From Laide Raheem
Hon. Abdul-Kabir Adekunle Akimlade is the governorship candidate of the Allied People’s Movement (APM) in Ogun State. In this interview with Sunday Sun, he reels out the programmes he would execute in the state if he emerges the next governor, particularly his plan to create 25,000 jobs within 24 months of assumption of office. Excerpts:
During one of your campaigns, you promised to create 25,000 jobs within two years of assumption of office. With the reality on ground and the situation in the country, how do you intend to achieve this?
What we intend to do if we are voted into office by God’s grace is not rocket science. Like I discussed with my running mate who was until recently a Commissioner for Agriculture in the state, I am from Ipokia local government and there is vast arable land for agriculture. There is no job in government, even presently the challenges the state is facing in terms of catering for civil servants are enormous. That is why we have to look outside the government and partner with the private sector to create these jobs. Basically, we are looking at three key areas – agriculture, vocational skill sector and ICT. About 10,000 of that jobs will come from agriculture. We have a couple of programmes drawn up for our young poeple, both educated and not educated. What we want to do with that is to target 5,000 youth from each of the three senatorial districts. For instance, in Ogun West, which has five local government areas, that means 1,000 youths per local government. To me, the number is even small. We want to start so small and what we want to do as a government is to do something that is sustainable and every other two years, we try to increase the number. Agriculture is going to be made wonderful for the first 15,000 youths to be engaged. Presently, the incumbent administration has something called farm settlements. And what we need to do is to attract younger people there. The average age of any farmer in Ogun today is about 60, what we want to do is to reduce it to about 40 years. And when we are able to get the average age of a farmer to 30, then you are assured that 30, 40, 50 years to this time, there will be farmers because it will be made attractive. Farmers at the farm settlements can really settle down to do their business in a modern and conducive environment. Once we get that right in the area of farm settlement, there are other areas we should look at. Another area is fish farming which so many young men avoid because it is cost effective and tedious. You have to get a bulldozer to clear the land and dig the pond close to water. And there is fear that if the water level rises, your pond is gone. But now there is what is called cage fishing. This is a concept former Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun did in Ogun Waterside. I was at the Waterside few days ago on campaign and I saw the mass of water. And in Ipokia where I come from, there is water in Akere and Tongeji and I believe cage fishing will thrive there. With this technology, you put the cage in the water, put in your fingerlings and rear them there. The wastes are washed away in the water; you don’t need to drain any pond again. The fishes feed within the enclosure, which is the same natural habitat of the fish. So, the quality of the fish is better because they are more organic than the ones you put in concrete ponds. Once you get younger people do what to do and see that they can make millions, society will be much better, even for the government. And this is what we will do and get young people involved. I served on a committee in the House of Reps where I had the privilege to have close interactions with development banks such as Bank of Industry, Bank of Agric, NEXIM Bank, etc. I looked at how much fund they disbursed annually to young farmers and I discovered not much of the funds came to the Southwest. I then asked them why Southwest was left out and one of the guys explained to me that the funds are only given to those farmers who approached to access the funds and added there are criteria to be met before fund could be disbursed. Once the criteria is met, the fund will be disbursed accordingly. He told me that few farmers accessed the funds in the Southwest, especially farmers from Oke Ogun area of Oyo State. It was through this interaction I realised that there are certain platforms we have to set up and that is why we are going to establish Ministry of Trade and Investment immediately we are sworn into office in the state. With this in place, we will be able to access these funds for the farmers. The cage fishing we talked about, the farm settlement, there are financial facilities locally to support them, through these development banks. So, my vision is that if we can get these 15,000 youths into fish farming, the number can even increase to 50,000 along the value chain. Once you start producing so much fish, some set of youth will be given money to be the off-takers and dry them. They too will sell to market women or even export the fish out of the country. For the other 10,000 youths, we are going to target 5,000 for IT and 5,000 for skill acquisition to serve as interns in industries across the state. As an industry coming to our state, we give you some incentives. For instance, an investor wants to buy a land worth N100 million, we can say pay N50 million, the balance of N50 million should be used in training young Ogun indigenes every six months. The idea is that when these industries get bigger they will need more hands and once they know that people they trained are available, they will be the first they will take onboard. Then our own idea is: if during your internship, in six months you have learnt how to bend steels and other things, five of you can come together and approach the Bank of Industry. We will also look at certification; we intend to certify these young Ogun indigenes. Once we are able to certify their skills, it is the skills that will provide job for you in the future. The certification will also help them to access funds from development banks. For the other 5,000, we are going to look into service businesses. If you look at Abeokuta City Centre, it will engage about 6,000 people. At the location, about five banks are building their offices. And wherever you have such high number of banks in a single location, there will be other ancillary businesses coming there. So, our job is to make sure we tap into the cluster and business opportunities. Once I can convince the House of Assembly about our sincerity to create job opportunities for our young people in the state, then we can begin to negotiate with these banks and other companies. By the time each member of the House, irrespective of his or her political party, is asked to bring two members of his constituents for employment, the concession and incentives we plan to give to the industries and companies, will receive wide support from the House. And the PAYE tax we will get from those who are gainfully employed will go up. Once you get people to business where they are going to learn skills, they will be happy to do it. People who retire from public service often agonize because they lack skills that will cater for their needs in retirement. Our youths are educated, but they are unemployable because they lack the skills required by the employers of labour. Even in the House of Reps, when I am asked to bring CVs of my people for employment, I was always shocked to hear that they are not employable as they lack the requisite skills. People work better in private sector because the players in that sector will push you to make profit. In fact, my vision is for an Ogun indigene to work in a place just for seven years and then resign to start his or her own business. We will support such a person in order to create more jobs. So, 25,000 jobs are not a big number, when you break it down, you will see it is just like a drop of water in the ocean.
The present administration has done so much on infrastructural development of the urban areas. What are your plans in the area of rural development to curb rural-urban migration?
Let us look at it basically from this angle. You discover a virgin land and you know there is a river that courses through that land. And you know very clearly that the river is the wealth that will attract everybody. What any wise person should do first is to open a clear road to the stream, which is the heart of the land, everybody who comes there to fetch water will see settlement, and people will start to build other roads in the land. This analogy is what we saw in Ogun in 2011 and I believed in the vision I had seen back then and I bought into it. We need to open our urban roads to attract investments. You too can see the result, biggest industries have come to Ogun. Once you are able to attract them, what you now earn will be used to build rural roads and do other things. Today, we have a company that pays as much as N400 million as tax annually in Ogun. That was not the case in the state before the advent of Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s government. Do you know what our administration is going to enjoy? It is like somebody has worked for us, ours is just to come and enjoy the money. What we will now do is to make our local communities economically viable from the money we now earn from companies coming to Ogun State. I want to tell you that the wealth of Ogun State, we have not even tapped into it. For example, if cost of a plot of land is N80,000 in Ipokia, by the time I build a connecting road from industrial hub to Ipokia, the same plot of land might sell for N1 million or even above that. That means what I will collect as land charge with the value up, will be higher.
The present administration signed an MoU with a Chinese company for the construction of a light rail project, but it is yet to take off. Would your own administration revisit this project and start it?
You see, as I said, there is a blueprint and once you work with the blueprint, which is like your body, arteries, bones and all the organs that are there, all you need to do is to live healthy. So, as far as we don’t derail from the blueprint, we are good to go. This blueprint encapsulates all the visions for Ogun State. And because I am part of that process, I won’t have problems in tapping into the visions. When I met Amosun in 2011 in his house in Lagos, he asked me whether I have read a book titled ‘Not too big to fail’. I said no and he asked me to go and read it. And when I read it I discovered what he was trying to tell me and I immediately bought into his vision. I learnt in the book that you need to build a system so big that everybody will come and buy into it. Now, the benefit of it is that when a system is so big, everybody involved in it will not pray that it fails. You see, people will come with different ideas to keep the system afloat because they are stakeholders. And that is exactly what Amosun has done. Just like JP Morgan and partners built their bank so big that it became the largest mortgage financier in the USA. If American government had allowed that bank to go under, then, the whole mortgage market in that country is gone. So, in order to keep it afloat, the US government injected $180 billion into the bank to keep the mortgage market alive. And for us in Ogun State, we have invested heavily on infrastructure to attract certain kind of investment. An average asphalt road in our state has capacity to withstand about 30 tons articulate vehicles, but because of industries coming to Ogun State, these roads will not be able to carry heavy loads, they will cave in as a result of heavier vehicles. So, the only alternative to transporting heavy goods is by rail. So, any smart government that is attracting investors into its state should understand the need to build a railway system to take pressure off the roads. So, Ogun rail project will stay and we can even expand it if it is necessary by God’s grace.
One of the issues confronting the state is the provision of pipe-borne water, especially in Ijebu axis. What are your plans to solve these issues?
Since I have been going around on my ward-to-ward tour, I have discovered that one of the demands of the people is provision of pipe-borne water in the communities. Even in the cities, pipe-borne water is not everywhere and this made me to approach the General Manager of Water Corporation in the state on the matter. And as the deputy chairman of House Committee on Climate Change, I know that if you don’t control digging of boreholes everywhere, it is going to create problems for us in future. There was a time I met with Commissioner for Environment on the issue of water raised by members of the Manufacturing Association of Nigeria (MAN). The commissioner told me that his ministry was trying to control the digging of borehole. He explained that they were looking at a situation where companies in a cluster will dig industrial borehole to serve all of them in the cluster. And in my interaction with the GM of Water Corporation, I learnt that the challenge we have is that when those water pipes were being laid they were laid very close to the surface and as development came and there was need to expand the road, they started to break the water pipes during road construction. The woman then told me that they have evolved a new way to prevent this in the future. This is by digging and laying the pipes, which she said are now made with tougher materials, deeper into the ground. She added there is now a technology, which can help detect broken water pipes underground. Because water is life, what we will do as a government is that we will strengthen the corporation very well, but we will decentralise water supply system. This will be easy to manage and monitor unlike where you have a centralised water supply system.
with this, I think we will be able to solve the issue of water and even make it communal where communities will be involved. So, we will not drill borehole that will cause a seismic issue in future.
Senator Ibikunle Amosun’s administration constructed model schools across the state, but only one seems to be operational. If you are voted into office, what will happen to these multi-million naira projects?
I know this administration will do its best to complete those that are yet to be completed. And those uncompleted ones that I will inherit, I will complete them. For those who don’t know, the model school is not because we want to do fancy schools, you have to have a minimum standard how a secondary school should be and that was the reason for those schools. We are trying to create a model for those who want to establish private secondary schools now in Ogun State. That is the model we want our school to look like.
So, when we started to invest in those schools, we knew what we were targeting – standard, equipment and quality of children we want to send into universities. And I heard a candidate say that he would turn the model schools into technical and vocational institutes, he didn’t get it because he did not understand. You cannot do technical if you don’t have a technical based secondary school. The model school is to set standard for how a secondary school should be. It may take us 15 to 20 years, but we will get there. Maybe before I finish my tenure as governor, I will build more model schools and the person coming after me, I hope will add to the schools. All these are in the blueprint I talked about. What I will ensure is that I interpret the vision document efficiently and others coming after me will do the same.
What are your plans in terms of provision of security of lives and property for Ogun State residents?
My philosophy is that you don’t change what is working, but improve on it. Billions of naira was invested into security in 2011 and we have all seen the benefit of it in terms of investment drive into the state. And what any intelligent governor will do is to get investors involved in the security initiative. No matter how many armoured personnel carriers you buy, if you don’t get all the critical stakeholders involved in security, it will fail. Once we all have that understanding, we will all be part of it. I am aware there is a security trust fund put up then, we will continue to put money there and private sector will also support us. I don’t have a feeling I will have any problem to continue with the security template of the incumbent government.
You have lofty plans and ideas, but how do you intend to fund all these programmes?
It is through our IGR. At present the state is netting between N7 billion and N8 billion monthly and we intend to surpass that. You see, Governor Amosun is a fund manager and my own skill is in revenue generation. And for any one with that requisite skill, you look at Ogun State as a market and look at the potentials in the market. That is why I said that the wealth of Ogun is in the rural areas and not in Abeokuta.