Fayemi: Unlike Before, I Am Running on a Record Now

In 2007, you embarked on this kind of campaign, then you were just an aspirant. Now as a governor, you are going through the process again. What has changed?

I am not the way I was then; I am running on a record now. Then I was running on promises and pledges to the people and when you are running on promises and pledges the onus is on you to convince the people that the things you said you were going to do you are actually credible to the people that you are going to do it. There is likelihood though that the electorate will treat your message with a pinch of salt unless you have cognate experience they can refer to as how you have performed in the Senate or in the House of Representatives or when you were a Permanent Secretary or in some position in that particular state that gives a sense of who you are and what you are capable of doing. It is different now, because there is an advantage and a disadvantage; because whatever I do will be scrutinised on the basis of what my promise and whether I have been able to deliver on it.

 

So, if I come to community A that I had been to four years ago and I have not fulfilled the things I said I would do in community A, what moral right, what courage do I have to come to that community and seek their votes again? What am I selling to them? So, every community I go, I wish you are on a train with me to a particular community. When I visit them one of the things I say to them is “Se eti ri ise wa, abi se eeti ri ise wa? Have you seen the school? Have you been to your hospitals? Have you seen the number of people who are on social security benefits in your community? Have you seen your Oba’s palace? When I went to Bimbo (Akosile)’s village that was one of the campaign points. I gave them money to build their Oba’s palace in Igbara-odo. I did the same with the school, helped with the town hall, the road that passes through the community to Ondo State has been fixed; the road from the community to Ikere has been fixed. There are tangible evidence-based results, which either tallies with my promise in the road map to Ekiti recovery, the 8-point Agenda, which remains my mantra. Almost everyone in Ekiti can recite the 8-point Agenda to you, to the letter. Or you said you are going to fix all the schools, you said we are going to have motorable roads all around Ekiti, you said we would have free delivery for every pregnant woman. Specific things; that, I think is a difference between when I was growing up, a challenger without being a known politician; I was a rank outsider then. The only record I had then was, oh, he fits the bill of what Ekiti people will normally like; an intellectual, PHD, he used to be an activist, he has worked with the people who rescued Nigeria from dictatorship and military rule. That was the only record I was able to sell to the Ekiti people in 2007, which luckily for me, they believed.

But it’s not the same now. People are going to scrutinise me now. What is in for their community, what have they benefitted because you will have those who will say, yes we have seen the road and the schools, what about my stomach infrastructure? I’m still waiting for that. That’s the difference between 2007 and now. And, of course, I have also grown a few gray hairs.

 

What has changed in terms of the way people view the politicians?

I think, to a large extent, one of the values I could claim I have added to politics here has been the way we have managed to reclaim the trust of the people because there is nothing that I have done that is not in the 8-point Agenda, that I did not talk about in my inaugural speech on October 16, 2010. Many of the things people say about Ekiti, laptop, social security benefits for the elderly, Ekiti has managed to tar all its internal roads within the space of three and half years. These were the things I specifically promised Ekiti people. People thought it was just campaign promises to get the people’s vote then throw them out of the windows. To actually see them delivered has really enhanced the extent of trust and closed the credibility gap between a political leader and the general populace.

I will go into a community and the first thing I do is to go and greet a royal father. And in 10 minutes of interaction they are always prepared to reel out “thank you for our roads, for our schools, thank you for this, our water is now running; thank you for the transformer you gave us”. Averagely, in every community, there are four to five things they always point out that I have done for them within the period that I have been in office. And also because we now introduced some kind of community government on a better work, every community has a project that we have given them money to go and implement on their own. This is not government contract; we work with our town unions because we find them extremely reliable. People don’t steal community’s money the way they steal government’s money. So, if we give you N10 million for the Oba’s palace or N5 million for the town hall, some of them, these were the projects they have been raising money for the last thirty years, in some communities, they would hold Isan day, Igbara-odo day every year and they are not still able to raise N5 million. So, you can imagine when government gives that same community town union N5 million and tell them use your own plumber, bricklayer, build your town hall, we will monitor and make sure you deliver on the project that we have sponsored but it is entirely yours; take ownership, run with it. Ninety out of a hundred projects are delivered on cost and on time by these community unions. So, it has really added value. It has also renewed the trust of our people in government. That is really the difference, the value and the addition I think we have brought into politics. These are the kinds of things we talked about. How do you do development with people and ensure you don’t do development to them? Because what government does is sit in this big office and begin to fashion out agenda for people. No input of the local people, no involvement of the community. I pose a project to them, I put it in the budget, and now some fancy ideas that I’m excited about, but which means practically nothing to the people. So when we came in we said no, this is not a government ruled by participatory agenda, and we take the budgets to the communities; give us three priorities that you have. Every year I spend like 30 days on the road between October and November visiting communities and asking them their next priorities after the completion of the one they ask. We tell them that you asked for school last year and we have done it, what is your priority this year? Some will say, Oh, it is the road to our farm, oh Mr. Governor, it is the Oba’s palace, among others. Okay, we endeavour to do something about that and we did and they take pride and ownership of the project. And I think, it just proves the point that government is not rocket science. If you have passion, commitment and a sincerity of purpose and the trust of your people, they would also work with you. When they say “O wi be, O se be” now they say Mr. Promise-keeper; that’s what Ekiti people believe genuinely that if Fayemi tells you that it is going to be done, you can relax, just go to bed; he will do it.

 

Your Excellency, you talked about your 8-point Agenda and we have gone round town and we have seen some of those things spoken of by the people. Ekiti is one those states that is among the lowest in terms of resource allocation and some of these projects require a lot of money. How did you get the fund to implement them, especially this social security, giving funds to the vulnerable?

A lot of us make the mistake often, particularly in development by focusing on the money rather than the issues. I am someone who has been brought up in a very clear perspective that lack of fund is an excuse for inaction. Once you are clear about what you want to do, you can always find money. I was lucky, apart from coming from a development and civil society background where we don’t really need a lot of money to get things done; we do things on a shoe-string budget. So, when I hear of these millions and billions, I imagine why do you need all those money to get things done? I also had the benefits of not just the period before 2011, I had the benefits of additional preparation for office in the three and half years I spent in court to the extent that every year when Engineer Segun Oni announced 2008, 2009 and 2010 budgets; those were the three budgets the state had under Engineer Segun Oni. We produced an alternative budget and published that alternative budget in Newspapers in this country. We sit down, as soon as the budget from the government comes, we will produce our budget on the basis of our 8- point Agenda. So, we knew what we needed, we knew what the deficit was going to be, and the basis of the resources allocation that we had at the time and we knew that these gaps must be filled one way or the other. We went to the capital market, for example, and borrowed N25 billion, specifically for regenerating projects that can earn the state money and infrastructural development. Virtually everybody talks about our roads now that is where the money came from to fix those roads. And when you talk about Ikogosi, that’s where the money came from.

People talk about our clay industry the money was also from there, the civic centre. I don’t know if you saw that in the course of your moving around. The new pavilion, the government house and a whole range of projects come from that. But I also refer to the fact that I come from a development background. One of the significant impacts this government has had is that all the development institutions that left the state after the exit of Governor Adebayo, I mean, I was privileged to have brought DfID (Department for International Development of the UK) to this stage when Adebayo was in office as a consultant and someone who was involved in the development sector. I was able to encourage Ekiti to be in the forefront of the agenda but they left. By the time governor Fayose was here all the development agencies moved their feet but by the time I became a governor they were all back here and within that period and now, we have secured funding from the World Bank on education, $50 million; we have secured another $50 million from the World Bank for water, infrastructure; we have secured funding from the World Bank on youth empowerment, about $15 million. We have also secured funding from the African Development Bank, from what I mentioned earlier from the ADB. Because people ask the same question that you asked: “Where is the money coming from?” But they don’t know that you can actually put these things together without being endowed with infinite resources.

Now, you cannot access funding from those kinds of places that I mentioned if you are not ready to be scrutinised. You must be ready to put your book out, therefore that is why we have a Fiscal Responsibility law in the state, that is why I declared my asset publicly, that is why we have everything on our table because World Bank would not do anything with you if you are not able to demonstrate transparency in your dealings and you must not shy away from exposure because they want to really say, this is your book, what your audited record says and we don’t think we want to do business with you, we don’t think you are healthy economically. We still do not have all of the resources we need but we have been able to position the state in a way that gives us reasonable confidence that stabilising the state economy, as we have done, that gross period is the next strategy. When you have the right infrastructure investment comes. In the last three and the half years we have had, even in the hospitality sector alone, we have had 10 new hotel facilities in Ekiti, and between 2003 and 2006, we barely had one and that is a measure. The hospitality industry is a measure of the confidence investors have in your economy and in safety and security. You don’t go and put a hotel where there is one week, one trouble; because it doesn’t make any sense. You want to make sure that your return on investment is one that can comfortably put you in a profit-led environment. And I think that is essentially what has been happening here.

 

You talked about the funding support you have been getting from some of these credible international agencies and all that. What have you been able to do with the IGR (Internally-Generated Revenue)?

Yes, education is our industry and we haven’t done badly, we haven’t done as well as we would love to. But when I became governor here, mostly IGR here was N109 million. Right now, the IGR oscillates between N500 and N600 million per month; you don’t want to compare with Lagos but the comparative is a much larger right in the short space of time than even what Lagos has experienced. It’s a huge amount in an environment, as you say, a civil service environment; there are no industries here. We are only trying to revive the industries of old and ensure that we create the basis for enterprise in our state and that will take some time.

 

You have the social safety net in place for the elderly. What are you doing for the unemployed youths because they are also vulnerable?

For us, we run a social democratic agenda and that is primarily defined by our core belief that it is the duty of government; it is not a favour to the vulnerable and weak in our society. But it is the duty of the government to lift the weak and the vulnerable up, because opportunities are not equally available or equally accessible. So, those of us who are blessed or lucky or whatever word you want to use to describe us, and have found ourselves in privileged positions, it’s not that we are better than those that we describe as weak and vulnerable, we are just lucky to be at the right place and at the right time. So, it is a duty of any government not to run a survival of the fittest agenda but to run an agenda that believes that we all owe each other a duty to protect and to promote one another. That is the fundamental philosophy of our government. And that’s why what we do to the elderly population what we also do to the young. I just talked about the youth empowerment programme that the World Bank is contributing here, we have been running our own scheme before the World Bank decided to support it. We have our Ekiti State youth volunteer scheme. And what does the volunteer scheme do? It pays an average of N10, 000 every month to our young unemployed people, who then contribute in turn their own time on a range of duties like traffic management, environmental sanitation, road clearing and public works, among others. That’s what we do with our young people. But we also encourage them to go into agriculture. We have a scheme here known as ‘Youth in Commercial Agriculture’ and we have empowered no fewer than 9,000 people directly or indirectly; who have now become active in the agricultural sector in fishery, cassava production, rice production, in cocoa, fruit juice and poultry; a whole range of production now have our young people become a lot more active.

 

Let’s move to the campaign. Shortly before the primary election of your party, the Labour Party governorship candidate, Opeyemi Bamidele, pulled out from the APC. Would you say his pullout has impacted negatively on the strength of APC? What damage has that done to your party?

Your recollection of 2007 was actually not that accurate. In 2007, when I contested and emerged as the flag bearer of this party in its earlier incarnation, you will also recall that 16 contestants against me pulled out of the party in December 2006: Caleb Olubolade, Dayo Adeyeye, Dare Babarinsa and the rest of them and these were the people who contested against me and once I won that primary they pulled out. The word on the street then was that they would pull out with the whole structure of the party and the people would follow them, which turned out not to be the case. I recall that we had a rough period, because some of them ended up in PDP, had federal backing, the election went the way it went and the Ekiti people were convinced that I won the elections against all odds; against the 16 people who pulled out. That just tells you something about character and about principles as far as this part of Nigeria is concerned. It’s unfortunate that my brother, Opeyemi, has found his greener pasture elsewhere, I can only wish him luck where he is.

But the reality is that not even Opeyemi’s ward chairman followed him to Labour Party, not to mention senior leader of our party in Iyin North in Ekiti. And you know in politics, they say, politicians are incurable optimists. A politician will see a road where there is a bush, because he is being guided by spirit; he is not being guided by facts; he is acting on faith not on evidence. So, you cannot legislate against someone who chooses to have a romantic view of life and a romantic view of politics; all you can do is encourage the person to test out his or her result out there with the people. Because, ultimately, this is an election that will be determined by Ekiti people; they have to define what they want of their state. We can say whatever we like as the contestants but the people ultimately would have the power to choose that which they believe is right from their perspective. If they believe that look, “Mr. Governor, you have done your beat, we have chosen to go with A or B, we no longer want you”; it is their prerogative. And, we must protect the right of the people to do that. But if they also say that “we love what you have been doing in the last three and half years, we love what you are doing. We want continuity because we believe continuity is the stability and growth in our state. We are going with you come rain come shine”, it is also the people’s prerogative. I do not think the fact that Hon. Bamidele is no longer in APC denigrates him or diminishes the party in anyway.

He has exercised his fundamental right to associate freely with the party of his choice, and I think no one should begrudge for that. What becomes objectionable as far as we in APC know, is the mistaken notion that is presented out there that he was hounded out of the party or pulled out of the party. I have gone on records, not once, not twice and I’ve asked him to challenge me on this; that my brother never even approached his ward to say he wanted to be governor let alone his local government, let alone the party at the state.

At no time did he put himself forward and then wait to be clobbered and say no, you cannot contest; it will not happen in this party. Yes, some leaders of our party may have exercised their freedom too, to say the governor is our person, we think he has done well for Ekiti, we want to back him but endorsement is endorsement. Endorsement is not a licence not to run on the part of any other person who chooses to run. You can decide that you are to doing it because this is going to be a moving train and if you run into a moving train you will have yourself to blame. But you cannot say you were blocked from running. Chief Obafemi endorsed G.S. Olawonyi in Kwara; they went into the primaries, C.O Adebayo defeated G.S. Olawonyi. Chief Obafemi Awolowo endorsed Rev. Alayande, Bola Ige who was a student of Rev. Alayande, went into the contest with him and defeated him, in spite of Papa Awolowo’s support.

So the idea that Niyi Adebayo has endorsed Governor Fayemi, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed has endorsed Fayemi, Chief Bisi Akande has endorsed him, is not an inheritance title; it’s not a chieftaincy title. Anybody can support whoever they want go into the race. If you claim that you are as popular as you tell people you are, then you should be able to defeat the candidate whom everybody has endorsed, in fact that is what will give you the credibility as the man to beat in the race. But that did not happen in Opeyemi’s case. I try as much as possible to grant everyone’s indulgence of their own right. Opeyemi is in the race, he is running. The taste of the pudding is in the eating. June 21 will soon be here. Let us allow the people to be the judge of who they see as a better protector of their future.

 

Talking about investment and boosting the IGR, are there any inputs from Ekitis in the Diaspora?

There is a lot of input from Ekitis in the Diaspora. You know we have our major initiative called Ekiti Knowledge Zone, which is the future of Ekiti. When you hear that we are laying fibre optic cables all around the state, for example, for broadband access, people do not really pay attention to that, because it is not food on the table, it is not tangible evidence of what government is doing. But we are doing that, because we know that we must leverage a point; everybody knows about Ekiti that we love education and knowledge and we need to be able to translate this into tangible benefits beyond just degree certificates in quality jobs for our people. So, we have the benefits of our people in the Diaspora being actively involved in the knowledge zone. We have had people like Prof. Funmi Olopade, one of the most renowned physicians in the world, who serves on President Obama’s medical advisory council and is a professor of medicine at Chicago, she is involved here with that. Prof. Bolaji Aluko is back home now and she is also very active at the knowledge zone. And the knowledge zone is like a free zone; it’s like the Lekki free zones for industries. The only industry we have is our knowledge, our academic and intellectual disposition generally and we want to turn that into wealth creation. That is why we are involving a lot of our people who have excelled in the intellectual and academic world in this sector. But the local Diaspora too, a lot of them are returning home, because of the climate and condition that have improved considerably here. We have a whole lot of Ekiti people doing well outside; they feel more comfortable associating with this government, because they are not afraid of their shadows, they don’t have a governor who feels threatened by the fact that they are successful and they are intellectual outside, unlike what it used to be in the state a few years ago. Many people would not even sleep in Ekiti; if they come here to visit their relatives, they would sleep either in Akure or in Iworoko, drive into their family compounds, see their parents and rush back. That no longer happens, because it is my pride and joy for those who have done well outside to return home and add value to what we are doing here. So, we have a strong partnership with our Diaspora community and they are contributing a great deal to Ekiti development.

 

Out of the eight point agenda, is there any you consider a priority or pay special attention to?

If you are in government, you often don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing priorities, because priorities don’t come in sequence. Challenges confront you almost at once. As we are dealing with challenges in the education sector, the women, who are getting pregnant and dying of child mortality, are not going to stop getting pregnant; the roads that are not fixed that are leading to accident will not wait for the governor to finish with the pregnant women before I come to fix them. We do this theoretical analysis about priorities, about sequencing that really fly in the face of reality. When you are confronted with developmental challenges, they don’t come in sequence, they don’t come in codified manner they just come at you and you have got to fix them.

If at 3am I get a call here that a community is under siege by armed robbers, and I just slept at 2am, would I say because I just slept I wouldn’t pick up my shoes and my cloth and head to that community? I’m not in any way making light the importance of prioritisation, which is the point you are driving at, I’m just saying that it doesn’t quite work that way in practical governance. If I were to then in an ideal word answer your question, I would say education is the priority for me. Because once I am able to fix education in a qualitative manner, almost every other thing flows from there. At least, that is my own limited understanding of the way things work; which is why I am moving from mainstream standardised educational development issue to the Knowledge Zone, promoting the knowledge economy so that they can become the hub for the transformation of Ekiti State. And, it would be something that we would be known for. If you go to Hartford in Connecticut, in the United States, they are only known for one thing, insurance. That is one state you know if you want to do insurance deals, go to Connecticut. If you go to California, you know that you’ll go to Silicon Valley. So, you have things that are associated with a particular thing to particular states and that are their unique selling points. I want knowledge to be the unique selling point of this state and of course agriculture and tourism will be the two other things that would follow, maybe in that prioritisation that you talked about. But all of the things that we are doing we won’t stop doing them but we are just going to probably put more efforts into investing in the future of our children by investing in education and then fitting every other thing into that.

 

The candidate of the PDP alleged that education is gradually dying in the state, compared with when he was the governor. How do you react to that?

I don’t want to trade blame games with any candidate. Some of your colleagues came to ask me questions about this, in fact a number of them have asked and I remember telling them that I don’t deal with opinion I deal with facts, the fact as available which is independently verifiable as far as education is concerned in this state. Ekiti has not been doing badly on education; rather it is on the rising trajectory in Ekiti from what it used to be. Whether you trace public education in secondary school or you trace quality of tertiary education in the state, it is very clear. But education is not a field, where you begin to see the impact of reforms immediately; it doesn’t happen that way. I cannot come into office in 2010 and the first public examination was 2011, you will want to judge with that. What you will do is compare the result of June 2011 and that of June 2013 if you want to make a reasonable assessment of what has happened to education when I came into office. Pick WAEC results of 2011, 2012 and 2013 then do a comparative analysis you will get a very clear result of our new infrastructure in secondary schools, which are beginning to pay off in 2013, unlike what the results used to be in 2011. I have given a few examples, I have even gone ahead to give you examples of my own school that had a nine per cent pass rate in 2011 but had 99 per cent in pass rate in 2013.

The records are there; I’m not going to be trading words with any candidate. And that’s why I invited the candidate of the PDP to a debate. Let us debate this before Ekiti people. Or how does he compare what is happening in the university system, where Ekiti State University has moved from 217 position on the Webometric scale to number 17? Is that my record? That’s not my record; that’s national standard. NUC said Ekiti is a merger university and it is an example to follow. Was it Fayemi that said that? The Law School graduate that had the best result in law school last year, was it Fayemi that marked Law School scripts? There are some things we shouldn’t play politics with. We must not play politics with the future of our children. And, I think I know one or two things about education better than some of the people who indulge in these things. So, they should give me some credit that I have gone through this and I still consider myself first and foremost a teacher before being described as a politician. This is not my daytime job; this is just some vocation that I have taken on for a particular period because of my commitment and passion for my people.

 

The reforms in the education sector, how did you resolve this, and secondly, what are your fears and concern for the June 21 election?

I don’t know if I will call them fears, I will call them concerns, when once bitten you become twice shy. I have had my management meeting with the electoral commission body of this country. I’m one of the few who are lucky to tell the story in a positive light. But that is not to say I have forgotten what I experienced to get where I am. And if you have got through that kind of experience you become a lot more suspicious about the superficiality of claims made by our electoral management bodies. I believe that Ekiti election is even more important than 2015 election, because if INEC goes wrong with Ekiti election then it would have forfeited its own credibility and reduced the confidence level, which is a warning by the way in what is going to be the outcome of the 2015 election. I am not so sure that’s the kind of impression that President Jonathan wants to leave Nigerians with, having promised that this is the last thing he would like to do following the uproar that accompanied his own arrival at the scene with the death of late President Yar’Adua.

My concern is therefore, that the electoral body should not give room for any excuse. There are many intelligent reports that come to me, I sit here; that Ekiti election must be taken by “hook or crook”, it’s a military language. “We are going to the war front, we want to capture, we want to collect, we want to break into the South-west”. The language itself speaks volume. It’s not a language of “we want to win, we want to appeal to the Ekiti people, but it is we want to capture; hijack, capture, war front”. The tendency of course is to dismiss this as you know this is the sabre-rattling of politicians, who always exaggerate their own capacity for evil. But our people always say that when Sango has performed before your very eyes you will begin to believe that there is something called magic. And we are not prepared to take anything for granted and anyone who knows this part of the country knows you do this thing at your own peril, because our people will not allow external imposition of who rules them. Because that is what it boils down to. I think it will be in the interest of those who have such machination to stay clear of Ekiti, because they will be shocked at what they are going to meet if they attempt to manipulate directly or remotely the election here in Ekiti.

And INEC should not lend itself to easy manipulation by some powers, who believe that they have INEC in their pocket. I do not want to believe that Prof. Jega would want to lose his high-earned credibility. If you follow the trajectory of this election, particularly in recent times, Delta, Anambra, Nigerians are not very confident that INEC can run hitch free process. Having said that, INEC is just one leg of the equation; if INEC does his job to the best of its ability, what about the security agencies who are even directly in the pockets of the establishment forces? I think those are concerns but I also believe that Nigeria is coming of age, we have to stop being a laughing stock in the rest of the world. We need to do something much more serious and much more credible and Ekiti offers that opportunity. This is one election that is going to be monitored so closely by both international and local agencies. Everybody knows that when I do election I bring everybody from the world. One of the hallmarks of my 2007 election was that it was the most covered election by international media: New York Times, Reuters, BBC and everybody was on ground; they witnessed the ballot box snatching live in Ekiti. Those were some of the things I used in court. Rigging election in Ekiti is not going to be a tea party. For anyone who wants to rig, he better prepare to confront his waterloo here. We are very confident that our people are not foolish but if the tactics is to scare them not to come out to vote then we will not let that happen. We will do everything within our powers and within the constitutional limits to defend and protect the votes of our people.

Reforms, by their very nature, are not things that people cherish, change is difficult. People don’t like change. Because we are comfortable in our skin, we like the way we have been doing things. So, if anybody were to introduce new way of doing things to us our first reaction is resentment. And the reforms you talked about were not entirely my making. Yes, I was determined to turn around the educational fortunes of the state. But I then decided that there were others more knowledgeable about this issue than Fayemi and who would not be accused of partisanship. So, I asked Sam Aluko to chair a stakeholder summit on education when I became the governor. Our Union of Teachers, our Association of Principals, head teachers; all the works were all there and recommended to me ideas for transforming Ekiti education sector that had gotten into a bad lot at the time. And they came up with very solid recommendations, one of which was improving teaching quality. In doing that they also came up with the principle of assessment; needs assessment now by their own reckoning, which I quite agree with, was purely to identify gaps in the competency of our teachers. It wasn’t a promotion examination, it wasn’t a test of dismissal or retirement, it was basically to identify the gaps in the competency of our teachers, which was misunderstood by union of teachers, an association body and a whole lot of brouhaha was engineered around that, which then saw some taking the examination and some of them not taking it. We reckoned that for us, there are ways we could do what we wanted to do without necessarily incurring the wrath of our teachers, because our intention was never to sack teachers. But we felt that teachers also owe us a duty to ensure that the future of our children is guaranteed, so that they can compete equally with their colleagues from other places, and for them to be able to deliver on that they needed to be better equipped as teachers. It was a ding-dong affair. We started providing capacity building for them. We also felt it wasn’t just about competency but also about remuneration that was why we introduced rural teachers allowance, core subjects allowance for critical subjects areas that we were having teachers to engage in Mathematics, English, the sciences, which are the toughest to deal with. But today I believe our teachers are reasonably happy with government. They are receiving benefits that would ordinarily not come to them, they know that the governor is passionate about education and is not ready to compromise the future of the children too in a way that, after eight years by God’s grace on the seat, our vision is that our students will not just carry certificates proclaiming that they have one degree or the other but they too will be employers of labour, because they would have sufficient skills in a manner that are independent of what is coming from civil service jobs or any other jobs. They will be wealth creators and they will be drivers of change within the economy, to make sure that the Knowledge Zone I talked about, also have people to look after them.

 

That’s really the vision of the reform and it is happening across the state not only teachers; to become a Permanent Secretary in Ekiti now you have to take an examination, to become a Head of Service you will take an examination; in every stage we have examination. There are other things we test without always subjecting people to writing an examination and all of these things constitute segment of our civil service transformation programme, teachers’ reform agenda and other aspects of the state’s developmental agenda. But we are sure that the worst days of our reforms are really over. We have achieved stability and we are now on an upward swing and we know that every segment of the population would come to appreciate fully what we are doing now that appeared not to be that clear yet to them.