By Murphy Ganagana

Benue State governor, Dr. Samuel Ortom, has said that it would be difficult for him to account for the action of his predecessor, Gabriel Suswam, who was picked up recently by operatives of the Department of State Service, DSS, on allegations of illegal possession of firearms and sundry issues.

In a chance encounter with Daily Sun in his farm at Adeka, a suburb of Makurdi, the state capital, Governor Ortom also asserted that no official of the state government had siphoned public funds under his watch.

Did you plan to be governor of your state or you were prompted by your people?

God told me that I would be governor; that was in 1992, but I was waiting for my time until 2012, when God told me it’s 2015, so I started work. My aspiration was divine, I am not just coming in for the sake of contesting and winning election; I have a divine mandate, to execute the counsel of God over the land, to lead with the fear of God, and that would translate to transparency, equity, fairness, justice, accountability, honesty, selflessness, discipline and integrity in governance.  Those are the core values that had been missing, and you see everything upside down in Nigeria. If we have those values, things would work well.

You became governor at a period of economic recession, how are you coping?

One thing that we decided to do was to go into partnership with our development partners. By the time we came, all of them were gone. We invited them and they came back; we hosted them and told them of the need to return. So we secured funds through borrowing, going into partnership with them, because to me, if you are bringing one Naira to add to my one Naira, something has added. That is what we did, and prudent management of the scarce resources. All the funds that had come into the state, nobody has siphoned under my watch. We made sure that it went for those purposes.

What is your blueprint for primary healthcare which is vital to save lives especially in the rural communities?

We have inaugurated the Board as specified by our laws, and they are doing very well. We intend to make health facilities available to the grassroots, and also augment secondary healthcare, by ensuring that our general hospitals are functional, and then our tertiary institutions, the one owned by the Federal Government and the Teaching Hospital we have here, we want it to be able to provide medical care to our people. It is just for paucity of funds, we would have gone very far, but we are also looking at development partners working with us.

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I understand the schools of Nursing and Midwifery in your state which is critical for the manpower needs, especially for primary healthcare, lost accreditation for a period of four years and were shut. How did it happen?

Well, I wouldn’t know; I wasn’t there during the past administration, but when I came in 2015, I discovered they had lost accreditation for four years, and I swung into action because the school of Nursing and Midwifery is one institution in the state that has the capacity to provide jobs for students as soon as you graduate. So we did everything and within eight months, we were able to pay N800million.  The school regained accreditation, and today, students have resumed; the same thing with the College of Health Technology, Agasha, for which we are about applying for accreditation. Then, Benue State University that had medical students for 12years but were not able to graduate due to the inability of government to secure accreditation, we secured accreditation and today, we have graduated four sets, 154 medical doctors from Benue State University, after 12 years.

I visited the new deputy governor’s office complex under construction and saw several dilapidated structures within the precincts of the Government House. Why were those structures left to decay?

You see, it is difficult to account for what the past administration did; I wasn’t there, we are still studying the situation up till today. But the truth is that we came in, we saw that there was need to upgrade facilities; there was dearth of infrastructure in the state. We came with the sole aim of reviving the state, and we think we have the capacity despite the paucity of funds. So, whatever we are able to do, prudently, we get into it; those structures you saw, we would come to them as soon as we get funds.

In terms of provision of infrastructure, what have you set out to achieve in your first four years?

I want to see that my people go back fully into farming, to regain our status as the Food Basket of the nation, through land clearing, through mechanized agriculture, through ensuring that we provide farm inputs on time, so that our people can access and do agriculture. I want to see that my state move from an economy of the civil service to an industrialized state so that we can process our primary product; I want to see that my people get strong education at the primary level, at the secondary level and tertiary levels; stronger at the primary level because that is the foundation of every child. I want to ensure that our people go into commercial activities and do well just like other states in the federation that are doing well; I want to ensure that we attract investors.

I want to ensure security of lives and property. Before I came in, there were massive security breaches and insecurity in the state; kidnappings, armed robbery, and so on, but you can see that today, we have reduced insecurity to the barest minimum.

How do you ensure your people go back fully into agriculture with the incessant invasion of farmlands and communities by alleged Fulani herdsmen?

Thank you, I am on my way to Abuja.