Ekiti State Governor Kayode Fayemi spoke with reporters in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, on the preparations for the June 21 governorship election, Vice President Namadi Sambo’s description of Ekiti as a war front, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) threat to ‘capture’ the Southwest and other issues. Group Political Editor EMMANUEL OLADESU was there.
Vice President Namadi Sambo has said that Ekiti State will become a war front during the governorship election? What is your view?
Quite frankly, my immediate reaction when I saw the statement from the Vice President was disbelief, until I eventually read it in about five newspapers and saw that the language was consistent and that the reports are similar in all the papers. The Vice President is someone I relate with very well. He and I are on the board of the NDPHC (Niger Delta Power Holding Company) and the Nigeria Integrated Power Project (NIPP). He chairs the company and I represent the Southwest in the company. And through that, we meet fairly regularly. The Vice President has every right to push for his party in any election. That is his legitimate right. But, to have said what the media reported was quite unfortunate because we are not at war in Ekiti. We have enjoyed three and a half years of peace and we are one of the most peaceful states in this country today. So, for someone, who occupies one of the highest offices in the land as our Vice President to reduce the importance of his office and promote insecurity, either directly or by subterfuge, is quite unbecoming of the person who occupies the number two position in our country. There is a part of me that still wants to treat it with scepticism and I still would like to take it up with the Vice President whenever I get the opportunity. I hope he would deny the report. But, I do think the underlying implication of the purported statement should worry any decent Nigerian who is interested in credible elections, especially in the light of what recently happened at Ilaje/Ese Odo and the role played by a minister of government, which has now been confirmed by the Resident Electoral Commissioner in Ondo State. In any decent polity, the minister would have been asked to leave by now. If you do anything that flies flagrantly in the face of the law, then, the maximum weight of the law ought to be applied by INEC. The law is very clear on these matters and even the military is empowered to disobey manifestly unlawful orders. What happened in Ilaje/Ese Odo appears to many people as a precursor of the grand plan to steal elections in Ekiti and Osun States. And the INEC ought to be sending a very strong signal that the institution would not take kindly to unlawful interference in the electoral process.
I can tell you that there is a lot of intelligence available to me about people sewing fake soldiers and policemen uniforms in preparation for Ekiti election and I hope INEC would be reassuring not just Ekiti people but Nigerians because the Ekiti election is even far more important than the 2015 election because if confidence is lost in INEC’s preparation and eventual implementation of the Ekiti election, that will rub off terribly on the 2015 election. I mean the INEC is already under watch, given what happened in Anambra. To then see Ekiti election going in the wrong direction would totally put paid to any hope on the part of Nigerians that anything good can come out of the 2015 elections and I don’t think President Jonathan needs that. I think he has conveyed an image of himself as a decent politician, who is not going to manipulate or resort to extra-legal or illegal ways in election management in Nigeria. So, I think the INEC, together with Inter Agency Committee on Election Security, would need to give Nigerians a lot of reassurance following the Vice President’s careless statement. But perhaps, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. I think it is very unfortunate. I think it is unbecoming of his office. And I think the Vice President really ought to withdraw the statement and reassure Nigerians that the agenda for Ekiti election is not going to be determined in Aso Rock but by Ekiti people because it is a referendum on the performance of the government in Ekiti; it is not a national election. It should not be expanded to a national election. But, let me also say that whatever evil machinations are in place from Abuja, Ekiti people are fully ready.
But, the Vic President made that statement at a time the PDP is also saying that it will ‘capture’ the Southwest. Are you not nursing any fear for this election?
This is Ekiti and people who are familiar with the history here would know that this is not a very good place to rig election. You can afford to manipulate elections in Anambra because Anambra has a lot of rich people who are even richer than the governor and do not care too much about who governs the state. In Ekiti, you will discover that everybody is interested in what happens here because we have 2.5million potential governors in this state. Every single indigene believes he has what it takes; that he understands government and that he knows how to govern. So, you can’t say such a person should not have an opinion on who governs. And every time election was manipulated in Ekiti, the result has not been palatable. Whether you refer to 1964/65 wetie crisis, which eventually culminated in the 1966 coup, Ekiti was even a stronger zone of resistance than Ikenne where Chief Awolowo hailed from and of course, when you talk of the 1983 election rigging in Ondo State, we all can remember what happened here. And of course, my own recent experience has also demonstrated that our people are far too sensitive to allow external interference in their affairs. People will make all sorts of claims; that they would do this, they would do that; but, the truth of the matter is that, even the PDP admits that this governor has done well, but it is about gaining an in-road to the Southwest by hook or crook. Unfortunately for them, the PDP had been in government here for seven and a half years and Ekiti people cannot forget in a hurry what they went through in those years. It was murder, mayhem and crises for the bulk of the period. And don’t forget that, for those seven and a half years, there were six governors. So, it was instability galore. That is what would have to be placed side-by-side what happened in our time in office.
Federal might is always going to be a factor in any election, but I can assure you that the peoples’ might is bigger than federal might. So, we have nothing to fear. We are ready for the worse. But, light will overcome darkness. The election will be a referendum on the performance of our administration and those competitors in Ekiti.
What do you mean by the election being a referendum on your performance?
First, what do I mean by that statement? An election is necessarily a referendum of what an incumbent has done or failed to do in the judgment of the electorate. Somebody running for the first time can only make promises and hope that the people will believe his promises. As an incumbent, I am running on the record of the public goods that I’ve delivered in every community and constituency. I have been on the campaign trail for over three weeks now and in every place I get to, the people are the ones who reel out what we have done in their communities. It is a much taller order for me in the sense that I must present tangible, palpable, verifiable evidence of what I have done. That is what I have to sell. And in addition to that, with the record that you know that I have, I now want to do one, two, three and four when I come back. So, it is a referendum on my performance. It may not be a referendum of the performance of my competitors. But, even in the case of one of my competitors, the election is a referendum on who he was when he was in office in the state and what he did. Even, if he chooses not to talk about that, others would talk about his record in office. The record will be set straight.
Why do you think that you deserves a second term?
I ran in 2007 on a platform popularly known as the ‘Roadmap to Ekiti Recovery – My Eight-Point Agenda. At the time, I was very specific about what I was going to do in office as far back as 2006. When you talk about social security – if you read my inaugural speech you will find social security benefit to the elderly there. If you read my inaugural speech, you will see laptop per child there. There is nothing that we have done in this state that we have not picked up from the eight-point agenda. And everyone who is objective can attest to the fulfilment of what we promised Ekiti State people. And in the various communities that we are going to meet people, they speak to that. So, I think the answer to your question is yes. My performance has earned me a reason to believe that I would be re-elected. A dimension to this, today, the result of one of the polls that we conducted at the various communities came to me. One woman they spoke to basically just said: “We like Fayemi. He has done very well. He has fulfilled all his promises. He has not done anything that we don’t like, but the issue is that, since he has already done everything he promised, he should allow another person come in”. I found that very interesting. But, the thing is that we have not actually done everything. There are areas where I would score myself 70 per cent or even 60 per cent. There are still some things to be done.
Seriously speaking, I think we have done reasonably well. Don’t forget that this state is number 35 on the revenue ladder of the country. People often forget that. And this is a state that gets N3billion a month against N23billion in Bayelsa with a smaller population. So, I think it is important to put this in proper perspective. We run a social democratic agenda and it is a progressive government. You will see that in many of the policies that we put in place. We concentrate on how to assist the weak and the vulnerable in our State. Additionally, we have run a reasonably clean government. So, I think we have done enough to earn a second term. But, we are also not unaware that performance itself is not the only factor in an election. But, it is the most critical success factor for an incumbent.
There are some things you said about the disparity in the money you get from the Federation Account. Are you comfortable with the federal system being practised in Nigeria?
We don’t operate a federal system in Nigeria. At best, we operate a distorted, pseudo-federal system, which does not operate coordinate powers among the federating units, but a hierarchical, subordinate powers inherited from our military past. If we operate a federal system, then, you will not have things like UBEC and TETFUND, which give people the impression that states are beholden to the Federal Government, whereas it is the funds jointly owned in the Federation Account that is being shared. If we run a proper federal structure, you will not have us here spending our meagre resources in sustaining the police while we have no authority over its activities in the state, unless our views coincide with or reinforce the instructions from Abuja. It’s simply a distortion of the federal system.
As for the disparities in earnings between Bayelsa, or Rivers and Ekiti, I do not have any problem with it. I’m an advocate of fiscal federalism. So, I do not necessarily have a problem with Rivers State, for instance, earning what comes from its soil. However, in order for us not to undermine the nation, for any federal system to work well, we often need equilibrating mechanisms so that one side is not overwhelmingly rich and other parts of the federation so despicably poor. We have to find a mechanism to balance this and, if you look at the Australian and Canadian constitutions – even in the American constitution, you have these mechanisms there. We have them in ours as well, but they are exercised in breach rather than in consistency with the law. So, I hope those who are working on this at the National Conference will be able to come up with a federalism that is more cooperative than combative because states are being forced into a combative model.
One of your programmes that the opposition has not criticised is the digitalisation of your income. Could you to shed light on it?
You are talking about the Integrated Payroll Biometric System. I don’t know if the opposition has not criticised it. When we started it, they called us all manners of names – that the agenda was to get rid of the civil servants. But, eventually, you are right, they couldn’t criticise it because the civil servants and the teachers became champions of the electronic payment system and it has saved us from a lot of money spent on ghost workers. We are now even trying to use the same system for our ‘Citizen Identity Management System’ and our social security payment, which is still manual payment and there is still a level of inefficiency and waste that we have detected in the social security payment. But, clearly, biometrics is the way to go. If you want to run an efficient government, technology has to play a major role. And that is how we have been able to reduce fraud in the system. We now save an average of N200million.
The scholar and princess of Ado-Ekiti, Professor Modupe Adelabu, is likely to be your running mate. Why are you retaining the deputy governor as your running mate?
You know what they say – if it is not broken, why fix it? The deputy governor has done very well. She did exceedingly well managing the state Universal Basic Education Board. My party has a position that the deputy must come from Ado – Ekiti and I cannot go against the position of the party on that. My late deputy was also from Ado – Ekiti as you know. So, we just replaced her with another Ado – Ekiti person who happens to be a direct descendant of the monarch here. But, that is not what qualifies her for the job. She is, more importantly, a professor and expert in educational administration.
