From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The governor of the State of Osun, Gboyega Oyetola, has declared that his achievements in the areas of works, infrastructure and high ratings from the electorate will place him above any candidate the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will field in the July Osun governorship election.
Speaking after returning his expression of interest and nomination form at the party’s Secretariat, he boasted that he has performed above his predecessors in his first tenure.
Asked the chances of PDP in Osun state in the forthcoming election, he said: “Well I can talk about my party the APC, it remains the party to beat anytime, any day, I don’t see them having any extraordinary chance of doing what we are doing.
“The works, infrastructures that we have done is there for everyone to see. We have also received so much ratings from the people who are to decide in terms of what we have been able to do,” he said.
He said that he has performed in the areas of economy, health, building the state into a financial hub, construction of roads, construction of schools among others.
“I want to thank God for the privilege. We have been in power for about three years and three months as the governor of the state of Osun. And we made some promises to the people, to a very large extent we have fulfilled our promises in spite of the paucity of fund to take care of the welfare and security of the people as a matter of priority.
“In terms of welfare, we have been paying the salaries and pensions of the people on a monthly basis since the inception of this administration. We have actually supported our people in the areas of agriculture and health scheme for the less privileged and vulnerable taking care of the vulnerable using the social register.
“In the area of health, we have revitalized not less than 320 primary health care centres spread across the state. The intention is to ensure that our people have access to health care by having at least a health care centre per ward.
In addition, we tried to ensure that we fixed all of the general hospitals in the state.
“We set up the health insurance scheme to take care of the vulnerable. This is to ensure no one in our state is denied access to quality health services because he or she does not have money. In the area of infrastructure, we have fixed quite a number of roads.
“They are so many that I can’t be mentioning them but sometimes the roads have been deplorable for thirty years. We ensured we have motorable roads across the state. We just constructed the first flyover in our state.
Many roads in Ife, Ilesha and Ijesha axis have been fixed in addition we continued the projects that we inherited from my predecessor.
“In the area of economy, we have actually done so well by diversifying our economy in the areas of agriculture and tourism. In the area of agriculture, we supported farmers with seedlings, stems and loans. We also supported poultry farming through the agro-poult, where we supported young farming,” he enumerated.