Mimiko brought misery, poverty to Ondo

•Abraham

 

Chief Segun Abraham, an accomplished businessman, is one of the aspirants plotting the electoral defeat of Ondo State Governor Olusegun Mimiko in the election slated for October 20. In this interview with Group Political Editor BOLADE OMONIJO, he shares his vision and thoughts on the development of the state.

I have heard people say the ACN is very good at propaganda, and they are not on ground; that the party only exists in the media and its performance at the 2011 general elections was an indication that the Labour Party owns the land. How would you react to this?

At the time that ,the first election was conducted before the INEC postponed it, the ACN was leading, but when INEC postponed the National Assembly election, we heard that they brought money out and called all their elders threatening them. We heard that the election results consequently released were not the true position of the people’s choice because if it is a true reflection of the acceptability and popularity of the Labour Party, why did the chairman, deputy chairman, and other key officials of the Labour Party subsequently defected to ACN? People are trooping in to join ACN, so if we are not popular, why are people coming to join us? Don’t forget that our party has been restructured, and members can be found in all the nooks and crannies of the local government areas of the state. Can you imagine that people are decamping from the government in power? Why are they not decamping in Lagos and Ekiti? Why are they not decamping in Edo and Osun? So, if this government is popular, will it be losing its members to the party that is not in government, especially in a state where there are no industries and people depend on government. Despite that these people have no money, yet they are convinced that Labour has failed. They leave their bread and butter with the hope that they will be on the side of integrity, on the side of the people that will sustain democracy. So, it is an indication to everybody that they are not popular. Nobody will come and contest against an incumbent government that wants to run for a second term if it is popular. If they are popular, why are they losing their senator? It is a party without ideology and philosophy. It is a party for what is called "chop chop, not even chop I chop". It is a party of hard labour and poverty. So, people want to leave labour and poverty and come to prosperity, peace and justice.

Will you agree with people who say Mimiko is a General and nobody can dare him?

In his party, may be, but there is no general in politics but in the military and when they say he is a General, I want to believe because if you look at his administration, this is the first time in the history of Ondo state that we do not have government at the local level which is the pattern of military administration. I also heard that he served under the military and he copied that experience, so he brought military experience into democratic setting. A man who won an election on a democratic platform now dissolves the local government councils and then introduced administrators to take over the local governments. So, I don’t know the General they are talking about.

Are you afraid that ACN may be its own enemy at the end of the day; that it is a divided House that may not stand after the election?

I normally use history for what is happening, to guide us. From past experience; we have never had a divided house in the ACN. In Lagos we did election there without a divided house. In Osun, there was no divided house. In Ekiti, there was no divided house. In Edo, there was no divided house in Oyo and Ogun states. As democrats, our members believe in the supremacy of the party; if the party leaders say these are the people that we choose to deliver democracy, we will all support them.

Are you saying that the contest is unlikely to lead to exodus from the party? How would you personally react if another aspirant gets the nod of the party elders?

You don’t have to leave the party, and when you do that, it means you are not a democrat, that means you are just there as a gold digger, that means you are just there because of office. You don’t join a party because of office but because you believe in its ideology and the philosophy. So, those who have gone, we thank God we gave everybody a kind of level playing ground because we want everybody, at the same time. If you now leave because you were not given the position, that means you are not a member of the party. Suppose someone is eyeing the post of a commissioner and he does not get appointed as a commissioner tomorrow, does that mean that he is going to leave the party? Someone wants a post of chairman of board and he does not get the post, he leaves, that shows that he is more concerned about his pocket. Whoever leaves is not loyal to the party. I have been serving the party with my resources for many years and I did not leave. The leaders of the party know me for that.

Are you saying irrespective of the process that may throw up the candidate, you will stick to the party?

Our process is very democratic. What the people refuse to understand in the country is that we have brought innovation to the process of the emergence of candidates in ACN so that we can produce the best candidate. Will you say the process that produced Fashola, Aregbesola, Fayemi, Amosun, Oshiomhole and Ajimobi is bad? Is the process employed in choosing the people who are arraigned for stealing billions a true process? That is not a kind of process we are using in ACN. That they will say someone stole N58 billion in Abuja. Is that a process? There are so many criteria that we put forward before we will eventually pick a candidate. It is not a process of making mouth around the street. No, there are processes that you must pass through before you can be finally picked as the candidate, especially this time that the party is ready to deliver, to work and not ready for any godfatherism.

How, why and when did you get involved politics?

I have been involved in partisan politics for more than 15 years. I have been a politician. Once I identify somebody that he has the potential to deliver, I’ll try and support him. I did that in 1999 with the late Chief Adebayo Adefarati. I was among the people who contributed to the success of that election. I even campaigned with them during the election. I left my business and campaigned with them. After the election, the governor offered me commissionership and I declined the appointment because I couldn’t afford to leave my business. However, the governor appealed to me to make my services available to assist the state and he appointed me as chairman of Owena Hotels. Although I was reluctant, I, however, took it and promised that I’ll not take any salaries or allowance from government, that I would do it free of charge, and for the four years, I was the chairman of that Hotel and I did not take any kobo.

You took it, and how did that impact on the fortunes of the hotel?

When I took charge, I discovered that Owena Hotel was indebted to the tune of more than N50 million and within six months, we were able to make more profit. As a matter of fact, when I got there, I brought managers from Sheraton Hotel in Lagos and asked them to come there and manage it. They came there and trained the people. We even doubled the salaries twice before I left. That was why people started rushing to buy the Hotel because they never knew it could be profitable; it became very profitable because we were making a lot of money. I think Odua Investment took it over during Agagu’s regime to manage because they discovered that they could make good profit. It became an eye opener for people because that led to hotels springing up in Akure. You can see the effect because today you can see about ten good and standard hotels. That time, you could not get any.

How will you response to the people who think that you don’t have sufficient political and administrative experience to manage the affairs of a state. I mean public sector experience?

When they say public sector experience, all my business was done with government, as a contractor. Secondly, I have been advising politicians over the years. However, public administration experience in Nigeria has been a colossal failure and even if you have that kind of experience, it is the experience of failure. They do not have what we call relevant and developmental experience. For somebody like me, a technocrat bringing experience from the private sector that is called innovation, I have the kind of experience that Chief Awolowo brought to the defunct Western Region. He was not in public administration before he became the Leader of Government Business in the region in 1952. Fashola was not in public administration before. T Tinubu was not in the public sector before he joined politics. I was not also in the public sector before. Those who are arguing about public sector experience are people who are content with failure, people who have been part and parcel of the system and that system has been failing. Somebody like me will not be able to tolerate failure because I am coming from the private sector where we can measure performance, where we know our success depend on performance and this is what I am bringing. I am bringing innovation into governance, not a system where people just wait to collect salary. These people who have public experience, are just there to collect salary. That is why a country like Malaysia overtook us and Singapore overtook us, because those with public sector experience are used to the failure of successive administrations; they are tolerant of failure, they are not resistant to it. As a matter of fact, under normal condition in a civilised society, those people we are refer to as having public experience should not raise their heads because they should be asked what success they attain with the opportunity they had. If we don’t have electricity, we don’t have roads, our school system has gone bad, everything has gone worse, what experience can somebody now refer to? As an employer of labour, I’ll never employ that kind of a person in my system.

One major challenge that almost all Nigerian states are facing is that they are fully dependent on allocation from the Federation Account.

How do you intend to increase internal generated revenue in Ondo State?

The people in government are used to taking money every month. So, they don’t think how they can generate money. But, for somebody like me who knows very well that we cannot and should not solely depend on income from the federal government because it shows that we are all idle, we are going to turn around the state. First and foremost, we are going to train our people, our youth, our professionals to the relevant need of our environment because the first thing is that you must be able to conquer your environment to be able to survive very well. We shall not allow our environment to dictate to us. We must be able to dictate to our environment, therefore we have plans to turn the resources we have in the environment to economic activities. When we do so and generate employment, then you have development and less dependence on the federal government.

Look at Ondo State, in the last ten years, you cannot see industry that we established. Our education has no relevance again because we are not contributing to the development of our environment. All everybody wants is money.

It is not enough to say what you intend doing, we also need to know how…

We have cow. What is stopping us from developing our cow and give people fresh milk which is even better than the pasteurised milk? We can also get our milk from soya beans because it is healthier than cow milk. Coconut is another source of milk which is also very healthy; we have all these things in abundance. That is in the area of food. Some of the foods we have are good to produce others. For instance, our local Amala can be fortified with vitamin; our pounded yam can also be mixed in such a way that we reduce the starch content for consumption. There are a lot of things we are going to do. We are going to make sure that our foods have value added. When the British came, they took cocoa and coffee as cash crops, why can’t we develop them? By the time we develop our food, you discover that the income we generate on food will be higher than the one form oil that we are making noise about because everybody must eat but not everybody will use oil, not everybody will use gas. The cost of food in the last two years worldwide has increased by 56 per cent and it is soaring every day. Though they are now fighting against the trend worldwide and we can also join them by using the food we produce. In the developed countries, they are moving away from what they call processed food to organic food. It’s only in Africa that the major organic food can be grown because our environment is natural. So, Nigeria can be an organic food supplier to the world and that is a lot of money for us.

One major problem confronting our society is corruption. It has become endemic. Recently, a former chairman of OSOPADEC was arrested by the EFCC for alleged corrupt practices. How do you intend to plug the leakage points?

When the leader is good, the followers will tend to be good. That is the law of goodness. If the head is bad, the whole of the body will be bad. And if the head is good, then most part of the body will be good. So, the little part of the body that remains will be able to trust them. The people I am going to appoint will be people of integrity and those who have the interest of the people in mind. I will not pick those who are just going into the office to line their pockets with ill-gotten wealth. These people will not be poor, because there is a law that once you render service, there is no way you are going to be poor. They will not squander the state’s resources. And when you look at the situation where you have N58 billion taken from one parastatal alone in a small state like Ondo that is poor, it shows that people are just callous and wicked. Do they remember that the money is meant for the poor people? You can imagine the number of children that will be deprived of education, imagine the number of people that will be deprived of good healthcare. Today, we should be ranking higher than Dubai when it comes to the question of sophistication, in terms of equipment and technology to take care of our people because we have more resources here. I believe that evil has overtaken these people, because if not, what do they want to use all the money for?

One of your opponents (not in ACN) said you are an Akoko foreigner, how will you respond to this?

I don’t know what the person means by Akoko foreigner, because I have a house there, my parents’ houses are there, my brothers’ houses are there, my family house is there. I give scholarship to the people of Akoko every year and I have done that in the last 10 years. So, can this person who says I am a foreigner tell me what he or his family has done for Akoko? I set up businesses in Akoko. So, I don’t know how he is going to define Akoko foreigner, I don’t understand what he is saying. He should let me understand what it means to be an Akoko foreigner. My grandfather’s house is very close to those owned by other families. Who then is an Akoko foreigner? The only thing I can say is that the person must be a very local person who has never travelled out. Most of Akoko people are not local most of them have travelled out. Or maybe because I had travelled out, that now makes me a foreigner. I want to know the section of the constitution that makes me a foreigner here in Nigeria especially in my place of, where I have contributed meaningfully, where they have given me awards.