anymore. Your file will not be lost again because everything is digital.

The other thing we did was training. You know, you have people who are in government, who have been there. The same way they have done it since Lord Lugard’s time is the same way they are doing it. Meanwhile, the environment has changed, yet you’ve not trained them. You’ve not updated them. You’ve not updated their skills.

One of the things we’ve done was to set up the John Odigie Oyegun Training Centre, so that we can continuously train them and reduce the cost of training by having our own training centre. So, rather than send someone to a training centre outside, you come and offer the training in Edo State, which gives more people the opportunity to participate.

The other things we’re doing are compensation and remuneration. Edo has always done that; we never wait for the Federal Government to set minimum wage for us. We just believe that if you don’t pay people well, you won’t get their loyalty. It’s like when what you call pay is not fantastic. Yes, everywhere in the world people don’t become millionaires by working in government or the civil service but they live a relatively comfortable life, so that they can raise their families.

So, we’ve tried to begin to approximate that to say if you’re in the civil service, there are certain benefits you will get. You’ll get good health insurance. We’re building the school system, so you don’t have to take your child to a private school for your child to get good education. All the things that the service is supposed to be or used to be, we’re trying to reduce.

And then, lastly, the pension. It was President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government that set up the new pension administration. It is that certainty after work that is so important. You look at those who were there before you and you see them in penury, you realise that no provision was made for them while they were working; you are bound to say why will I wait to be in the same state. What then comes to your mind is to see how you can help yourself.

But when you know that when you retire, you will have a lump sum amount that can help you start life, you will relax more, knowing that every month you’ll be getting something that will sustain you. Those are the things we did to just reinstate a sense of belonging, a sense of pride in the public and civil servants and today, our civil servants, many of them do wonders.

People are very aware and I doubt if they will keep quiet for long allowing things to go back to what they used to be, without complaint, without shouting

I am proud; it’s like the kind of quality of staff I worked with in the private sector. And for me, if Nigeria is going to move forward, we must rebuild our civil service. The truth is, today in the world, it’s about digitization. It’s about data. It’s about the Internet. It’s about Artificial Intelligence.

Right now in Edo, our teachers can’t teach without digital. Each teacher in Edo has a tablet, you know, a handheld device. Every day you come to school, you must synchronise your own with that of the head teacher. If you don’t, it means you are not in school that day.

So, we’ve dropped the rate of absenteeism in our schools. And the truth is that if a teacher is not in class, the child will not learn. Beyond that, that device we’re giving you takes attendance of the children. So we know the child is in school or not in school. It also has your lesson notes that you deliver that day.

And, you know, the tools to help you motivate the children. So, our children want to go to school because they are learning. In the area of health care, any primary health care centre you go to has computers. As you go in there, we take your data, somebody knows that you attended. In the case of land administration, we’ve mapped the entire state.

We’ve flown over, so we have aerial survey, which has now made it easier for us. We can issue your Certificate of Occupancy within 60 days and you pay less than N60,000. From the time of Midwest Region to when I became governor, the total number of Certificates of Occupancy issued was about 2,000.

In three years, I’ve issued 30,000. It’s all because of digitisation. But for you to be able to digitise it is not just about the computers. First, you have to have infrastructure. You have to be able to link the devices. That is why we decided to invest in fiber optic cables and connection. So, we are the most connected state in Nigeria today.

We have over 2,000 kilometers of fiber. Every local government is connected. The implication of this is that for a fraction of the cost, we get services done. I don’t have to now call somebody from anywhere to come to Benin for a meeting. As soon as we have a Zoom meeting at nine o’clock, we tell the local government chairmen to join. So, digital is the way of the future. All the data you collect helps you in better decision making.

The Edo health insurance scheme has been devoted to making health care more accessible. What were the challenges in setting up this scheme, and what strategies are in place to ensure its sustainability?

The biggest issue we have today in Nigeria is cost. Most people don’t like to go to hospital or to go and seek care because they feel they don’t have the money to pay.

Once you get there, they say, this is how much you pay for a card and all of that stuff. So, by the time people are reporting illnesses, sometimes it’s already too late and too expensive.

So, what has happened everywhere else in the world, which we introduced to Edo, is to say just pay some thing. Today, we have one of the largest state insurance schemes in the country. We have almost 350,000 enrollees. Just imagine their pay and not everybody will be sick at the same time.

So, there’s always money. What that BHC has done for us is to unify everybody. Fortunately, there’s what you call a Federal Government Basic Healthcare Provision Fund.

What they pay as premium is not as much as what we collect, but it still can make the gap. So, that has helped us also to take care of the poorest of the poor, people who cannot contribute.

The Global Public Service Academy is seen as one of the achievements of your administration. How does this institution contribute to the modernization of public service and how can you compare this to other similar institutions across the country?

You see, when you are undertaking change or reform, it’s not enough to just say it, you have to hand-hold the process. Somebody who has been used to writing long letters, you don’t say, use computer. You have to help that person. I mean, you’ve got to help train people.

Don’t expect that because you’ve said it, it will happen. So the DRUPSAL, as we call it is like a world-class academy. And because it’s very well thought out, and it’s practical, you are taught what you need at your workplace every day, it’s not theoretical. It’s relevant and because of the changes we are making, we now need this centre to help teach people, train and nurture them to be able to cope with the changes.

If you go through the profile of some of the people and their comments, they are very excited because you are showing them things that they never knew. So, beyond civil service rules, you are training them on other life skills. So, it’s been very useful. It helps us build capacity and build confidence in public service.

How do you compare it to other training centres?

I don’t know how many others exist. I think we use to have the one owned by the Federal Government one in Badagry, Lagos State; that’s Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON).

I would not want to compare because what we are doing, many states are not doing t. We’ve gone digital; that means I don’t treat files manually again. I don’t know any other state that has done that. So, I need to tailor my own training to my people for it to be relevant.

Your tenure is winding down and you are going to hand over to another administration, unfortunately, not your political party. Are you concerned about the continuity of most of these things you’ve done?

It is a risk but I’ve always said that the people are very aware and I doubt if they will keep quiet for long, allowing things to go back to what they used to be, without complaint, without shouting. So, the way I see it is that sometimes in life, it just can’t be up all the time. You may need to slow down before you continue.

It’s like a stock market. Stock markets, sometimes, it’s unusual for it to just continue to go up. Occasionally, it will go down. But the fact that people know that roads can be constructed without you lobbying means that one day my own road will be done. And they will now agitate.

Because when you come to my office, I pass on letters because they don’t realise that government can really build roads. The parents of these children in school, they feel it; they see it in their children every day and that’s one thing you don’t play with. I’m not talking about children of rich people but children of market women. All they have is that and they can tell when the children are doing well or when they are not doing well.

The other thing we’ve done in some of the reforms is that we allowed for community participation. Take education for instance; in every community, we have what you call the school-based management. The Odionwele, the elders, everybody, they come in to just support the teachers and they know what is going on.

They take an interest and I don’t think even if the government doesn’t support or encourage them as we used to, they will disappear. So, beyond the reforms we’ve undertaken, we’ve institutionalised or started the process of institutionalising some of them.

And don’t underestimate the power of the social media. Even with what we’re doing, we saw the criticisms we’re getting not to talk about when you don’t do something. Yes, there’s a risk, but I’m optimistic that it will last. I would say there are several factors. First, you know, Edo is very porous. Like I said, people come from everywhere.

So, you need the cooperation of the Federal Government. I was lucky that I had some real good commissioners of police that I worked with. One of them later became the Inspector General of Police (IGP). And while we were there, we started talking and conversing about community policing, integrating what the community policing system would do with what the federal policing system would do.

So, what we did was to now, in our own little way, restructure our security architecture along our structure. At the community level, we used what they had. Many communities have vigilantes. You see market people come together and they pay for people to guide their markets.

You have those structures. So, we registered them and brought them into our security architecture. At the ward level, the police then came up with these community policing arrangements, where we then had constables, who were like a liaison between the Divisional Police Officers (DPOs) and those vigilantes.

At the local government level, you had the states, the police, and the DPOs. So you had that very kind of flow of information. So, if anything happens in any community, it was easy to find out from either the vigilantes or the constables, what happened, who did what and where. But it’s not cheap.

You’ve got to continue to service that structure. And one of the things we did for coordination is that we invested in the Police Training School in Ogida, put a lot of money and provided accommodation. So, every vigilante gets trained in the police college; the police, the DSS and the military put up a curriculum for them.

Every year, I try to train them once and we had about 12,000 of them. During that training, we were able to document them. So, there was some coordination. Then, technology, we have communication systems, so that way we could be competitive. And we then had a command and control centre in Benin. Now, we’re trying to build one in Auchi, where every incident of kidnapping or rape gets reported documented and we’ll follow through.

The Edo Oil Palm Programme is regarded as one of the most ambitious agricultural initiatives in Africa. How does this programme position the state as a leader in agriculture and what are its anticipated impacts on local farmers and the economy?

One of the things that has happened in Nigeria is that we can talk. People talk about a programme, but after a while, you don’t see it. What we did in Edo is that we said, let’s not speak too much English. What is Edo known for?

Edo is the home of oil palm. In the 60s, the Malaysians lived in the Nigeria Institute for Oil-palm Research (NIFOR), in Benin, and they were doing research together. It is those same seeds they took back to Malaysia and made Malaysia what it is today.

So, palm is a native of Edo. What we did was, first we went to Malaysia and to Indonesia to try and understand what we need to do. Agriculture is a very risky business. So, to be successful, government should try and help farmers reduce their risk. Government cannot and should not be a farmer.

Government’s role should just be to support. What are the challenges of people who want to do serious farming? First, is access to land. The fact that I gave you C of O does not make it that you have the land because you can go there to meet the community and they will say, sorry, this is our ancestral land, we will not let you.

What qualifications do you need for people who work in your farms? Let’s define it. Bring some of your people let us train them, so that as you come into our school of agric, you didn’t come for certificates, you came for work because even while you are in school, you are interning already in these farms.

We’re doing forestry, for instance and all the people that we’re hiring are Ghanaians. We can’t find Nigerians, because we don’t have the people. So, human capacity is the biggest angle to agriculture and there’s a science to it. That’s the only way you can farm on scale.

And one of the things we don’t realize in Nigeria is that we’re a very big country and the amount of food we need to feed 200 million people is a lot. So, you can’t be doing agriculture acre by acre. It can’t work again.

Your administration has developed over 1300 kilometres of road network, yet infrastructure challenge persists everywhere. What key lessons can other states learn from Edo’s approach to infrastructure development? In terms of infrastructure, you’re right. What should be the role of government?

You know, the problem we have is government gets being dragged into too many things and government doesn’t have the capacity to do too many things. The role of government is to create an enabling environment for citizens to do what they need to do. That’s all.

Once you’ve created the enabling environment, if I build a road now, you will go and sell the land there and build your house, isn’t it? But if there’s no road, you can’t get there. So, my own role as government is to build that road, plan for people to do that. That’s what government has the money to do because it collects taxes from everybody.

What are the critical infrastructures we need today? Fundamentally in Nigeria, it is electricity. We are lucky in a way that because of our location, we are a hub for electricity. Edo is that point where electricity transmission meets gas transmission. So if you generate electricity in Edo today, you can sell and upload it to the national grid. Whether they will pay you is a different matter.

And then, Edo also has the largest onshore reserve of gas. Most of our gas is either deep offshore or in the swamp. Which means that today, I can practically just take a turbine, go to Edo fields, locate it, take the gas from the well and generate. And that’s what we’re doing in Ossiomo. So, we have been pushing on electricity.

That’s why the whole fight with BDC, and you know, we’ve been able to become one of the few states that now can have their own electricity market. So, if you want to generate electricity, come to Edo. I’ll give you a license. You don’t need to go to Abuja.

We’re one of the few states that have that created. The other key infrastructure is fiber optics because without connectivity today, you’re not going anywhere in the world. I got the local governments to bring money, we brought money, and we built networks across all the 18 local governments in the state.

To answer your question directly, when I was the chairman of the economic team in the state, we had worked with the World Bank on a model for road construction. That model involved a lot of local labour. And we found out that by using local labour in road construction, well supervised, you could actually construct roads at a substantial discount relative to what it would cost.

Key to road construction in a place like Edo, which is in the rainforest, is drainage because the problem with roads is water. If you construct and you cannot remove the water, I bet you, after one season, you will come back to do the road again. So, key is essentially making sure that there’s drainage and showing the local contractors how to make sure that they have the capacity.

So before you do it, you first do the drainage and have people working on that. You can see some of that in the coast now. And then once you do, and that way we found out that we were constructing for the same, about a kilometre of road, we’re doing it at maybe, say, two-fifth of the cost by major contractors.

So at that time, maybe a kilometre of road will cost us $100,000. We could do it at $60,000, so we were able to do more. And then also remove the element of corruption and give it to those who know how to do the work.

You know how our system is, give me a contract now. Okay, which kind of contract? I have a road. Meanwhile, I have no road company.

That means you give it to him, instead of at $60,000, he will say, okay, I will do it at $120,000 for you because he will take it and sell it to somebody else.

Depending on the arrangement, that person will now use substandard materials because he wants to make his own profit. So removing corruption from the process is also key.

It was one of the things that helped us. But you know the consequences. You have to fight a lot of political battles. So, that way we were able to build more roads; roads that are relevant and useful because I have people who say, I’ve been in politics for many years now but my road has not been constructed.

The biggest challenge we’ve had is the federal roads. Edo has a disproportionate amount of federal roads because of our location. If you are coming from Lagos and going to the East, to the South- South, to the North, you must pass through Edo. So, Lagos-Benin road that goes right into Ring Road is a federal road..

The Benin-Sapele road going to the South-South is a federal road. Benin-Agbo-Asaba road is also a federal road. So, all around us are federal roads and we can’t be constructing those roads. To even get permission is a problem except it becomes so bad and we now go and do renovation.

So, we are hoping that we will be able to get them to understand that it is cheaper, since we don’t have rail, to just fix these roads and reduce the cost of transportation.