Alhaji Yusuph Olaniyonu is the Commissioner for Information & Strategy in Ogun State. In this interview with WALE ADEWUMI, he spoke about his job, the achievements and challenges of the state government. Enjoy…

Could you tell us a little about your background?

My name is Yusuph Olaniyonu, I trained as a journalist and lawyer but I was practising as a journalist before I was appointed as Commissioner for Information and sworn-in on July 21, 2011. Before assuming office as Commissioner for Information and Strategy, I have worked for over two decades as a journalist, and my last two positions were as Editor of THISDAY on Sunday and later Chairman of the Editorial Board. I was educated at Muslim High School, Nisolu in Abeokuta here, Ogun State Polytechnic, Abeokuta, University of Ibadan, Lagos State University, Nigerian Law School and University of Lagos.

What have been your achievements since you came on board?

Well, you know that the Information and Strategy Ministry in any state is actually not an agency that constructs roads, it doesn’t build hospitals or manage hospitals, what it manages is what we can call intangible. It is not something that is very physical but is intangible and very essential. What we do here is information management, managing the information of government, ensuring that the electorate has adequate information about what government is doing, government policies, government programmes, government projects and again feeling of the electorate and relay the feelings back to the government so that it can help to shape government policies and projects. I think essentially if we play this role very well in creating mutual relationship between the electorate who are actually the masters of the government and the government they have elected into office and in that area, I believe we have done well.

When I came in, based on the instruction from the captain of our ship, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, he was clear that we are not going to run a government by propaganda; that means we will not exaggerate what is on ground, we will tell the people exactly what it is and that we are not going to run a government where you construct a road for 1,000 and use 100,000 to advertise it or publicize it. We will tell our people as modestly as possible and that is what we have been doing, we have not exaggerated the achievements of government, the achievements of this administration are numerous. In fact, there are people who accused us for not saying too much,  not blowing our trumpet as much as we ought to but is just in-line with the fact that serving the people is more important than blowing trumpet about what we have done, but I believe that now that we are getting to election and now that most of our projects, particularly the A-list projects most of them are nearing completion, some of them are even completed, we will now need to do a lot of awareness campaign, a lot of publicity so that people can know what we have done, what we are doing and what we hope to do, so we definitely need to step up our game at this point now.

What have been the major achievements of the Amosun administration?
That question is simple and if I answer it as simple as it is, we can spend the whole of today talking about it.

Are you saying the government has delivered on its five cardinal programmes?
We have delivered. Let’s start from affordable and qualitative education, which is the first item on the programme of the “mission to re-build” Ogun State. Look at it, in education the first thing the administration did was to stabilize the primary and secondary levels of education because they were actually collapsing because of aging and dilapidated infrastructure that dotted the entire State. It was collapsing because the morale of teachers had gone low, that sector has gone down because many parents could not afford the school fees, cost of purchasing text books, desks and chairs and all those things that needed to be fixed and it cut across the entire education sector, but this administration came in and tackled the problems from the foundation which is the primary and secondary education. So the first thing the government did was to declare free education at the two levels, nursery to primary and secondary and again supplied text books and began fixing the infrastructure one by one, gradually renovating buildings; bringing some buildings down and rebuilding them totally, buying furniture and fixing them, to do that, the administration started putting between 23 and 30 percent of its total budget into education. For almost three to four years, around 2008, Ogun State has been blacklisted by SUBEB and ETF because the previous administration collected money and did not use it for the purpose it was meant and they even failed to pay their counterpart fund and if you don’t pay the counterpart fund; you can’t access fund available for Universal Basic Education as well as the Education Trust Fund. This government came in and paid the counterpart fund and was able to access the fund.

So now, over 1,000 classrooms have been either constructed or renovated, thousands of furniture have been supplied to schools, but, you see the sector has gone so bad that even three years after; we have not fixed everything. In some areas; you will still see a few areas that needed repairs, government has continued to repair and it will still continue, there is free education in that area. Another area in education that got the attention of the administration was boosting the morale of teachers, arrears of salaries were paid, they now get this allowance which they call peculiar allowance This state is paying 27.5 which is the highest in the country to teachers. Then, there is an all round the year training programme, we are training them from time to time and government came again to introduce unified examination, this examination is set like external examinations, all primary school and secondary schools now write the same examination, government pays for the exam, the exams are centrally marked. As we are talking now, the pupils at the primary schools and secondary schools before they finish they are already sitting as if they are sitting for WAEC, they are already being prepared for external exams from their first year and this has helped to maintain standard, it has raised the standard and sustained it because each teacher is forced to cover the syllabus because he or she knows that is not the one that will set the exam. Students now have books to read at home, they take these books home free and they read and they don’t pay school fees so they attend classes regularly, syllabus is covered, the standard of performance is improving and that is why you see that our students are now doing very well in competitions all over the country, we win awards all over.

At the tertiary education level, when this administration came in, the issue of school fees was a thorn but this government has stabilized it and what we are doing now is investing in the schools now. For example; if you go to TASUED now, we have rationalized the courses they offer to make sure that they are
focused on education. Before, they did jack of all trade, we then standardized the entry requirements, made sure they complied with WAEC and they don’t take more than they can cater for.  Before, they would just admit students anyhow, arbitrarily, discipline has been introduced now. Look at Olabisi Onabanjo University, we just set up a Governing Council and that Governing Council has started investing in infrastructure, a lot of their courses were not accredited before but are now being accredited and for eight years; there was no convocation before we came in. We have standardized the whole thing, in 2012; we made sure over 40,000 students had their ceremonies and certificates. Now, 2013 has ended and we are just
waiting for 2014. In Mapoly and everywhere; we are trying to improve everything.
What has been done in the area of Efficient Health Delivery?

What we did initially was to look at it holistically, the rot was so much, we now have to prioritize and be strategic in approaching each and every area. In fact; in first 100 days; we make sure that 50 health centres across the State were fixed and when I say fixed, is like rebuilding, you renovate the building, we put toilet, we put generator there, we painted, we put borehole, we recruited and did everything. The workers now feel they are working in a new environment, they can now attend to more people, that we are doing and we are moving from that to bigger hospitals now. The plan is that there are more comprehensive ones we want to build now, the comprehensive health centres are bigger than primary health care centres, they may not be as large as the general hospitals, but they are bigger and well equipped and easy to manage. We have built one which will soon be commissioned, the plan is that we will now replicate that in nine federal constituencies. We took the general hospitals now and ensure that drugs are there. We now have a Drug Revolving Scheme; drugs are purchased enmasse by government and subsidised and given to them so they sell to the patients at reduced price; then pay back the government; that is why they call it Revolving Drugs Scheme, the money they pay back is used to buy more.
We computerize their operations in such a way that there would be no waste of funds or mismanagement of funds. Just yesterday, a press release came out published by a newspaper that we have surpassed our immunisation target either we talk of immunization in malaria and all these other diseases that you need to immunize children against. Ogun State now is guinea worm free, Ogun State is polio free. Aids infection level had gone down tremendously.

There was a promise made by the Governor when he was sworn-in to introduce a scheme whereby  those who are 70 years and above get free treatment and those who are five years including pregnant women to zero age get free treatment. To implement that, we found out that there were so many leakages that you will not even know who is qualified to get and who is not qualified to get it and it will be
difficult to fix them from each other  and if you are not careful; all the money the government is pumping into health will go into that thing  and wasted and government took its time to look at a near full proof programme. To implement that and in order to do that essentially; we came out with what we call Community based Health Insurance Scheme. World Bank has now looked at the project and given it a pass mark, UNICEF has looked at it and given it pass mark, so many private organizations have given it pass mark. How does it work, you know in some communities now in some of our local governments, contributors pay some certain amount of money, may be 1,000 a month as Insurance Premium and they do that from time to time. From the pool of that fund, we now treat everybody in that community who is age 70 and above and also pregnant women as well as children who are ages five to zero. Again, those who contributed also benefit from  free treatments, you know you can be contributor and not benefit from it because you are not sick.

What qualifies one for it?

Anybody who is in that community that it is done.

Is there a penalty for those who did not subscribe to it?

There is no penalty, you see being a participant has many advantages. I have benefited from it because when I was in Lagos; I was doing National Health Insurance Scheme, company was doing it for us, my family clinic was listed on it, the card I was given, everybody in my family benefited from it. They get free treatment anytime they are sick, you might not need it for some time but the day you will need it; you might not have any money on you and if any of the children came down with malaria; I will just take it to the hospital with the card and he will get treatment and I don’t get to pay anything, it reduced my medical bill to zero, I was not paying anything again.

What about tertiary health institution?

We have only one tertiary health institution and that is Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital and the institution was almost going down totally but government had bought a lot of equipment for that hospital. We have also done the accreditation of some courses being run by Olabisi Onabanjo Medical School which the tertiary Hospital has. We have helped a lot but there is still a lot to be done. One of the things we are trying to do now is to partner with some Americans to build a World Class Cancer Centre. That Cancer centre will draw a lot of attention, a lot of funds to OOUTH and also the training aspect for OOUTH staff. The Americans are working with us on it. The situation in the health sector just like  education is not something you can solve at a go, you solve them gradually. The government some time last year recruited over 700 medical personnel in the health sector, including doctors, nurses, laboratory technologists because we also realize that there was shortage of personnel, as you recruit you must pay them money; that is why the governor said if you put N1billion in  the works ministry, you will see physical development, roads and bridges, but if you put the same amount  in health or educational sector; it will just go into payment of salaries. The personnel is large, it goes into serving the personnel, you will not see the physical things.

What about agriculture and industrialisation?

We have realized that Ogun State has good land mass, our land area is 15,432 square km, almost 80 percent of it is arable; that means you can grow so many things. We realized that there is nothing that can solve employment problem than agriculture and construction and again that is why we put industrialization and agriculture together because we believe one will lead to another. We realized that we needed to get a lot of high level investors to come and start big agric project and employ our people. We made a lot of enquiries and a lot of people that are interested want to see how well this thing can be managed. If you want people to carry your load for you, you must have carried it somewhere; so while we are discussing and allocating land to investors in agric, we are also  trying to demonstrate to them what is possible in Ogun State. For example, we acquired land in Egua 100 hectares for rice farming, we have cultivated about 20 percent of it and they are going round, Egua Rice Farm; that is what we put in our calendar this year. Lagos State has also leased land for rice planting, that is going, and our plan is that as we are growing the rice, very soon we will construct a rice mill around that area so that as we are growing that rice and harvesting it, they will be processing it and bagging it; so we can start selling our own Ogun Rice, Ofada rice. If you go to Imeko, we have about 20 hectares of cashew farm that we are growing there, if you go to Ibiade; there is Cassava farm of large hectares of land there. We also have the tomato farm that is being done with the new technology that is called Green House Technology in Kotopo, they are growing tomato and pepper. They are harvesting and selling it, we now have agric mart that we operate here in Arcade, Oke-Mosan and every Friday the market is opened. The Farm market is also one way to let the civil servants feel what we are doing, the fishes from the fish farms we have all over the place are brought there to sell, they bring all the things we are growing from all our farms here to sell. We have fish farms  in Ilaro and Ogun Waterside, they bring fishes from there to sell. We also have the poultry farm in Kotopo, from there they bring chicken and and turkey. Again, if you also look at it, we have cassava farms all over the place because we are trying to create ready market for them. As we are talking today, Ogun State is the highest growing cassava State,  yet we already have an industry Procter and Gamble. The cassava input they need is more than what Ogun State is producing because that ready market will encourage our farmers and when you are producing more; there is already market for them. It enriches them, you grow, you sell immediately, you have money in your pocket, you go and grow more, when you produce, there must be a ready market for you and we don’t even want that market to be what they will sell and eat. We want something that will be value added, it will be processing into finished products and the finished products can then be sold all over the world, that is the fact, that is the linkage. Also, we are encouraging graduate farmers and that is why we have done the Owowo farm Settlement, where we have farm settlement with good housing, two bungalows, we have it in the picture, well equipped and each of the farmers has five hectares of land. They live in that community, they go to their farm, where they can do poultry, they can do animal husbandry, they can do real farming, cultivation of crops is also being done to encourage young people to go into farming. We are rehabilitating the farm settlement all over the place so as to get more of these graduate farmers and produce modern day farmers, for the big time farmers our people will work with them and we will have transfer of technology in line with the new techniques of farming. The get new seedlings and they go and replicate it in their own farms. Recently, the President of the country declared that Ogun State is the most industrialised State because we have policies that are attracting more and more industries. As we are talking now, I think 37 industries, according to the  Ministry of Commerce & Industry have been established in the State, companies  that are investing nothing less than N100 million dollars. In fact, the President of this country has come to this State to commission new industries about four times. He has said it, I watched it in video, he said the way Ogun State is going, everybody who wants to work will find work in Ogun State and he doesn’t know what the Ogun State government is doing. I think Ogun State government must have been doing something fantastic, which is attracting all those companies.

What about affordable Housing and Urban Renewal?

Now, a lot of urban renewal is being done by the government, a lot of them are nearing completion. If you leave where we are now, just cross the road, you will see orange valley which has just been completed, beautiful edifices, they don’t just beautify the landscape, but they show standard, this is the kind of housing that will attract high caliber investors, wealthy people to come and live in Ogun State and even have their holiday home. On the other side of Orange Valley is Plainfields, Orange valley is being handled by OPIC and it is for high level people, because the smallest house there is for N30 million and on the other side is Plainfields, which is N5 million. In Laderin, we have AAK Degun Mission 1 Estate which is for workers, 200 units which had been completed. Just in Kobape there, there is another Estate going on there, the Chinese are working on it, that one they are selling land to people, you can develop at your own pace, they are already putting the infrastructure there. Again, in Sagamu, we have the Makun cities there that is also already being completed. OPIC is also building in Agbara now. We have new cities now, there are all over the State now, be it in South, West, North, East of the State. It is all over because with the influx of industries in the State, there will be more people that are going to work in the State and live in the State, those people will need high quality housing, so we are already preparing for that and more of these housing estates will come and as we are doing this, we are also encouraging private developers to also develop properties. In Kara market, there is already a housing estate that is already in the pipeline. Very soon, they will start putting the place in shape and make sure we put it in level where water won’t disturb them.
What about Urban Renewal?
There was a PDP governor who came to the state and said, that the governor must be a very bold person; that in the first term, he’s doing all these kinds of roads and urban renewal. Before we came,  there were no flyovers, but as of today, we must have completed about eight and about eight are under construction, Itoku is completed, Sapon is completed, Ibara is completed, Sagamu is completed. Now, they are building at Ilu Awela, they are doing Abiola way, Madojutimi junction, about six between Sango and Ojodu are ongoing.

What about Rural Infrastructure and Employment Generation?

If you look at Urban Renewal, we want to talk strictly about the environment, see how many people we have employed under Ministry of Environment to clean our environment, that has provided a lot of employment. All the things I have talked about create employment, when industries are coming, they employ people, when you are constructing road, you employ people. When we are constructing Housing Estate, we employ people. We employed about 15,000 into the civil service. Then talk of the one we have done through different employment programmes, the Ministry of Women Affairs gave N100 million in the first instance to women to trade, they all traded with it and paid back, they increased it to 200 and gave it out. Now they are giving N400 million, do you know how many direct and indirect employments that have been created through that. Ministry of Cooperatives has created their own, N100 million, we have this N1 billion that we have put together through the Bank of Industry. In agric, we have this N1 billion which people are accessing, again we have realized that land clearing in agric is a major problem. If you want to start big farm now, you have to clear the land, that is where you need most capital. At a go, we invested N500 million to buy land clearing equipment, people can now rent them at subsidised rate and then you get your land cleared. In agric, we have N100 million which farmers are accessing. The First lady did training for unemployment graduates, 200 and after they finished, she gave them startup capital. Some of them are on their own, government is patronizing them, all the bridges, all the roads we are constructing they create employment. Let me give you an instance, if you are building  a 3 bed-room flat, not less than 50 people will work on that site before it is finished, talk of bricklayers, you talk of diggers,  sand suppliers, carpenters, block makers, food vendors, electricians, suppliers of various building materials, like windows and all those things, various kinds of artisans will work on it. Look at all the various housings, all the various bridges that are under construction, they generate employment, they beautify the State, those infrastructure facilities are rebuilding the State. They are giving the state a  new life, people now talk of new London in Ogun State, new Paris in Ogun State, the New York in Ogun State.  Look at what we have done in security which is not under the five cardinal points, the State was highly insecure when we came in. There were a lot of security challenges in some areas, when we came in, we sat with the various security agencies, assessed their needs and provided those needs. Today, we have provided over 200 Hilux buses with communication gadgets, we have provided 13 armoured personnel carriers, we have set up Operation OP MESSA, joint Military Operation, we have set up so many things, Rapid Response Squad. These are well funded and we have even set up a Security Trust Fund to help us sustain the operations.

What are the major challenges the state government is facing?

How I wish we can have more funds. When this government came in, we met N750 million monthly IGR, the government through ingenuity of the captain of the ships, Senator Ibikunle and his economic team, we have raised that IGR  from N750m to over N4 billion. Today, Ogun and Lagos states are the ones which Internally Generated Revenue is more than what they collect for revenue allocation. If we have more money, I know the Governor will expand more roads in Ogun State. If we have more money, I know government will want almost all our tertiary institutions to have new set of buildings, new facilities, new workshops. The governor will want housing estate that is very cheap.

The concept of stomach infrastructure which is in vogue now, can you relate it to physical development that your government is doing

The governor has consistently said it and I share his view on that, that our people in Ogun State are the most sophisticated people in this country, they know what is good for them, they know what they want and what is good for them. They know who is working for them and what is against them, our people know what this State was before Amosun came in. They know what it is  today, they are proud of what they are seeing and that is why you will see various professional groups, artistes, artisans, road transport workers, all of them, coming to support the government and the governor. Any day, our people will vote for development, our people will prefer development to all other things, all those who are talking about stomach infrastructure even in other places, they are just misjudging what is happening there, very soon the real story of what happened in those places will be told.