Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State in this interview reveals how he is going to run Cross River State. Excerpts:
What are your remarks as you take over the mantle of leadership of Cross River State?

Given the outcome of the result, it is evident to me that I have support across all parts of the state and I should therefore thank the people so much for the overwhelming victory and with the trust and confidence entrusted in me, I shall not fail them because my victory is that of everyone in the state.

It is known that Cross River State has a huge debt profile and it is assumed that whoever takes over the reins of government will inherit a moving carcass which he has to do to bring to live. What do you intend to do to revive this carcass

First, that assumption is wrong, Cross-River State is not a moving carcass I am inheriting a very robust government. The fact that the state owes does not make it a carcass. We can actually convert the debt to asset; it all depends on the management style I shall bring to bear in the state. We have a very vibrant economy with huge natural resources even though most of the resources fall under the exclusive list of the Federal Government, I do believe that I will have a healthy relationship with the Federal Government and through that relationship give the economy a robust change so that with the looming climate, we can overcome the challenge. I believe that for every single failure it is the best door for success.

My conviction is that I am going to bring all my business acumen to bear and reconstruct the economy based on commoditizing and commercializing the state and shift away from depending on the Federal Allocation. I will isolate the state and run it as a business model and with that in combination with my contact and exposure I believe we can overcome whatever challenges as a state and turn the carcass to a huge economy.

Ben Ayade

How do you hope to bring in investors to the state to help drive the economy in keeping with your electoral promise?

As I speak I just came from upstairs where I have a team from the United States and Canada and we have been having a series of meetings. The cardinal issue is as a state, we owe a lot but we know and can see what the money was used for. Cross River State today can boast of having the biggest conference centre in the whole of Africa and that will bring a lot of traffic into the state and that would revive the economic profile of the state and of course create opportunities for employment and   for private investments to thrive.

Okay, I do believe that the core focus of my administration is to take advantage of all the natural resources we have got in the state to develop enhance development. It is not true that you have to inherit plenty to succeed. The whole essence of meeting with the investors who are already talking with me is how I can package our debts and turn the economy around. I have    a model which is to package the state for investment and that is by turning the liability into assets by creating and presenting the fundamentals to be exciting.

This is a state that has over one million hectres of pristine forest and that forest which is an asset that has remained unexploited and this forest has been conserved over time without exploitation and that is not the way we are going to go forward, we are going to move from forest conservation to forest management which means we are going to be needing two to three thousand young men who will be responsible for regeneration of forest.

As we are deforesting for development by processing it into ply wood and vinyl    for export we are also    correspondingly investing hugely for regeneration. That regeneration regime alone is going to be creating over three thousand jobs    for young men. We are also going to create a green city and that green city by creating   huge levels of canopy trees in parts of the cities in the state   and that will provide young men a reserve centre to undertake horticultural activities. To do that we need to provide them water and other activities. That will be part of the gymnastics that would be coming

We also think that as a state, we must own a shipping line.    The national shipping line is gone moribund and there is nothing wrong with a state government owing a shipping line to ship in our own petroleum products to generate additional revenue sources and all we need is just a federal license. As I keep saying, the time for politicking is over. We must move away from our party lines and realise that party simply a container and the content is what is important.

God has given us power through the people’s votes; we must therefore go out there and work for the people. It is not about APC, it is not about PDP,    so when people say I am now in an opposition party, I tell them I am simply in PDP not in opposition party but PDP is done I am now the governor of Cross River State and I need the Federal government to be able to succeed, I must therefore relate with the Federal structure and present to them my ideas and programmes and I do believe that it will be time to work together but   if    party is the issue, time would tell but I believe that the President, General Buhari would definitely recognise the fact that the whole country is   now his constituency and whole world will be watching the way and manner he deals with opposition and not divide the nation on party lines.

I believe that as someone with a military background, he will act fast and see the outcome of the election as watershed in Nigerian history. We as a state will recreate and reconstruct our economy and stop over dependence on the federal government. The sales of oil is falling every day, foreign   reserve is depleting every day , the naira is getting weaker everyday against the dollar and it is affecting both our macro and micro economy so we need to re-engineer our economy to meet our needs as a state.

We owe our people a duty and that duty is to make sure we put jobs on the table and I state   it clearly, it is time we stopped privatising government assets and put them in the hands of individuals. There is nowhere in the world where government assets are passed into the hands of individuals. Developing economies all over the world depend on government assets for job creation because when government takes over all natural resources, it is their duty also under the law to provide for the people.

Therefore, the assumption that private organisations should be responsible for developing the economy and providing jobs while government is to provide the enabling environment is wrong. We are two hundred and twenty years away from that scenario. For now, government must do business with business. For instance if today we had our Calabar Cement Company as it then was, the company would be creating jobs and if we had a state owned refinery, it would be creating jobs. We as a state must create a vehicle to exploit our natural gas and with the gas plant running, we can have power and create opportunity to export our gas. We can create a mini LNG plant and this state can depend on that to sustain the economy.

How do you achieve this business model in view of the bureaucracy which the public and private civil servants are used to. Be able to key into your vision.

We a have a government that patrnosises people based on duration of stay in the civil service so promotions are designed to    elevate people based on time spent on one level but with me all that would change. What you are going to experience in the first six months what you are going to experience is massive deployment to restructure the civil, service which we need to do. We are going to do a lot of orgasmic surgery to move hands from the civil service structure to a business model and those who cannot fit, we shall give them a robust retirement programme.

It is essential to recognise the fact that we must do business and by this I mean that as a head of unit, whether as a permanent secretary, you must wear jeans because you have to be in the field. We have to improve upon what we have now and that means we have a ministry of Water Resources and the question is why can’t that ministry   construct a giant borehole and reticulate it in a small rural community and pay its own salaries and remits the excess to government purse. How can we have ministry of works and all it does is to supervise contracts when actually the original philosophy of the Ministry of Works is to do works.

And so if I decide to partner with Volvo, a Swedish company to supply the state all the practical construction equipment, the Ministry of Works will be responsible for most of our roads, to construct them because with the state of our funds, we cannot afford to award contracts. We have a big project coming up here, the Summit Hills which we must complete, this is a project that will attract about five thousand visitors to the state so we need to put our hands on it.

So basically we are going to revolutionalise the ministries, reconstruct them and also carry out a massive deployment by ensuring that the white collar jobs will present only ten percent of our work force, the green collar jobs which is the agriculture and the blue collar jobs which is the factory takes the rest but the reverse is the case now because everybody in the employment of government is a white collar worker and so we need to reverse that equation. What we will do is to take all those people who are in the ministries sitting down, move them to the field. So if you are a geologist and you are in water resources, you have no business being in the office, get to the field and locate where we need is which is   to sink our bore holes. You must be able to come with these ideas which will create a new economy based on minimalistic cost and maximalistic returns.

Cross River State has a number of estates, robber, cocoa, oil palm; how do you intend to    reactivate them or are you going to bring them down.

The truth is that the right way for us to go is agriculture. Unfortunately we have a long way to go on the reorientation of our people. There is this command structure in our economy and sociological polity such that for you to say you are doing well, you have   to wear a tie and go to work.

If you ask a graduate of Agric Engineering where he wants to work, he would rather be in the office than    in the farm. When we take agriculture as the way to go and our people don’t have the orientation for hard work anymore and this is not a Cross River issue but a Nigerian issue. It is a national issue that the mentality for hard work is taking a back burner. People understand hard work by way of award of contracts and subletting the contract and taking the margin and money that you make synthetically like that is not wealth but agriculture provides the opportunity for wealth creation which is not different from being wealthy.