….Justifies Tinubu 2027 campaigns in Edo

…..Says N190 billion owed contractors by former administration

By Ozioruva Aliu

BENIN CITY – PRINCE Kassim Afegbua is the Edo State Commissioner for Information and Strategy. He justifies the expanded cabinet of the Governor Monday Okpebholo administration, the reason for the delay in appointing commissioners.

What was responsible for this delay in the governor setting up his cabinet?

The cabinet was already set up. It was not full blown. It didn’t stop his work, the governor was working. They were holding exco meetings and all that. Also, getting the politics right is one thing and then pressure from different interest groups, political actors and all of that contributed to why the entire exco was not constituted. But that has been settled now and the governor has also gone a step further to create additional ministries to be able to cover a wide spectrum of the economy.

There is a large exco, the largest in the history of the state at a time people are advocating for a cut in cost of governance. What is the justification for this?

Well, I think people should be looking at whether those ministries created have values that they will add to the state’s economy and if you ask me, they are not out of place. The Ministry of Livestock for example is going to add value to a lot of things that we intend to do. Ministry of Public Safety and Security, we never had that before. Now you have someone who will be engaging with security agencies and all that. All the time, you don’t have to see the governor. The person will have to go around and also interface with security agencies to suggest ideas and all that, building the civilian component of the security architecture in the state and work towards implementing policies that have to do with security architecture in the state. You have Humanitarian Services, administrative at the federal level so they will be interfacing with our own local level at the state level. Women Affairs has always been there with Social Development. The Ministry of Power was just separated from water resources so that it could concentrate more on the critical issues of power across the state. Especially now that we are talking about renewable energy, solar power and what have you. So it is not about the size. It is about whether you are ready to spend money prudently, you know, and transparently in a manner that will deepen the conversation around governance in the entire state. I don’t know when people talk about the size of governance and the cost of governance, what the issue is, is not necessarily the size, it is about whether what you are doing has impact on the wellbeing of the people. I think corruption is the bane of public service generally in Nigeria and elsewhere. Since the governor came on board, he has been doing a lot of legacy projects and he has not held back contractors’ money. He has been paying. Our IGR has improved from 5.5 billion that we inherited, we are hitting 10 billion now, add that to increase allocation from the federal funds and look at the projects he is doing in the area of agriculture, in the area of security, collaborating with security agencies, giving them necessary logistics support. Look at the area of infrastructure development, building one flyover we started another one again fixing the decayed road that we inherited from the previous government and also there are quite a number of issues and I can tell you without any equivocation that I am impressed with what the Governor has done thus far.

So what should the people expect from the government?

By November 12, the governor will be celebrating one year in office and that will give us an opportunity to carry out introspection, to carry out critical analysis of the government. What we have done right, what we have done wrong, areas we need to improve. Have we been prudent with resources, have we been prudent with management of human capital development and what have you? There are quite a number of issues. We are going to look inward to see our strengths. We will identify our weaknesses and we will also create opportunities of how to move forward, do greater things for the people of Edo State.

The expectations are high, but I do not envy the governor because of the depth of decay that we have seen in the state. Now as of November, we pray the dry season will set in, which will give us the opportunity to carry out a lot of repairs on our roads, in the area of education, we have been fixing quite a number of schools. In another two, three months, I am sure we’ll be completely fixing almost 60 or 60 something structures.

There are quite a number of uncompleted road projects that they started. Many of them, we are the ones paying. When we did asset verification, we are owing contractors, that is the previous government are owing contractors almost 190 billion naira so you can imagine what the governor inherited. Look at Stella Obasanjo Hospital, they said they have rebuilt, the governor had just given instruction that they should pay about 7.72 billion naira so that they can complete it. So they just awarded contracts, told the contractor to go and borrow money to be building and now leaving the burden on us. Look at the education hub they were talking about, we are paying almost 2 billion naira, money that ordinarily would be enough to renovate that place. Not that they built it from scratch. That place existed before. They just decided to renovate it because there was a fire incident at some point. We are the ones carrying out Obaseki’s mis-governance. All the things he claimed he has done; look at Golf Mews, they built it with government money, then they sold it to themselves. Nobody can even trace the money. Look at EdoBEST, schools without chairs and tables, they got $65 million from the World Bank. We only trace $5 million, $60 million, we can’t see it today. Look at the Radisson Hotel. They took money, N25 billion, invested the whole money in that place and now today they are telling us that somebody else who according to them invested 10 billion is having 80% ownership and a government that spent 25 billion is having 20% share. How justifiable is such investment. Look at MOWAA. They called it the Edo Museum of West African Arts (EMOWAA) but once money started coming in, they changed it to Museum of West African Arts (MOWAA) and turned it into a private entity. The three billion naira the government spent on it, there is no return on investment. So quite a number of infractions here and there, but it is okay, the government must move on. The former governor is now running around, nobody is chasing him.

We are seeing what is happening, don’t just bring somebody from Lagos and hand over power to him. We are happy that Okpebholo won that election because it would have been a continuation of what we witnessed in the last eight years before now.

The governor is dwelling seriously on 2027, always talking about Edo State delivering 2.5 now 3.5 million votes to President Tinubu. Is that not a distraction?

He is not being distracted by that. Rather it is helping him to get serious national attention, federal attention to address critical road infrastructure in Edo. Umahi has visited us quite a number of times and the road Benin – Sapele – Warri Road is ongoing. The dry season will hasten it. Asaba – Benin road is ongoing and all that. So it is not distracting us at all. It is good that Edo is in sync with the federal government. So we think alike. We implement the Renewed Hope Agenda in Edo state. It is an opportunity for us to go and lobby for more things to come to Edo. Don’t forget, even from that lobby we got 100km within Edo coastal line on the Lagos Calabar coastal line and rather than putting signboard as Obaseki used to do, do to say we are sorry, this is federal road, we are no longer putting sign board, we are addressing, we are fixing those roads. Even the internal roads Obasaki couldn’t do, you know, he was just using that one to shift attention away from the failure to address the, you know, state roads, you know, across the state.

One of the weaknesses of the last administration was the quality of roads so what is this government going to do differently on this?

Well, the current governor has a Special Adviser, an engineer who is into project monitoring and evaluation. So she goes about with all those contractors and ensures that there is value for money. There is strict adherence to building evaluation and measurement of the engineering measurement. The governor also carries out a lot of inspections on the spot assessment. He is not wasting time in paying them their certificates once they are ready.