PDP members are the fraudsters — Osun govt

Osun State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Sunday Akere

The Osun State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Sunday Akere, in this interview with FEMI MAKINDE, says the Peoples Democratic Party in the state is fabricating lies to justify its looming loss at the next governorship poll

The APC was accused of carrying out illegal voter registration inside the Government House with the connivance of the Independent National Electoral Commission. How do you react to this?

It is a pity that instead of grappling with the problem confronting the PDP in the state, the leadership of the party is bent on distracting us from the good work we are doing. The government of Rauf Aregbesola or the governor himself has nothing to do with the registration of voters. Registration for elections is the business of INEC and there is no way voter registration can be done in the Government House, which is a public property. The Government House is open for everybody to enter. The PDP is making such spurious allegation because the party is never known to be involved in anything decent; they are always involved in illegalities and that is why they are raising such allegation. The period of Osun Osogbo Festival is known for festivities and enjoyment. How can anybody say he will be involved in such, when the whole town is jam-packed? They don’t have anything reasonable to say and we refuse to be distracted by their antics.

Those in the PDP are afraid because they know that they have since lost everything that  has to do with popularity; they know that the volume of work already done by Aregbesola in the state is more than enough to campaign for him; they know that their party is heading for a big defeat at the poll. They are raising issues that are not supposed to be brought up because they know that people will ask them what they did with the state’s resources when they were in government for seven-and-half years.

This administration, according to the PDP, has borrowed N311bn with nothing to show for it. Is this true?

The problem with the PDP is that they are populated with stark illiterates and I am sorry to say this. In Nigeria today, out of 25 banks legally registered, there is none of them that will lend you more than how much you have the capacity to pay back. Let us look at it this way: if you approach a bank for a loan, the first thing they will ask for is the collateral, which must be higher in values than the loan you want to take. If you they saying Osun has borrowed over N300bn, that means Osun is worth more than N900bn. What comes to the state per month is around N4bn, out of which salaries are paid. Even if you say we have N2bn left, what that amounts to at the end of the year is N24bn. Multiply this in four places (four years), what does it give you? How can you say banks will borrow you far more than what you can pay back in four years, which is a single tenure. The PDP in Osun is full of illiterates. They are free to say anything they like, we are not bothered. We don’t want to be distracted. They know we are working and that is why they are saying all these. When they were in government, they borrowed N18.38bn and withdrew N10bn from it in a day and there was nothing to show for the N10bn.

What Aregbesola is doing today is called financial re-engineering. The contractors working with us have trust in us and majority of the projects are contractor-financed projects. The PDP does not know anything like that and that is why they keep saying we are borrowing money to do what we are doing. We are constructing the airport in Osogbo with less than N5bn. But they were here (in government); they put up a paper that they committed N9bn to the same project and there was nothing to show for it. We are not bothered by their allegations because they are confirmed fraudsters and the people of the state know this.

What is the debt profile of Osun State?

The commissioner for finance says it all the time; the governor himself says it always and anybody  that has knowledge about financing will know it. When we presented the 2013 budget to the state House of Assembly, we stated there that we were to take N35bn through loan financing. To make up this, we took a bond of N30bn and the state is not committed more than that.

Your party seems to be ready to take the advantage of the crisis rocking the PDP in the state to win the 2014 governorship election in the state

Even before the crisis was blown open to the public, everybody knew that the PDP was finished. They are only living on past glory; they are living on the greed, which is the binding force within the party. The PDP is divided into about four factions now. There is the old PDP, the New PDP has been accused of taking the PDM and one other faction. We are not waiting for this (the division). Our party has worked seriously to ensure that in 2014, we are going to win convincingly. If you look at the composition of the APC, you will know that the party,  is waiting to form the government at the national level and is ready to continue as the ruling party in Osun.

Why is the governor trying to constitute the Osun State Independent Electoral Commission considering that a case on this is pending before the Supreme Court?

The governor sent names of those to be appointed as chairman and members of the state electoral body to the State House of Assembly for ratification.  We are not undermining whatever verdict the Supreme Court will come up with. We know that the people that went to the court were members of the old OSSIEC. Our lawmakers went to court challenging the modalities used for screening members of the old OSSIEC and they won at the High Court in Osogbo. The OSSIEC members that lost challenged the victory at the Appeal Court, where they lost. They now want to challenge it at the Supreme Court. We believe it is a process, we are democrats and we are committed to the people of the state. We have waited for so long; we have waited for almost three years thinking this thing would be dispensed soon. What we are doing now is preparing for the next year. We know that before the process of screening will be concluded, the matter must have been dispensed at the Supreme Court. We know that they cannot win in the case because the facts are clear regarding the procedures that were supposed to be followed in screening members of the electoral body. Due processes were not followed. We know that they cannot win and we don’t want to be delayed. That is why we are prepared to conduct the local government poll, which will entrench democratic structures in the local government councils.

Why did the state government postpone public schools’ resumption?

What we are doing is re-ordering of the education sector. We promised during our campaign in 2007 to provide free and functional education, as one of the pillars of our six-point integral action plan. In doing this, we convoked an education summit and we came up with what we are doing know.

We have started reclassification of the school structure: one, we have elementary model schools, which is for Primary I to Primary IV. We have middle model schools for Primary V to JS III, and we have the High School, which is for SS I to SS III.  If you look around the state today, you will see that the government is in the process of building several school structures to make us effectively perfect and complete the ongoing reclassification.  What we are doing by extending school resumption by two weeks is to give the committee in charge a sufficient time to complete what it is doing. This is for the benefits of everybody; the pupils, the parents, the teachers and the government.

 How will you react to allegations of capital flight levelled against this administration?

There is no contract awarded by this government that we did not indicate that local inputs must be there. When the PDP was in power, how many Osun State indigenes did they patronise?  Their contractors were from outside the state. The little money in circulation then was what they were sharing. Before this administration came in, if you drove around Osogbo till around 2pm, you would see bricklayers, carpenters and others loitering around the Old Garage, waiting to be engaged. The situation has changed. Go there by 8:30am, all of them are already working at one construction site or another. Look at the 10km road projects by the local government councils, which of the contractors is not from Osun?