Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara State recently met with journalists in Ilorin. The meeting was the first ever, since he was elected and sworn into office on May 29, 2019. The governor whose extreme low profile style of governance is attracting concerns among the people came up with a tale of woes left behind for him by the immediate past regime. He spoke of large scale grabbing of government properties, claiming money for contracts not done as well as grounding virtually all government institutions, among others. Wole Adedeji was there.
Your Excellency, you have been in office for 100 days now. How has the experience been? Is there any time you feel so overwhelmed by the system you inherited?
Business is different from governance. It is a totally different ball game. In government, there’s governance, there is politics. Politics is the difficult part. Running a state is very simple and not difficult at all. Yes, we met much rot, which is daunting and one will ordinarily ask himself, where do we start from? There’s no money to do it. But we just have to be ingenious in the way we do our things and luckily for us, the day we got in, we got N4.8 billion. This is a PAYE tax from the Federal Government, which was paid on May 28, 2019. It was originally N5.2 billion but there were some deductions of 10 percent from Abuja, so really, what we got was N4.8 billion. The previous administration tried to spend that money but thanks to the EFCC (Economic and Financial Crime Commission) and others that blocked them off. We’re glad it was blocked. That’s the sort of money we are going to use to fund our education by paying counterpart funding for UBEC (Universal Basic Education Commission) and build infrastructure. The money we got is still in the bank; we have not touched it. We will invest it wisely for the state. It has been tough handling the situation on the ground. It has been more about learning and discovering, because we actually met nothing in terms of basic infrastructure, schools, hospitals and water supply among others, to build on. We had to jettison our manifesto and reset our programmes as a result of that. So, we had to redraft everything we thought we had. During our campaign, we went to schools but we were not granted access. The only school we were able to access was in Kaiama, and that was on a Saturday because they could not resist us. That was the first sign we saw about the deplorable state of schools. Now, building on the schools, we have nothing. I implore some of you to go to the schools nearest to where you live or where you work and see to confirm what I am saying. We have nothing in the schools. We also discovered that the state is unable to access Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, fund due to the mismanagement of the fund by the past governments. In fact, the state was blacklisted since 2013 due to this. The government refused to pay its counterpart fund. But thankfully, we came in to stop the rot in that sector.
In 2013, the counterpart fund that the state put down was withdrawn from the bank immediately the UBEC fund came in and they mismanaged it. UBEC demanded a refund but they couldn’t refund everything. When we came in, after meeting UBEC in Abuja, they demanded that we pay N450 million to be re-certified and we did that immediately. So, we are back on board. The coast is clear but we cannot immediately move to schools now to start repairing until we have properly mapped out to find out which schools to go to, which schools to start with. Right now, UBEC has about N7 billion for us and we are asked to look for N7 billion to match it to get N14 billion to invest in education. So, if we can put N14 billion in our education within the next two years, we’ll begin to see the changes in terms of infrastructure and capacity building in our schools.
Moving on to tertiary institutions, our colleges of education are nothing to write home about. This is a matter of fact. We all need to visit those institutions to see. When we came in, they were on strike. They’ve been on strike since last year, not paying them a lot of the amount of money in excess of N700 million. Gladly, we have almost cleared that and by next month, we shall clear the backlog of salaries owed those institutions.
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As per the Kwara State University, KWASU, Malete, there is an effort going on there. We have set up a visitation panel to go in, look into what is happening there and advise us properly so that we don’t rush into making wrong or biased decisions. The visitation panel will conclude their works in a couple of weeks. That will give us chance to make informed decisions on KWASU issue.
The education sector is a tall hill for us to climb and like I said, we are up to the task. It’s just a shame that that sector had been neglected. Government Secondary School, Ilorin, and Queen Elizabeth College, Ilorin, which were the top schools in Northern Nigeria in those days and, in fact, in Nigeria, are now in the shadows of themselves with deficit infrastructures. And if the top schools are like that, what is the standard of ordinary institutions we have? Basically, virtually, all our schools do not have toilets. Some NGOs are trying within their best to do capacity building in the sector. It just shows you the decay in the sector.
Also, in the health sector, most of our hospitals are dilapidated. Most of them do not have running water. Kudos to Omu-Aran General Hospital, where the CMD has tried a lot to keep going. That’s one of the hospitals I went to and they had running water in the toilet and equipment to keep their systems on for medication and pharmaceutical. But going to Lafiagi and Patigi General Hospitals, you will find out that it is one doctor on duty or one doctor in the hospital and two attendants, at the most. The conditions are deplorable; no light. Our hospitals exist treating only two ailments – malaria and childbirth. Every other thing is not treated. Basically, we need to build capacity in our health care institutions. We really need to revamp the institutions. We can’t afford to have only one doctor, treating everything from pregnancy, performing C-section; he is the dentist, eye surgeon, orthopedic surgeon and so on. So, they are overwhelmed. We have to come to their rescue now.
Also, civil service is bloated. As it is, we have a lot of capacity in the civil service but it’s weighed in the wrong direction. We have a lot of administrative staff and core professionals that can do the jobs in our hospitals. Nurses too have tried a lot. But the challenge is that we can’t pay them enough, especially the nurses. As soon as they serve here for one or two years, they are off to other states with better pay. So, we will look into that. We will find a way of keeping our nurses at home. Also, when we got in, the School of Nursing, Ilorin, had lost its accreditation. We have invested in giving them a lot of money and they secured their accreditation back. Even, the Harmony Diagnostic Centre, we had to also release money for them to maintain their equipment. So, it was just total neglect in all sectors.
The roads are just a sham. The only state roads we have in Kwara are those in Ilorin metropolis. There are no roads in-between our towns, even the ones within Ilorin metropolis are in bad shape. It is a daunting task repairing those roads because Kwara Road Maintenance Agency, KWARMA, that is saddled with the responsibility of fixing the roads is not empowered to do so. We have been forced to embark on fixing some of these roads during this period of the raining season but we just have to take up that to show Kwarans that we are ready to work from the word go. We are out fixing the roads and one of the road contracts we met, like the one handling the Ilesha-Baruba/Gwanara road, what he does is a sham. They awarded the project at the sum of N1.5 billion; they have paid about N1.7 billion now. They revised it to N2.5 billion and there is nothing going on there, as we speak. Anybody that has passed through that road will know that it is not passable; it is not motorable. We don’t know where they put the money spent by the state government on that road and generally in that axis. And even Kishi/ Kaiama road, which was awarded by the Federal Government and the state government chose to take it over. Federal government has paid over N1.1billion on the project. All the same, anybody that passes that road will observe that nothing is going on. We don’t know what they have done and it is a shame that we have that sort of situation. We are going to work with the Federal Government to ensure that federal roads projects in the state are funded. We have federal roads like Kishi/Kaiama, Share/Tsaragi/Patigi/Kpada roads among others, in the state. The contractors handling these projects only returned to site after we have won our elections. The Federal Government has spent about N4 billion on that road and it doesn’t look as if N200 million worth of work has been done on the road. So, we have no choice than to force them to do the work. We will work with the Federal Government to get the roads fixed. Those traveling along Ilorin/Oro road can see that there is a remarkable change in the pace of work going on there. The road is getting better. The contractor is fully on site now. That again is because of the change in government. We will not tolerate such things. We’ll make sure that contractors perform their duties. And in terms of what we are doing, you will have noticed that we have not awarded any contract. The work that you can see that are going on are done through direct labour and this is through the ministries and they are doing a very good job.
Still talking about infrastructures, there is still a lot of work to be done. But, we will do it in such a way that every local government will feel the impact of this administration. We will build roads in each local government headquarter. It will not be lopsided; every local government will have its fair share of the revenue allocations we receive.
One of the first issues we tackled is water. While we were campaigning, we kept hearing the word reticulation, and it seems like a magic or something being done out of the ordinary whereas it only means piping and distribution of water. But, the word is just a big jargon because water did not get to the people. And the previous government was distributing water with tankers and that’s a shame in this generation. When we went to some water works, we realised that they were just not working for many reasons, including the staff, who were not happy with their conditions of work. The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company, IBEDC, bills were not paid and the bill is hugely piled up when we came in. We met the bill of over N60 million for electricity, which we have cleared by now. Asa-Dam alone gulped about N10 million for electricity bill every month. Consumption of alum is about N10 million every month. We now said with all the reticulation or not, where were we before, which areas in town are getting water supply and which ones are not getting water? Let’s go back to the basics. Where they were getting water from, let’s start, go back and supply them with water. That is what we did. We made sure that in some parts of Ilorin that were getting water before, we started the project that made them to begin to receive water again. We visited Oyun Dam in Oyun Local Government. The dam is beautiful enough for tourist attraction even if we decided to use it for that purpose. It was built by a company called Bi-water. In Oyun, there are two water works. The one built by Sardauna of Sokoto in the Second Republic. It was still working but later, they abandoned it for no good reason for the other one built by the Bi-water Company. They were both neglected. And we have told them to let them go back to work. Also, in Ilorin, when the water works started working, we lost half of the water because the pipes had all become bad. Even with their much acclaimed reticulation, the pipes got burst and we lost a lot of water. And when you lose water, it costs a lot of money because of the cost of producing the water in addition to the labour expended, not to talk of the chemicals. We were able to fix some of the water works. Work is still ongoing in this sector.
We have decided is to get a company that will help us look into the whole system of water supply in the state and the company gave us a bill close to N40 million and we approached ADB and they promised to do it for us for free. They will assess our water situation and tell us where to go from here. We instructed them to give us a road map to follow. Our major towns and minor towns should not be using boreholes; we should be able to provide water for them. Boreholes are meant for villages and remote areas but boreholes are the norms now. In Ilorin now, only God knows how many boreholes we have. So, once we have a master plan in place, which will take at least two years to do, but in the meantime, we will make sure that we keep pumping water.
Patigi is now getting water from its abandoned water project. Kudos to the Federal Government; there is a N3 billion water project sited in Patigi. The contractor should be on site but, before that comes on stream, which can take about three years, we should be able to use the system that was in place to survive; the same thing in Lafiagi, Kaiama, Igbaja and other parts of the state. So, the State Water Corporation is on site to restore water supplies across the state. We are also planning to have a Masterplan for the supply of water in the state.
It’s been a difficult task cleaning up the mess left by the people (government) that just left. They abandoned the state. They did nothing. They budgeted for nothing and whatever they budgeted for, we can’t see and how they spent the money is another thing. What we know is that we have a huge salary bill. Our average federal allocation is about N3.8 billion, out of which N2.8 billion goes for salaries so we have N1 billion left. Out of this N1 billion, we have to do capital projects in addition to the cost of running the government. The job is much for us but with prudent management, we’ll be able to survive and thrive and progress properly as we should.
It is said that you inherited the 2019 budget with some challenges. What are the challenges of implementing the budget and how are you tackling this?
The budget we inherited is a difficult and tough one and it did not fit into our programmes. It is something we could have continued with but what they appropriated money for and where they appropriated money to is quite different from what we are doing. We could not build on the foundation they had laid. For example, in their budget, there is a provision for the renovation of schools and when we came in we found that those schools need not be renovated but to be rebuilt completely. So, that’s not in their budget.
The issue in the health sector is the same thing. There is nothing in their budget to fix our hospitals. So, we had to review the budget to find money to put in to those projects. For example, we want to build roads in our towns, local government capitals and other major towns. There is no provision for that in the budget. That’s why we have to review the budget, to be practical and put money where we want to.
Recently, you held the 2019 budget review session at the school for Special Needs. That was strange! Why did you chose such a location?
When we set out to review the budget, we spoke with the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Planning and Economic Development and he said I will need to be at the opening session and I asked for the venue and he said it would hold at one of the government offices. But a week earlier, I was at the School for Special Needs (School for The Handicapped Children) and needless to say, the situation in that school was appalling. There is no water, no toilets, the infrastructure is extremely unpalatable. That’s why I said we should go to the school to hold a special budget session there. The idea, for me, is for those that draft the budget and shape our future to come to the institution and see what the life for other citizens of the state is. This will guide them while preparing the budget proper. They would have seen what others are going through in that school. That’s the whole idea. The good thing is that all the parastatals came in to defend their budgets and make proposals. For me, if the Ministry of Sports comes in, they should be thinking of making provisions for the disabled sports. If the Ministry of Works comes there, they will see the need for infrastructures in the state generally and see everything that’s lacking in our society using just one school as an example. One good take away from that was that a day after it went viral online, a company from Lagos came to the school and promised to help us fix the school. That was a major take away. So we moved the budget session there so that civil servants who shape our future can always see the larger picture of our society.
2020 budget will be your major budget in government. What can you say will be the priorities of your administration in this budget?
Priorities of the budget for 2020 will be water supply because of its importance to our living. We will prioritise healthcare, education, infrastructure, job creation and agro-processing. We’ll build capacity with private sector, including in the area of Social Investment Programmes to create jobs and empower more people. These are our priorities.
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There was this Senator Ajadi Government Assets Committee that probed the sales of government properties, what are the highlights of their reports?
The committee did a very good job. They submitted two reports and we’re waiting for the final report. It is unfortunate that from my little reading of it so far, people just shared government properties as if it was their fiefdom. They did not even think for one second that it was government property. For example, you give properties to Harmony Holdings to invest on behalf of the state as trust and those in Harmony Holdings just shared the properties among themselves. They even sold the properties even before the valuation prices. Even those in government did the same thing. There is a new layout called New GRA, none of them went there to build new houses because it was cheaper to pick government houses for next to nothing rather than build their own houses. We will look at the recommendations. In fact, some of them just live in those houses without paying anything while most of them only started paying after the election was won and lost to the extent that the state government does not have enough accommodation to accommodate dignitaries and traditional rulers from other states. Nowhere to host them. Rather, we are left with the option of putting them in the hotel. That’s how they shared the property and we are looking at more than 90 properties which they grabbed for themselves. We’ll go back to the report of the panel and make sure the proper thing is done.
You have the next three years and nine months, what is your message to the people as you begin this journey?
During the campaign, there was a message of hope and since we came in people have seen our intention in the little things we have been able to do. We urge them to be a little patient with us while we begin the proper implementation of our policies which begins with the passage of the revised budget, putting cabinet in place and delivering services to the people.
Hopefully, Insha Allah, by the time we pass the budget, when the cabinet is in place, the citizens will feel the real impact of governance. So, I urge the people to be patient with us and work with us because it is our government and it is going to be our success. We don’t want to go back to what was happening before, that’s not our future. We need to build together collectively and take decisions collectively.
