The governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Bayelsa State, Senator Douye Diri, recently had an interactive session with journalists at the NUJ House in Yenagoa, the state capital. He spoke at length on various issues ahead of the November election in the state. Our Correspondent, TONY OLUTOMIWA, was there.
Appeal to other aspirants
Bayelsa is a PDP state from the beginning of this democracy. Till today no other party has won in this state. No other party has won the governorship of Bayelsa State and this one will not be an exception but we must be united. So, I am pleading with all of them to join hands with the party, join hands with me to ensure that come November 16, there will be victory for the PDP. That I emerged as the candidate of the PDP didn’t mean I won other contestants and in the acceptance speech that day I made it very clear that there was no victor, there was no vanquished. I believe that the person who won was the Peoples Democratic Party and I stand by that as I repeat it today calling on all of us to join hands and ensure victory for our party.
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Level of development in relation to revenue allocation
First, yes, we are not satisfied with what was coming to Bayelsa with the level of development we have seen. If we are satisfied then there would be no need for me to come out and contest this election. As a party, even on self-evaluation, we know that within the 23 years of our existence, certain regimes didn’t do well and that was the reason some persons even left government to go and join opposition and that’s the reason when the government of Seriake Dickson came in, we called it a government of restoration and for you to restore, it means the locust must have eaten and if the locust have so eaten, we need to restore so that’s why restoration was coined. Simply, we are not very satisfied with the performance of our party for the past 23 years. But again let us look at it from the other side. For those of you who knew Yenagoa, the old Yenagoa Local Government Area (mark my words, I said we are not very satisfied) if you know the old Yenagoa Local Government Area of Kolokumo/Opokuma, Southern Ijaw and Yenagoa and particularly Yenagoa, then I can say that I am also satisfied, I can tell you that a whole lot of development has taken place in Yenagoa by the successive PDP governments. Successive PDP governments have contributed so much to the development of Yenagoa as our state capital comparatively as to what you know as the old Yenagoa Local Government.
This was a place where you have bushes bordering one community from the other. This was a place where we had very few development, the road was narrow, just one road and remember at the creation of Bayelsa, people were abusing us for having just one road. They say that state capital with just one road but today, I am sure we don’t have just that Mbiama – Yenagoa road. Several other roads have been added even though we are not there yet and that’s why I said not very satisfied. But I am satisfied to an extent that those of us who are founding fathers and stood for the creation of Bayelsa State, we have nothing to regret about. We are still a developing state. Rome was not built in a day.
And to the allocation of the Federal Government, for me, I Intend to disagree that the money coming into Bayelsa compared to the money being taken away from Bayelsa is infinitesimal. If Bayelsa is given so much by the federal system why are we having only 13 percent and then we are crying over that 13 percent that is nowhere near the challenge of development of the state, considering our terrain and our environment, that we have 13 percent out of 100 percent given to us. My brother Osahon, I am sure you are from Edo State and you feel the pains the same way I feel it. You should be talking about controlling our resources and paying taxes to the Federal Government. That is the practice worldwide. Nobody goes to sit down with their plates at the end of every month to collect what they call federal allocation and that federal allocation is used to develop other parts of Nigeria and here we are struggling and abusing ourselves with 13 percent.
So I want to urge you to join me in the crusade for the abrogation of the Land Use Act because that is what has deprived the Niger Delta of its own wealth and if that is done, then we can be asking ourselves how much do we have. How much have we put in, in the development of Bayelsa State?
Running mate
Let me refer you to the INEC website. If you go to the INEC website, you will know who my running mate is. I ran the primaries, after the primary, I ran under the platform which is my party, the PDP and the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria empowers me to nominate a running mate. And when I do that, I am not doing that alone and when I do, I will do it through my party and my party has the responsibility of forwarding that name to INEC and it is only when INEC has published that he becomes my running mate and that’s why I am referring you back to INEC website.
Fixing electricity blackout
When we had blackout, the first people to take the blame is the Power Holding Company. It is not a company owned by Bayelsa, all the lines are owned by the federal government of Nigeria and that’s why we are also talking about restructuring of this country. Things like this should not be in the exclusive legislative list, things like this should not even be in the concurrent list, things like this should be in the residual legislative list.
What you have in the concurrent legislative list is that the state government can also approximate power to have their own electricity but because they are all controlled from the federal, you need to go and talk to people in Abuja to do something in your state. If you want to have an independent power plant you need approval from Abuja. Those are the things wrong with our federation and those were the things I stood for in the green chambers. I remember we brought a bill (those of us from this place), we brought a bill, I was representing Bayelsa State in the Constitutional Amendment Committee because every state had one representative. I represented Bayelsa State in that committee and we agreed and brought a bill and that bill was to abrogate the Land Use Act because we considered it among ourselves (those of us from this region and of course the support of those from the south east), we succeeded at our committee level. It was the part to remove that amendment process that was too cumbersome. So, we can easily amend that Land Use Act together with other acts that were very cumbersome to amend; for instance, the NYSC Act and the National Security Act. But you know what, after succeeding at our committee level, we went into voting on the floor of the house, we were voted out. They agreed into the NYSC Act because we deposed that from the inception of NYSC till today people are still being paid N20,000. Meanwhile, the naira is somersaulting everyday and that money was nowhere to sustain our children and our younger ones. They accepted the NYSC Act to be removed from the cumbersome amendment. They accepted the National Security Act to be removed from the amendment. We brought all of them together because we knew they will do that so we tied them together so that if they don’t accept, Nigerians will see them. But do you know that on the floor of the House by the time the bill came, the same bill that I and others worked on, they separated them into three so they voted the NYSC separately and from the moment they decided to change and separate them, some of us tried to introduce a point of order to say what is coming is not from our committee but we were shut down because we were minorities. And they voted for the NYSC and the security act and voted out the Land Use Act.
That’s the kind of country we are into and we must understand all of these things so that you know that power situation is actually not from Bayelsa here but we will try to begin to get the approvals that they want us to get from the national and try to see whether we can bring in independent power project the way Okilo and others did when they were governors. And I am sure even this administration was fighting to settle discussion on bringing in more independent power project. You know we are sitting on gas in Bayelsa and all the major oil companies we will engage them to the point that they will support us in the state and my government will productively go into looking out how we can bring in more independent power plants and solve the problems of darkness not only in Yenagoa but also in our local government headquarters in our various communities.
Civil service and sport
I am guided by the fact that I am not yet the governor of the state. But when I become the governor, I will sustain part of the policies that I was part of in the current government before I left for Abuja. One of them was to look at the civil service and see how we can bring in most of our youths who are graduates but are roaming the streets. And that was done very well in the re-organisation of the civil service. There are people who were receiving salaries in 5,6,3,2 places at inception. I was one of those who led the team to my local government and we saw a lot. People were receiving salaries who are not residents in Bayelsa; they were in Port Harcourt and Abuja. Their names were on the pay rolls. They were depriving our children of employment. People who were over 65 years add age declaration that they were younger than their own children and those policies came on board and today even though I am not in the service of the state, my ears are always on ground here, I am told that about 1,000 people have been employed and that was because of good policies of re-organising the civil service. The civil service is the engine room of government and when I come on board, I will oil that engine room and make it more effective; oiling in terms of retraining and retaining, oiling in terms of people who have the capacity and competence, oiling in terms of people who are interested in the civil service and not people who have employment and do not come to work. You remember the policy of the current government of logging in and logging out. I remember when we came in, the secretariat was almost desolate. Nobody was coming to work and today the story is different and we are going to sustain those types of policies.
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I am also very concerned about the depreciation in the sport sector and it’s interesting you asked that. The trophies I brought into Bayelsa, since I left, things are no longer the same that our sports is depreciating. Sporting facilities are nowhere. They made reference to the swimming pool. They made reference to Bayelsa United that has been demoted. I can understand. Luckily, I shared your thoughts; I feel it because I am a sport person not only as a former commissioner for sports. Up till today, I still do my routine exercises no matter how busy I am and the best way to live to be free from sicknesses, diseases and death is for you to be a sport personality. A sound mind can only be in a sound person. Today you see our people die of obesity and all of that. It is because we are not doing sports and let me let you know, one of my bills in the House of Representatives was to declare a national day for exercises as a way of educating our people on the importance of exercises, on the importance of keeping fit, of the importance of health talks about the food you eat. Let there be a national day of exercise of our people. That bill went through. The senate also concurred but the President was unable to give an answer to it until we left and so one thing I am very passionate about is sport. For me being elected as a governor, one of the constituencies that will benefit will be the sport constituency because I will struggle to ensure that Bayelsa United comes back to the Premier League. I will struggle to ensure that our facilities are upgraded. We had a place under my tenure as sport commissioner at Elebele axis to build a modern stadium. In fact, we even awarded that contract but because our tenure was very short at about one and a half years, the contract was unable to take off before we left and that place has been abandoned from 2006 till today. And I feel very bad that we don’t have an international rating stadium in Bayelsa in spite of the fervor of our people in sports during my tenure as sports commissioner. I was one of the people that advocated for comparative advantage in sports, I know and believe that in Bayelsa, we are very good in combat sports. I know and believe we are good in wrestling. I know and believe in Bayelsa, we have skills in football and other areas.
So my advocacy then was that the federal sport authorities should concern themselves to state that have those comparative advantages. We have rivers around Bayelsa, our children go to swim comparative to others who will only learn how to swim when they are at home. But here, from the day you are born, you are thrown to the river and so we have a comparative advantage in terms of swimming, wrestling and combat sports and so as a governor this is one constituency I am very passionate about. We can remove the youths from the streets when we engage them in sports. We will go back to local governments fishing for talents. In those days, we had sports personnel in Port Harcourt who were posted to the rural areas. We will post people back to our rural development areas to fish out talents and if we have the resources, we will even build facilities at our local government areas. So, I am with you in the development of sports in Bayelsa and I am very clear about what to do in sports development.