Ondo State Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu (SAN) served as Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) president. In this interview with Legal Editor JOHN AUSTIN UNACHUKWU, he speaks on his stewardship in the past two years, and his trip to Thailand for legalised and regulated cultivation of medical cannabis.
- ’My Thailand Indian hemp cultivation trip’
As a former NBA president, what are your thoughts on the legal profession?
Well, as for me, we have a lot of wrong perception in the country now and I believe that it is wrong although we practitioners too have not helped ourselves. We are probably to blame for a number of those things. Perception, not only lawyers, the moment anything affects the judiciary, it affects you as lawyers. A situation where we have the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) going through trial, there is no way it will not rob off on the profession including the NBA. If for one reason or the other, rightly or wrongly, the NBA President is also being tried, there is a problem. Now the issue of the NBA President, I have made efforts to look at it. And for me if you are not careful, all of us can run into that problem.
How do you mean?
All of us because a number of times you handle cases for governors and probably you are a lead counsel, the money paid to you is not for you alone. Never. Most times such money is not for you alone. So, if money like that is paid, if you are not careful, they will say it is being laundered through your office. We have a Bar, the President is being tried, the CJN is being tried. I pray that the NBA president comes out of this well. If he does, then we have to come together to build the reputation of the Bar again, that is the way I see it. Apart from the President, a number of our colleagues have been tried and some convicted. Other senior lawyers are still undergoing trial with judges and so on. These are things that have given us negative perception. Something has to be done. It may not be done by Paul Usoro as NBA president. Maybe after his tenure we have a president who gives a different image and all of us can walk in because when all these trials start, to wash yourself clean may not be very easy. We cannot condemn anybody here because anybody could have fallen victim of this.
You have been in office for over two years. How has it been?
Well it has been a worthwhile experience and let me say, I had time to plan to come here. I ran for the office once and got it the second time. So, I am supposed to have enough time to plan for it and I did. And coming here, I had my focus. Essentially my focus was the people. When I talk about the people, it is not necessarily my party members who have quarreled with me over time, and are still quarrelling because I just believed that look, when you talk about people, it is the generality of people which includes my party members. Your focus cannot be your party members alone. Your focus must be the generality of the people of Ondo State. I was convinced that if you are going to make any impact, you need to do things that will last long, that the people will be the ultimate beneficiaries of.
So, I said well, something has to be done about infrastructure. I set at it with everything I had, and developed my own model which is not the common or conventional one. We got contractors to work without being paid. How they accepted this I don’t know. A few of them felt that well, we have a lot of trust in you, ‘why wont we do it? We know that you will pay’. So, people started work on road construction and other areas and so on.
They got to 30 perc ent before they were paid a dime. That approach made whatever work that they were doing to be of high quality. They set the standard before they were paid. That is how we set what people came to refer to as Aketi standard for road construction.
What about education?
On education, for years my predecessor did not believe in the type of primary schools that we have, that SUBEB or UBEC at Federal level will support. Everybody has his own style. He felt ‘why don’t I spend money to build mega schools?’ and that was good for him. But for me it wasn’t something I was going to embark on because I am learning from his experience. I could see practically what mega schools had suffered.
What have they suffered?
The issue of attendance is very poor and some of the facilities are wasting away. So, I felt that I would still approach the primary school education and the improvement of infrastructure through the SUBEB and UBEC way. So I got money, we paid our counterpart fund. For about four five years we had not paid. So, we got money, paid our counterpart fund and that led us to work on primary schools from over 700 schools. We have constructed new classrooms in some of them. We have repaired so many. We have toilet facilities. We have their recreational facilities. We have solar power to provide them light. You can see so many schools all over the state, at all the nooks and crannies of the state.
The other approach is that I said look, our Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) is very poor. It was oscillating between N600 to N700 million maximum when we came in. It never exceeded N700 million and I said no, we cannot continue in that way. So we got consultants who had to come and work for us and luckily for us now we are getting about N1.5billion and still moving ahead. Luckily again for us when the Federal Board of Inland Revenue did their rating and Ondo State was rated number one in the country in terms of revenue generation, not that we are generating surplus or much but, in relation to what we used to generate and what we have now, the percentage increase in relation to what we used to have ,we are number one. It is on record and was announced, so we thank God for that. Then we were determined that we must industrialise the state. I travelled to China and had discussions here and there and today we decided to have the Ore Industrial Park. If you go there, about five or six major industries are coming up. Some have even come up. We have plywood. We have MDF. We are the only one selling in this country now. We have cassava to ethanol which has been completed.
What is the debt situation?
We are paying debts owed by past administrations. I said that government is a continuum. There were so many people that the government was owing and I remember somebody saying, what is this man doing, his party members have not got anything and he is busy paying salaries and debts owed by other administrations in the state. People have worked, they were owed about seven months without pay and for me, I have settled about six months out of that and have only one month left. So, by the time we get the next Paris Club funds we will settle that.
Is your administration debt-free?
Since we came into office for over two years we have not owed a dime. Consistently for over two years we have not owed a month salary. We are paying those working for us. It is important for us to do that because I believe that every labourer deserves his wage. I am not sure that an interview like this can capture all that we have achieved. When I was coming into office, I mentioned to them in Ore that the rate of accidents at that junction is high, that we’ll have a flyover over at Ore. They said every government has been saying so. But we have started. We have done the pilling, which is completed. I am sure that before the end of the year, you will see the flyover over Ore. This is part of what we are set to do. The roads in Owo are there and many places all over the state because infrastructure has been key to us.
It is widely reported that you are calling for commercial production of Indian Hemp otherwise called cannabis. What is your reaction to this?
I am a lawyer. I am aware of the Single United Nations Convention on Narcotics 1961. We we were part of it. My understanding of that convention is that it would discourage accumulation of cannabis by its cultivation and so on. But other countries have found ways to legalise cannabis, so many countries in Europe, because there is what is called medical cannabis. When you discover a cannabidiol, whether it’s the STS you find, or CBD oil you find, whichever one you want to find in cannabis its use today is there for medicinal purposes. We cannot deny that fact. How can we as a country or as a state where you have potential, you have good soil and these things are growing and is known everywhere, people are in search of it – I am aware for instance that in Canada they have about one and half years shortage, they need these things. So, how do we now fold our hands and keep pursuing our people? I said we can have controlled cultivation.
How do you control it?
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) will license you, take your area cover and you have their officers there to monitor so it doesn’t go into anybody’s hands. There is no way they can even take cannabis out of the country. If we have controlled cultivation then they can have facilities to extract the M Oil. Then the M Oil is packaged and sent to them for use for medical purposes. That is all about it. I said that Ondo State with our strain with the type of cannabis we have here, it has been taken out and tested and confirmed that we have the best strain in the world. They are three species here namely those that grow by river, those that grow upland and so on.
The specie that is grown within Ogbesse here and Amowuya is the best so I believe that we can take advantage of it now before it is late. It is believed that we have about $140billonn worth of it in the state, so why can’t we explore how to legally harness it for the benefit of the country? Even if it is S40billion we get, it is something for the country. That is why we went to Thailand to study how they do it. They are still at baby stage but they have put in laws to allow for this cultivation. In their case, there was a time they were part of the golden triangle, growing puppies of Opium and so on. People have left it now and we can equally make people to leave illegal cultivation of Indian Hemp by bringing some sustainable development, bringing some cottage industries to them and make them part of those who work in the farm which is legalised. So, I believe that at the end of the day, it will be a win-win situation for Ondo State. We should not lose out of this big trade opportunity that is coming up when it eventually comes in the form of medical cannabis.
Why did you go to Thailand?
I did not go to Thailand to learn how to cultivate Indian Hemp. It is cultivated everywhere and everybody knows this. We only went there to see the pathway, to map out the pathway for legalised cultivation and export and use of cannabis here. We have our universities here and they can carry out a lot of research. A friend of mine was with me the other day and told me that he bought one Indian Hemp cannabis product from the United States of America for hair growth, his own hair has changed. There is one for memory loss and so on.
How do you get funds to pay salaries and still carry out infrastructural projects?
Well we looked at what comes to us from Abuja and from it the first line of charge is salaries, after that, whatever is left we make use of it. Whatever we get from IGR we make use of it. We cannot do more than that. There are some challenges now. We are looking at it that we may borrow some money. There is nothing wrong with that because a number of our contractors are now being overstretched. So, we need to give them more money. They have done substantial work that they need to be paid. The IGR may not meet it so along the line we may have to borrow. There was a time I said give us one month and let us owe you, they said no way and when I saw their reaction I said what do I do. In my first speech to them I told them that I won’t owe them salary, I am committed to it. I am duty bound to continue that way and I will continue as much as possible to do that.
About the time they made demand for the payment of the one month arrears which Mimiko was owing them, a union leader said I know how much that came and how much that has been spent, there is no money, it is not possible, so let us not stress it. Most of them work in government and they know when money comes in so if I had spent it anyhow, they would have revolted.
What is your reaction to the seeming crises within the state chapter of the APC? Is it true that you did not work for President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election?
Well for me our party has had its own problems which started from the last party primaries in the state. Whether we want to take it or we want to pretend, we must own up to the fact that we had that crises and there must be a way to solve it. And I believe that the way to solve it is not all these talks about suspension or no suspension. That is not the right approach.
What do you consider to be the right approach?
The right approach is for leaders to sit down and look at it holistically. I failed to communicate with you, or if I reacted in a way you did not like or did not react at all, let us see, bury the hatches and move forward as one family because we are all in the same party. For me when they talk about suspension – initially it was querry and as speak with you today, I have not seen the query.
The next one was suspension and as I speak to you today, there is no letter of suspension, so I want to believe that maybe it was discussed, maybe the chairman and other people feel that one way or the other we must get this matter solved rather than pursuing this line of action. But I believe that the way things are right now it is something we can still discuss and resolve. It is something we can sit down and talk over. I belong to the APC, I don’t belong to any other political party.
As for working for the President, anybody can sit down in Abuja and say oh, he didn’t work for the President. But I worked for the President. I was in his campaign strategy committee of 16 and I will make bold to say that it was only two of us from the Southwest who were meeting every two weeks in Abuja. I was living in Ibadan, I was not a governor then. I went round with him before he won primaries as the Presidential candidate of the party.
So, I have paid my dues. I supported the President and the President reciprocated in that when a little crises was about to start about my primaries, it was the same President who said look, I watched the programme on telly and this primary for me looks free. I am not going to be part of anybody to say go and do other things. He didn’t say more than that. All he said was look Mr. Chairman of the party, that was speaking to Mr. Odigie Oyegun, do what is right. I watched it, it was free and fair, so he reciprocated and when a lot of pressure was mounted on him not to even attend our rally, he came and for me that was more than enough solidarity.
So, if someone did that for me, can I then ever work against him? Who then did I work for? Is it somebody that never approached me, never spoke to me? How could I have worked for anyone else? His other opponent was Atiku Abubakar. We never met; we never spoke. How is it possible for me to work for any other person other than President Buhari? It is not possible. So, I worked for him very well. We might have lost the election here; there are reasons why we lost elections on the Presidential ticket here and it is so clear.
How so?
It is not easy for him to win because Akure has the population. All that happened was that Akure felt that look, oh their son Eyitayo Jegede (SAN) who had wanted to be the governor of the state is working with Atiku now, and if Atiku wins Eyitayo Jegede may become the Attorney-General of the Federation that was the rumour going on then and if he becomes the Attorney-General, he could always come back to contest as the state governor. Akure people went all out to support the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Everybody was surprised but that was what happened.
What of your support for other party members?
When they claimed that I did not support Senator Ajayi Borofice, but Borofice won, is it not enough? Every other person they claimed that I did not support won election. Tell me what else they wanted me to do. We supported Alashe Adura from Akure with everything we had, Alashe Adura lost. He is there. Go and ask him. It was the Akure factor. Ok tell me, is it because my party chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomohole and Governor Godwin Obaseki did not support President Buhari in Edo State and that is why the President lost in Edo? No. You see, anybody can lose election anywhere. Buhari did not lose election here because I did not support him. I supported him and wouldn’t have supported anyone else other than Buhari. I supported President Buhari with all my strength. I wouldn’t have supported any other person.
