By Emma Amaize, Regional Editor, South

SECRETARY to Delta State Government, Comrade Ovuozourie Macaulay, in this interview, x-rays the Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan -led government and  what he calls the hypocrisy of some Delta leaders, “who never see anything good in the governor.”

Uduaghan’s redefines development
Governor Uduaghan came in, in  2007 and, of course, having worked as a commissioner and Secretary to the State Government in the Ibori  administration, he had the advantage of knowing mistakes were made and areas that needed attention and came up with his three-point agenda.

He has done everything to ensure there is peace and  redefined issues of  development in two ways-infrastructural development and human capital development-which he is pursuing today.

The rate at which Uduaghan is going now, he is thinking ahead as a visionary. You know about his ‘Delta without oil’ concept, it is not just for the government to create all the resources that we can rely on without oil, his plans are for investors to come and invest in the state, employ our people and pay tax to the government to generate revenue.

To create  a  conducive atmosphere, one of the first things he did was to install street  lights in Warri, Asaba, as there were pockets of killings virtually every day in the two cities, to banish darkness because crime thrives in an atmosphere of darkness. So, the street  lights are not just there for aesthetics, it is primarily for security and, with security, you are sure many  people will come and invest in the state and that is why we have expanded it beyond Warri and Asaba.

Our pact with Obasanjo Farms
The money the state government has invested in training people in the last four years is amazing. Delta is the only state today where any first class student gets automatic scholarship to anywhere in the world to study,  and there are  numerous kinds of scholarships outside bursary. Then, we have been training our youths. The last time I checked, we have trained about 800 youths in the area of agriculture and they are being attached to farms and some of them are given starter-packs.

That is why you see the state government collaborating with Obasanjo Farms Nigeria because we need a bigger outfit to be able to train these people and build smaller outfits that will take care of the micro aspect of the economy.  You cannot just generate them without looking at somebody to learn from and that is the advantage of that farm and, again, that farm solves another problem; at completion, it is expected to absorb a minimum of 2,000 persons.

The 2,000 persons absorbed means that 2,000 families have been taken care of, and there  is no family that has less than four persons. So, you have to multiply that by minimum of four persons in every family.

Taking Delta to higher level
You have the airport. You can’t  get land to buy around that airport anymore,  it has all been purchased and, as you can see, development, from the Ibusa Road end and the Asaba expressway end,  is taking place. Why? Because of the Asaba airport, a lot of people want to build warehouses, a lot of shops are coming up, and this is the development  we are talking about.

In Lagos, the state government makes between N18 and N20 billion every month from tax, it is because there are investments there; the thing is clear, the more investments you have, the more people you have in the community, the more employed people and workers you have, the more tax you collect. Today, Delta,  in spite of its scarce resources, is building a dual-carriageway of 145 kilometres, off the East-West Road from Ughelli down to Asaba.

It is a  Federal  Government project, but we feel Delta will benefit more from  it because you cannot be talking about development when there is  no good transportation and so we have taken it upon ourselves to build the road.

As Warri is being dualised to Port-Harcourt, we are improving the Warri port so that if goods land in the port, there will be good road to convey them; so that an Onitsha trader, for instance, will not opt for Port Harcourt. Most of these big-time traders in Onitsha live in Asaba and most of the houses here in the new Asaba city, even around my residence, 30 per cent of them are owned by Onitsha businessmen.

So, if we dualise the Ughelli-Ozoro-Asaba expressway and the traders are sure that they will convey their goods safely, they will  not berth their goods in Lagos and Port-Harcourt, they will prefer Warri port and, by the time they bring the goods through Warri port and other ports in Delta, fly in some cargoes through Asaba airport, which is a passenger and cargo airport,  and stock their goods in warehouses in Asaba, who is benefiting? We know what we are talking  about when we say ‘Delta without oil.’

Why some people don’t like Uduaghan
Some  people don’t like Uduaghan and one major thing they don’t like him for is that he is not putting money in the individual persons pockets, including his commissioners and appointees.

He believes in putting the money into projects that will benefit everybody. Whether you are a member of Peoples Democratic Party, Action Congress of Nigeria,  Democratic Peoples Party, etc, you will not say put off the street lights because I am not a PDP person, everybody is benefiting from it.

Those who were criticising the airport are using it now, even some of them with their private jets; you don’t have to be a PDP person to use the airport and these are the things that will bring development. The university campuses are being developed faster than any other place you can think  of; these are things that grow development. Development is not just a contract being awarded to people, so that is our own definition of ‘Delta without oil.’

‘You cannot compare Lagos, Edo, Rivers  with Delta’
When you measure people, you put them on a scale; when you talk of Delta and Edo states, you cannot compare Delta with Rivers, you cannot compare Delta with Lagos, these are very old states; don’t forget that Lagos was a protectorate years back. In 1914, Lagos was already being developed, so you can’t use Lagos development to compare Delta. Before 1966, Rivers has been headquarters; how do you compare it with a state that was created 20 years ago? They are  not on the same parameters.

Another thing people lose sight of is that Delta  is the only state in this country where you have four cities, most of the states you are talking about just have one capital city to develop.

In Rivers, once you have developed Port-Harcourt, you have done it, but here, as you  develop  Asaba, you develop Warri, Ughelli and Sapele. The developmental requirements in Warri today is more than that of some state capitals in the country, ditto  Sapele, but people don’t know the peculiarities of Delta and you cannot say because here, the bulk of the revenue comes  from Warri area, so you cannot just take the revenue and develop only Asaba and, because of our peculiar nature, these four cities are growing side by side and Agbor is also getting involved.

So, in any consideration, we must put all of them together. If we have N1 billion to share, instead of putting the whole N1 billion into Asaba, we  put say N300 million in Asaba, put N300 million in Warri, put N200 million in Sapele, put the other one in Ughelli, just like that. The way we are dualising road here, we are dualising the whole of Ughelli and street lights are following it, we have started in Sapele. For Agbor, the road dualisation project is still on, that is why we have not started street lights yet. Of course, for Oghara, it is the same thing.

Ethnic politics  not good
Lately, the politics of ethnicity is trying to come up in the state, but we are fighting it headlong. And, people are beginning to listen to us that we cannot marry ethnicity with politics. The Minister of Niger Delta, Elder Godsday Orubebe, was very emotional on the need  to reunite the state when he spoke in Asaba recently, calling on those who have jumped the boat to come back so that the state can move forward.

The crisis of ethnicity we had before 2003 is different from the political crisis we are having today and I know that, with time, it will be resolved because we are beginning to realise that bringing ethnicity into politics will not do anybody any good. It is really unfortunate if you look at it that a tribe that can boast of being the majority tribe in this state and even in the country is politically becoming a minority.

And, I know that most of their elite  are already brainstorming on whether the path they had taken was  the right one. So, it is not something that anybody would want to glorify because it brought no good to anybody and I think those who made the mistakes would rectify them.