From Magnus Eze, Enugu
Former Secretary to Ebonyi State Government (SSG) and now Governorship candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in the March 11 poll, Prof. Bernard Ifeanyi Odoh, has said that the social sector will be his priority if elected governor of the state.
He condemned the incessant attacks on the opposition by suspected members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state ahead of the elections.
In this interview, Odoh spoke on various.
The governorship campaign is on, how has it been?
The campaign has been smooth and the experience we’ve had has been quite encouraging with our people. We have reached out with major demographic blocs that will shape the electoral outcome, like the faith based community, civil servants, teachers, traders and various associations across the state. It is quite encouraging, our people are interested in what each candidate does; the value proposition each candidate is bringing to the table and I think that our message resonates with them. We are offering solutions across different sectors which we have captured in our manifesto as B-SHAPE (Business Environment, Security, Agriculture, Public Sector Reforms, Education and Sports). Also we are encouraged by the response we’ve been getting from different wards, local governments and electoral demographics, so it is quite encouraging.
The issue before now when your campaign took off, when you were doing consultations, the issue of the security breach, there was an attack, how have you been able to contain such, including the defacing and pulling down of billboards?
We have refused to be deterred by all of that. The APC government believes that they get a win through harassment, attacks and threats but we cannot be cowed by those kinds of comments. Yes, I was attacked in Izzi local government, sometime in October. That hasn’t stopped me. I have continued to move with my team. I have been leading from the front. The way we approached the issue has brought their style to the national limelight. Everyone knows them now as people who cannot speak to issues but attack and each time they attack, they deny. So we have maintained our focus and have continued to interact with our people. Subsequently, there has also been a series of other attacks on our soft spots. Like at Ugwulengwu after we had our rallies there, they attacked our campaign offices, attacked some of our supporters. Some of them were badly injured. We have also taken steps to inform all the security agencies as to what is happening in Ebonyi. But we have maintained our focus and have not allowed any of these to discourage us or to demoralize our campaign. We will continue to speak to issues the way we have been doing. Our focus is that Ebonyi can do better. Out of 36 states, we are the 3rd poorest state in the country. There is a whole lot that can be done differently when I assume office as governor of Ebonyi state this year. We want to prioritize education, food security and our health system. We also want our business environment to be highly enabling so that investment can flow into the state. We have maintained our focus and that has reflected in our campaign.
What about the issue of venues for campaigns? There was this executive order on how one can get space for campaigns
The order is a lawless order because in a campaign season, a governor cannot issue an executive order preventing parties from campaigning. It’s unconstitutional, it doesn’t hold water anywhere. We have been meeting people in different locations where we can find them. Our own style of campaign is largely town hall meetings. So we are campaigning, executive order or no executive order. For us it’s a very unconstitutional order. It’s just an attempt to frighten people and discourage them from coming out. The good thing is that residents in Ebonyi know what they want and nobody is taking them seriously. We are engaging day in and day out and we are moving towards the finish line.
As one who has been in government in Ebonyi and you have done your due diligence in the course of pursuing your ambition, which particular areas would you give priority when you come onboard as governor.
Our number one priority is education. Priority number two is security, number three is agriculture and all these things will take place under an environment for people to thrive. We also want to allow press freedom because it is an ingredient of democracy. If a system doesn’t allow people to bring in valuable criticism, such a system is bound to fail because the room for improvement is hardly there. So in education, as of today, the statistics are not looking nice. Ebonyi State has the highest number of out of school children in the entire Southern Nigeria. Twenty Four per cent of those who are supposed to be in school are out of school. And after primary school, less than 40 per cent go into secondary school. And after junior secondary, only about 50 per cent go on to senior secondary school. So education in the state is in crisis. We don’t have adequate manpower; teachers to teach our children. We took a tour last Christmas to donate exercise books across the state. In Edda, Afikpo South, we visited five schools. Out of these five schools, only one had three teachers. The rest have two and one teacher. In fact, one has no teacher. The children were outside the classroom with no one to teach them. In the last seven years, there hasn’t been intervention in the area of manpower development in our schools systems. We also lack educational policies that would guide the system. The college of education is supposed to produce manpower for the state and beyond. If you take a tour to that facility, you have five per cent of the carrying capacity available there in terms of admission and in terms of resource persons available. Our university education has suffered the same fate. Under His Excellency Dr. Sam Egwu, our former governor, Ebonyi State University was ranked 8th in the country. In fact, our college of medicine at that point was ranked 2nd after the University of Ibadan. Our law faculty ranked 1st at some point in the past. Today, the university is ranked 118 among the universities in Nigeria. So, education needs all the focus and attention that it demands because if you have a number of young people who are supposed to be in school but are out of school, the incidence of crime, violence, abuse and propensity to drugs and all that increases. So under me as Governor, every child within the age of five and 18 years must be in school. Our primary all the way to lower secondary, we are going to offer full free education across that spectrum so that our children will not be encumbered from going to school. In Ebonyi today, no child has got a testimonial in the last seven years. Results are not produced, there is no overhead for teachers to buy chalk to teach our children. If you go to most of our schools, they look like places where chickens are raised. The environment is not conducive. We are not producing young minds that are good to be competitive. So it’s an area that I really want to focus on. Our budgetary allocation, we are going to implement the UNESCO minimum budgetary allocation to education which is 25 per cent of our budget. In health, we are also going to do a minimum of 15 per cent of our entire budget. Today in Ebonyi, we have only six doctors in the entire ministry of health to cover 171 wards. One doctor is covering Afikpo South and Ohaozara. None of these six doctors is less than 50 years of age which means in the next 10 years, most of them will be retiring. So, we have to inject new blood into the health system. We intend to expand the human resource availability within the sector. We have only one pharmacist. There is no Lab Scientist, there is no Radiographer, no rehabilitators within the health system. So the entire health sector is under crisis. That is why if you go to FETA today, the entire place is overstretched. The carrying capacity of that medical centre is way beyond what it can manage. So when people are taken to that facility, their chance of survival is just less than 50 per cent. So investment in health is really very important. Then most importantly, security. Ebonyi is the worst hit now in terms of insecurity in the entire South East. Billions have been lost to insecurity incidences. What we have as Ebubeagu is not delivering the services. Under my leadership, we will introduce smart security where the Nigerian Police force will properly and adequately be provided with security gadgets and allowed to have security stand-post with well equipped vehicles to respond to insecurity incidents across the state. We believe that if we make Ebonyi State safe, if we invest in our health system, invest in our education, invest in our agriculture, we will be able to create a new environment where everyone can prosper and attain his aspiration as citizens and as residents. This is what we intend to do differently when I come onboard as governor.
I don’t know whether you have diverted your mind to the issue of water. Water should be an emergency. Former governor Elechi invested heavily in the water sector. I don’t know if you have studied that.
Incidentally, I am a professor of geophysics. I understand that a whole lot has gone in that sector. What has happened in Ebonyi in terms of water supply is largely influenced by corruption. The state has spent not less than N17 billion in the last 16 years in providing public water supply, yet we don’t have one litre of water running in homes. The Ezilo water scheme has been abandoned. I was in government for two years and eleven months. Within that period under review, the Ministry of water resources wasn’t receiving the desired attention to treat and deliver water to the city. Much of the old lines has been dilapidated. They need to be rehabilitated. The Ofuruekpe water scheme which Chief Elechi built in Ikwo is largely too expensive to maintain. The distance between Ofuruekpe and Abakaliki urban is more than 40 kilometers so the cost of treatment, the cost of distribution and powering that facility doesn’t make economic sense. So for me as a geoscientist and a geophysicist, one of the key ways to drive urban water supply is to democratize water treatment and distribution. Introduce water schemes within neighborhoods that would be able to supply those neighborhoods as mini schemes. That is what you see overseas. You don’t treat water in a distance of 60 kilometers and you transport it from that point to another point. The cost of treatment and distribution outweighs the benefit. So it is to make mini grill water systems within communities, within neighborhoods. So that each neighborhood will have an independent water system. If one neighborhood fails, the rest of the neighborhood can still get water. But take example from Ofuruekpe, if there is a failure there, everybody is denied access to water supply. The Ezilo water scheme is within a reasonable distance. From Ezilo to Abakaliki is about 25 kilometers and that scheme worked up to the 80s and 90s up to 2000. In fact, water was still being distributed all the way to Ezzamgbo as at May 2015. But from June, it stopped and from that June till now, nobody has got water from the Ezzillo water scheme. So there is a lack of coordination. There is also corruption in the sector. So when I come onboard, we will reactivate the scheme that worked in the past. The Afikpo scheme, at the Federal Government college, there is a spring there. That spring can be developed and reticulated to supply water within that neighborhood. If you go towards the beach, the aquifer there is prolific. We can also develop a scheme there to supply water within the beach area. Same applies to Amasiri. So if we have mini water grids, it is more sustainable, more cost effective and can easily be maintained because the scope is manageable. That is the kind of approach that works and that is what we intend to deploy when I come onboard. So if we do that, neighborhoods will have access to potable water supply. Currently, many homes within the Abakaliki urban area spend more than N4,000 weekly on sachet water.
Today, the cost is N250 per bag. So a household of about seven or eight persons can use two of those bags daily. So if you do that in a week, it averages about N4,000 a week. That is not the way to run cities. So, it is our area of focus and we will do whatever it takes to ensure that our people have access to water within the urban area. There is also a cholera outbreak now since last Christmas. Akpoha and Amasiri communities are affected and it is also as a result of lack of access to quality water. So if we deal with that effectively, then we will reduce those incidences of outbreak of cholera and associated waterborne diseases. So it is a focal area that we have to look at critically when we come onboard..
Nobody has questioned your competence, your character and your suitability for the job but the question has been that it is not your turn. That there is zoning in Ebonyi. I don’t know how you are carrying on with this and your position about this.
If you do a sampling of residents in Ebonyi, especially residents within the capital city, out of probably every 10 persons you sample, they will tell you that they are going to vote for Professor Odo. Why? Because the average Ebonyi man today is focused on who among these candidates will address the issues that concern us as a people. Fortunately the three zones have all had a taste of governance. We have had a governor from North, Central and South. In this election as of today, we have candidates from North Central and South and they all have their followers. So I think Ebonyi people are more concerned with issues that face them and who is best to confront those issues. For me, I believe that we can do better as a people. We can reduce our poverty by creating jobs, lowering our unemployment rate, fixing education, fixing healthcare and guaranteeing a society where people are free to do their business without harassment. For me, that is what drives growth. We are not going to come out of the mess we are in now based on zoning. The race is already ongoing and candidates are already in the race from different zones so let the people make their choice based on who they think can best solve the problem. All those who were propagating the zoning formula and all of that, their interest was what was driving their proposition. It is not anchored on genuine interest of Ebonyi people. That’s why nobody is talking about zoning today. It is purely us who can best deal with issues before us. I am from Ebonyi Central. I am an Ezza man. If you go and look at the electoral map and look at the number of people that have registered to vote, about 24 per cent of those who will vote in this election are from Ezza area and between 1999 till date, Ezza man has never been a governor, has never been a deputy governor, has never been a minister, has never been an ambassador. So what kind of zoning excludes people who have that kind of population from participating in active politics. So for me, it is about the issues and that is where my focus is in the last couple of months we have been campaigning. So let the people decide who they want and vote for the person.