Rivers State governor, Chief Rotimi Amaechi, is the chairman of the Nigerian Governors' Forum (NGF). Recently, in Abuja, he met with a team of Politics Editors, where he spoke on a number of topical issues, including constitution amendment and the perceived powers of the Nigerian governors. He insisted that former governors, who are being dragged to court by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), are only being unduly targeted. Group Politics Editor, Taiwo Adisa, brings the excerpts:HOW has governance been in the past four years'I am tired, exhausted. It has been very, very challenging, but a worthy experience.Any regrets'At the end of your eight years in office, that is when you would want to look back and find out whether there are regrets. Certainly, you can't live a life where there would not be regrets. There could be decisions that we may have taken that we would have wished we took differently, but I am not in a position to recount those decisions until we would have concluded our tenure in office.It has been said that governors, after winning their second term in office, usually slow down. What is your experience like'There are arguments they make in that regard. I don't know if I have seen that, but the truth is that, at this time, you are more cautious. You want to complete projects that you are yet to complete so that you don't leave abandoned projects behind knowing that new governors would want to initiate their own projects, so as to be recognised by what they have put on the ground. So, you want to be careful and make sure that you complete your projects. If that is what you call slowing down, I think that would be wrong.I did promise the state that I would try and complete nearly all the projects that we started. The difference between us and other states is that, in our own state, we are being accused of doing many things at the same time; we are not being accused of not doing anything at all.Are people saying you are too ambitious' My response to them is that we were overwhelmed by what we met on the ground and there was a need to respond to them. If you say you want to make a gradual response, that is a good idea. But in responding gradually, you may address only one or two issues and leave. You should just be coureagous enough, to the extent that you can engage in as many projects as are necessary. Nobody has said all these your projects are not necessary. What they have said is that the projects appear to be too many.It is not my responsibility to build primary schools; it is the responsibility of the local government councils and I met 1,300 primary schools on the ground; no toilets, no offices, nothing! No auditorium for the children, no library, no ICT infrastructure. I felt that if you needed to engage in rebuilding secondary education and tertiary education, there was the need to deal with primary education. I found, after investigation by a committee, that the local government councils lacked capacity and resources to manage primary education. So we took it over and the salary that we inherited from them was N1.2 billion.When the Federal Government increased salaries, the salaries jumped to two billion naira. So, we are paying the two billion naira to them and that is excluding the N18,000 minimum wage. By the time you add the N18,000, only God knows what it could be like.Then you look at primary health care. You cannot address the secondary health care if you don't address the primary health care because it deals with diseases like cough, catarrh, malaria and all that, things that people take to secondary health institutions and thereby giving the health institutions too many problems that could have been handled at the primary level. So we went ahead to deal with primary health care and, at least, we can say that we have between 80 and 100 of them functioning.We moved from there to road infrastructure, and don't forget that everything we met on the ground were done in the last 50 years and we have been there for just four years.The primary schools I mentioned, 1,300 of them were in 50th year, but in four years, we have added 500 primary schools and not just six classroom blocks. We are building 14-classroom blocks, all of them with ICT infrastructure. There is an auditorium in each of the schools; there is a library (hard copy and e-library) and there are 16 toilets. Children do not have to run into the bush anymore to ease themselves; they can now do it in a conducive atmosphere. When I was in primary school, it was almost the norm that you held morning devotion outside when we would queue up and sing and all that, but now we have provided auditorium where you hold morning devotion.So, we are a different kind of leadership; we are solution-oriented. When we say that we are solution- oriented, we don't find solutions to immediate problems; we look at the long-term effect of our decisions. So, if you look at these our primary schools in the next 20, 30 years, you do not need to do anything about them because we have outsourced the maintenance of the schools.I usually tell people that when you go to the primary school at Elakahia, you would think that we built it last year. People forget that it was built in 2008 because as soon as a child walks into the toilet and walks out, somebody walks into the toilet to clean it up. The workers are standing by to ensure that everywhere is clean.Now we have introduced a reception class where children are not just allowed to go into Primary One. They are admitted first at the reception level. Now, we are dealing with secondary education, just as we are under pressure to deal with secondary health care. By God's grace, when the president visits Port Harcourt between January and February, he would commission at least one of our secondary health care facilities, which is furnished and equipped to world class standard.Don't you think that your initiative in primary education could be a threat to private primary schools' I don't know. What we intend to do at the primary school level is that we will require all private schools to meet that standard. If you don't meet that standard, too bad for you because that is the minimum that we expect from anybody who operates in an oil-based economy.There is a feeling that governors are becoming too powerful in the federation This imaginary power. I hope you people don't kill us! I don't see how governors are powerful. There is just one president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and all governors are loyal to the president; that is the requirement of leadership. We are all loyal to the president, so I don't see how you can say we are powerful.Are you worried that it is now a custom that governors, after leaving office, are taken to the EFCC' I am speaking as Amaechi. I am worried that after you finish serving your people, then they invite you to the EFCC just to rubbish you. Nobody takes into account the services that you have rendered. Everybody just believes that once you are a governor, you are stealing public money. Some of us have joined in propagating the theory by the Edo State governor that if your child sits for an exam and if he scores 52 per cent, what has he done' He has passed. If he scores 26 percent ,what has he done' He has failed!So, if the EFCC is serious about fighting corruption, it should focus on the 52 per cent and once they can stop corruption by the 52 per cent, then they have passed. Even if they stop corruption by the 26 per cent, they have not passed.For the EFCC to investigate 26 per cent, they have to take transport from (Abuja) to the state they are going to; they have to book accommodation and they have to do everything possible to look for the 26 per cent, including going to London, going to Abuja, looking for the 26 per cent.Now, even taxis can take them to the 52 per cent. They abandon the 52 per cent completely and begin to look for the 26 per cent that is located in Rivers, Sokoto or Lagos or Imo states. You have no need to vilify the governors. If you are serious about corruption, eliminate corruption in 100 per cent of the economy or if you cannot, focus on the 52 per cent, because if you succeed in the 52 per cent, what have you done' You have passed!If you make 100 per cent of the 26 per cent , you have still not passed your exam; it is a re-sit. That is the argument. We are helpless victims of the ruling class who have always wanted to be governors.We have observed that the democratic system of governance has almost disappeared at the local government level, as caretaker committees, which are alien to the constitution, have been foisted on the councils. What is the Nigeria Governors Forum doing to reverse this' To that extent, you are right. At the NGF, we have resolved that in the next few months, governors who have not conducted localcouncil elections should endeavour to do that and all governors are very willing to conduct elections. Lagos State has just finished its own, and so has Niger State. And they cleared everything' I don't know about clearing everything. Don't get me involved in electoral matters! But I know that the elections were democratic and people were elected. Other states have taken the same position to conduct council elections; so, rest assured that the NGF is working with its members to conduct elections in the councils.One other issue that has emerged from the meetings of the Governors' Forum is their reservation on the revenue sharing formula that gives the Federal Government 52 per cent and the states 26 per cent of the federation revenue. How is the forum articulating the issue' We are working with the president in that regard. Currently, what we have done is that we are pursuing constitution amendment. The governors are meeting in that regard; we have met up to some point. I remember some journalists accosted me and asked what was the outcome of the meeting and I said it was inconclusive. We are bound to hold a second meeting and by next week or thereabouts, we should hold a second meeting to conclude on all the issues and send a bill, a private members' bill on the amendment of the constitution, to the National Assembly. What are the specific issues being discussed'I can't tell until we have finished. We agreed at that meeting not to let the public know until we have concluded the final meeting.Does it have to do with the revenue formula' That is why I said we are not in a position to say. Ask the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMFAC) that question. What we are saying is that we have a position. We will articulate that position in the next meeting we have and then come up with an amendment bill and send it to the National Assembly.There is this issue of participatory governance as reflected in the town hall meetings and the much reported improvement of primary education in Rivers State. Is this something you, as chairman of the NGF, would want to popularise among your colleagues in the forum'You are pursuing the 26 per cent theory again. Everybody has his own style of leadership. There are those who consult by going to see people in the night; those people may be stronger than I am. I may wish to gather everybody in one hall and we discuss. There are those who would say, 'I have to visit John, visit Mary, go to places and talk to people and move ahead.'But I can hold town hall meetings and say to you: 'I drove down here, I did not fly. I know you have no road and you have no water and you have no school, or hospital, and that I have XYZ amount of money from the Federal Government, what do you want me to do for you' The road, or the water, or the school or the health centre' They can say 'Build health centre for us.'Or I have done the health centre and we are at stage A or we have paid the contractor up to stage C and they say 'oh no, no, no, the health centre is even just at the foundation level, not up to stage A. In fact, there is a case like that. I heard the health centre was completed and I announced at the town hall meeting that the health centre was ready and they said 'No sir, it is not completed.'I said 'let's go there' and we drove down to the place and they were right, then the commissioner began to apologise.That is one of the benefits of the town hall meetings.One thing I promised the country was that, as chairman of the NGF, I would pursue two things. I talked about constitution amendment and we are vigoriously pursuing. I also talked about good governance and you can see that there is virtually no state where you cannot see good governance going on. What do you mean'Yes, compare the current set of governors with the set of past governors we have had and see if there is no progress from what our predecessors left behind. We are not saying that they did badly, but the benefit that a father derives from his son is the fact that his son will outlive him and do better.The past governors have done very well, but we are leveraging on their successes to improve on good governance. You must credit the current governors with the fact that there is a huge improvement.
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