Gbenga Daniel I’m Back to My Engineering Work
The appointment for an interview with Otunba Gbenga Daniel, former governor of Ogun State, came with so much ease. He had given the options of venue – Lagos or Sagamu? Of course, Lagos, was our natural choice for convenience. But we ended up in Sagamu, ow
You have been out of power for six years now, how has life treated you?
Well, my father taught me that in all things we always must remain grateful – when you look at what has happened to a few people. Not too long ago, we lost one of our colleagues, a former governor of Niger State (Abdulkadir Kure). Things are happening on a daily basis, and if one is alive and healthy, I think the most important thing is to give thanks to God. So, I am happy and I thank God for His mercies over my life.
As governor, what was life like?
Quite hectic – a lot of pressure! As governor, to a large extent, you aren’t even yourself. You become like a piece of equipment that is being programmed by the system. You must attend to this, must accept this courtesy, must visit that person, you must respond to this, you must provide solution here and on a daily basis. It’s like being on the run. That is really how it was. For us in Ogun State it was quite challenging, because we had set milestones for our administration.
On our own volition, we created what we called “Contract with the People”. Not that anybody signed to that, we told the people that this is what we will do, so it is like a contract and we therefore felt the urge which propelled us to make sure that each and everything in that document was achieved. After that, the second year, we psyched ourselves once again when we created what we called the “Agenda for a Secured Future”.
It’s also a document which clearly states those things that we wanted to do as we left office. That really was like our Bible; it’s something that if we didn’t do it, it’s like we have failed and I am particularly happy, though we didn’t score 100%, to a large extent we did what we had to do.
How did you cope handling the responsibilities of your office as governor and striking a balance on the home front?
Well, a few things happened and I had to relocate my children abroad. Ordinarily, probably because of my own background, the way we were brought up is that first and foremost, you must school here in Nigeria, at least secondary education and first degree. After that, you have already acclimatized; you’ve established your old boys’ relations, you can then go abroad for your masters or PhD, and that is what I actually desired for my children and that was exactly what was happening until I became governor.
A few ugly things happened after I became governor – a few people were harassing and taunting them and it was clear that they weren’t having a good time. I had to therefore reluctantly ferry them away. That really was what happened. But they’ve finished studies now and they are coming back. To that extent I think I lost about eight years, but I thank God that they didn’t go haywire. They are well behaved, and what I lost at that time I am trying to get it back.
So like Chief Osoba said, you also failed here?
I wouldn’t put it in those words, but I think one would have done better. The only luck that I had is that, while it lasted they didn’t go haywire – all of them without exception. They don’t drink; they don’t do those things as children of the well-to-do people do. They are very well behaved and respectful children. Of course, I must thank my wife; she did quite a lot while I was busy.
During your administration, governors were seen as very powerful so to speak. How would you describe your style as governor then and the type of governors we have now?
I completely disagree with you, if I look at my own perspective. In fact, what I used to tell myself these days is that, I didn’t actually use power. I didn’t even know how powerful the position of a governor was and that is the fact. The first thing I did when I became governor was to cut the title executive and I thought that constitutionally, the governor is the officer responsible, to now add executive is like putting it in overdrive and I felt that part of what happened in the past was that governors were not relating well with the governed and there was really a gap.
Part of what I did as governor, was to completely close that gap, and I think everybody agrees that part of my weakness or strength was that you can easily reach me when I was governor. I will converse with you, send me a text message and I’ll respond, even market women, you’ll send me a text and I would respond. Whatever it is, I sorted a lot of problems out.
I remember that in Ijebu Ode, the old Ondo Road was very bad and I tried to dualise that road and there was one house whose landlord felt the dualization would get too close to his fence. He brought up legal documents stating that he built his fence within the stipulated meters from the road and as such I had no right to subject him to any form of harassment. I was there in person and he engaged me in a hot argument, and I had to plead with him, explaining to him that the road is quite busy (the road that leads to Ilese College of Health Technology), that I just had to extend the road and that he should please overlook whatever.
He insisted that he was going to make his claims, I then told him to do so and that when we get to that river we will cross it. That was what we did and when you compare it with what we have today, hey, what are you talking about? So, I didn’t use those powers then, we didn’t even know that such powers existed. I thought that as governor, I was servant of the people and I had to look after their welfare – all of them.
So when you say we are powerful, maybe you are looking at powerful from the amount of work we did. Everywhere we intervened, because everything was related to the other and we conceptualized a state that was not very active for no good reason and we felt that there could be a lot more we could do with the state. We had no time, every department that was sleeping. We woke them up, new ones we created, and employment we multiplied so that the thing was just going. I think that was what probably some of you saw and felt that the government was powerful. I wouldn’t say that I was powerful.
Still, you were a colossus as governor and coming from that sphere, one is unable to put together why your party lost in 2011. What really happened?
Oh, that is very simple. That is the simplest thing to stream together. Most of the time, our people don’t know how to measure success and a lot of time, people’s perception of the factors of success are not very clear. Quite a number of times, people ascribe things that they don’t have to themselves. That really is the summary. You can now analyse it whichever way you want. It took me time to appreciate it, after I left office, and without sounding immodest, things started happening and people started taking things for granted. I’ll give you a typical example: when we came, we met the state of roads in Ogun State, my predecessor tried his best but he was using the easy model.
The easy model is simply lets’ find money, award the contracts to a good company and hope that they will deliver. The fact of the case is that there is just not enough money to do the amount of roads that are begging for attention and the reason why there will never be enough money is the rate at which those contractors do the roads. The dilemma for my administration at the beginning was therefore, if I now say I am going to wait, because I was determined to multiply employment even in the public service which I doubled, that means instantly my salary bills has doubled.
Now with that doubled salary bill, I have nothing else to do, so the easiest thing for me to do is pick. If I picked to increase employment then I will do nothing, that was all I had. Then I said no, we’ll have to do this unemployment. Now, we must also do the roads, so how do we start? You will be shocked that we went into the ministry of works, gathered all the engineers and challenged them to start patching the roads. From there, they now see that they can also do the roads and they started to call for proposals and were giving me a fraction of what it will cost by contracts.
Okay, they don’t have equipment, then in the course of my tour, I would just see on the road, one tractor and upon asking for its owner, they will tell me it belongs to Ogun State agro something and so on. So, at the end, I went round the state and I was picking equipment. I now created a yard, in fact it’s the works yard in Sagamu here, and I ordered that all the equipment be gathered there and it was done. And so, before you know what was happening, we had equipment on the road, and we now deployed the equipment to do some of those roads. That’s what we did, so when you look at the chain reaction of even that alone, you can see instantly what went on: mechanics were getting jobs, locals were doing things and the economy picked up. We had not even spent money.
Contrary to the normal model we have in our country today, the easiest thing to do is to say I want to award contract, so sign contract and I see people celebrating contract signed. We’ve signed contracts in billions and therefore what is there to celebrate? What we have to celebrate is how we have been able to squeeze water out of stone. So, if I am able to pick engineers, who have been idle for 20 to 30 years, and they have been going around carrying files, and I was able to go round gather equipment, string them together and get them to start to do the roads; that is what we should celebrate.
People do say that the roads are not durable, fair enough. The fact remains that when we do the ones that are not durable today, tomorrow those people will do the ones that are durable, because we are transferring knowhow and that was precisely what happened. I keep laughing when people say that the roads are not durable, the one that was dualised right from here (Sagamu) to Abeokuta, it was done by OGROMA – 56km of road – we did it in record time, less than two years, it was ready for the gateway games which we hosted in 2006 and we did it at about 15% of the cost of Julius Berger and it is still there till today.
I am going to ply it tomorrow, and we street light everything. So these are the challenges we have; it is not an Ogun State matter it is a national problem. These days I laugh when people celebrate and say, we’ve done flyover. I am an engineer, what is flyover? Steel, stone, cement, water and labour that is a flyover; it is not gold, and people begin to celebrate. Flyovers are even not necessary except you are in the urban centre, where you have really seen traffic challenge and there is a problem of how to get out of the gridlock, so rather than begin to create flyovers in a place flyovers are not needed; you should move and expand the town.
In civilized organisations, people who are living in areas of flyovers say that there is too much pollution, because of the CO2 and they are moving away. We have a problem in our country, because people who should know but because of the circumstance will continue to support mediocrity. Now it is about how tall is your building, how many of the bridges did you build in your own time; it’s not about that in my own time. What happens to educational qualifications and records? What happens to our health (mortality factor, how much of AIDs have you eradicated)? It is no longer about that. I think it is just a question of the level of enlightenment of our people. That really is what I see as the major problem.
Looking back, have you any regrets?
No regrets whatsoever, not because I don’t feel shortchanged, of course my post-service years are not exciting. I have no business by being tried by EFCC for doing nothing. That is a political side of it. I am sure that quite a number of people who thought that there was something are now beginning to see in view of the recent revelations that there is nothing, hence they are now saying why are you holding this person. Anyway, I can’t comment too much on that because it’s already in the court of law. Basically that was the downside, so I said to myself that is the downside (personal), but what has happened to the generality of the people of Ogun State?
I think they have become a lot better. More people have
You know that my first job is engineering, that is where I have actually excelled before venturing into politics. After my tenure, I then quietly went back to what I knew how to do best, so I have been pulling my weight, developing my company“Crystal Laurel
become educated, more have been enriched as a result of the way we opened the system; the confidence of the people have come back. Now, what has happened to the IGR of the State? I am told it is now probably second to Lagos. Quite a lot of foundation we’ve built and openings we’ve done are now yielding results. Somebody is taking the glory, no problem, but even in their own hearts of heart they know precisely, though they will not admit.
But when you look at it globally, I think what is important in life is not what happens to you, it is the landmarks you leave in the people and that is what keeps me going. Everywhere I go I get people who introduce themselves saying you’ve done A,B,C,D for me or my father, you don’t know me but you’ve done it and we are grateful. That really satisfies me.
Is this harassment by some agencies of government why you have been quiet for some time?
No, the fact of the case is that I believe in the culture of governance: you have been at the saddle for eight years after which somebody else has now taken over. It is for me like a relay race, so you run your bit and hand over your baton. Once you hand over the baton, you stop or at least step aside and watch what he is doing. You can watch passively or actively as you like it, but the focus should be on that person and there is no point contesting for attention with somebody who is holding the baton.
He holds the baton for a while, hands over and then the focus changes to the person with the baton. That’s really the way I have looked at it. I’ve not shied away from doing what I have to do. If you were here yesterday, you will be shocked, because it was a full house – delegation from the whole South-west and that was why I pushed you till today. I’ve been quite busy. I am going to site as you can see, I am dressed. I’m back to my engineering.
What’s your concern about the state of the nation, especially the state of the political parties; are you concerned that the PDP is now in total mess and do you think it can survive this very phase?
There are so many things the PDP did wrong. I don’t want to be personal, but it is on record that the PDP government we ran in Ogun State was more or else a model government. We virtually controlled the state – all the elective offices we won we did not rig them, virtually all were taken to court and Ogun State was the only state where no election was reversed and no rerun was ordered at any level. A former deputy governor of Ogun State was here yesterday, you need to hear what he had to say.
He said “we took over from this guy, and he worked, forget about what we say politically”, and I said “why don’t you go tell that to the media?” We not only practiced democracy as best as we could, we did everything that was possible to turn around the state. Of course, quite naturally, you don’t expect the people we took over from to fold their hands. The predecessor that I took over from was a very strong man. In fact, when you say it that I was a powerful governor, I think it is coming directly from the fact that I was able to defeat him in an election. Everybody agreed that he was an infallible strong politician, so who the hell is this OGD trying to challenge him? He is going to meet his waterloo and so on.
The media didn’t help. Their position was clear as they saw the chances for my emergence as an uphill task, so we turned that around. I think this greatness of power that you are talking about stems from that. But it was also not lost on us, because we were taking over from a strong administration that the only thing that we had to do was to do our job well, so we went all out to also ensure that we ran a good government. We are supposed to be the poster boy of the party, but regrettably when those forces got involved in what we were doing (the forces of destabilisation), the party was not there, they looked at it as a local crisis in Ogun State.
Between you and me, the PDP crisis today started in Ogun State, and I was at the centre of it all. But for various reasons, everybody wanted to fight a different battle and people took different positions, so what happened in Ogun State was precisely what was exported to the national. So, it is a cancer that started growing from here, and the people who were supposed to apply what they needed to apply looked the other way, for whatever reason.
We are still not out of the woods yet because that cancer has not been ostracised, that precisely is the situation with PDP. I am particularly concerned because we are heading towards a one-party state, and you can’t blame people who are migrating. It is good to say they are without principle but again Nigeria is all about survival. Some of us who decided to stay put, what have we benefitted? At the end of the day, everybody is looking for survival and if you take the wrong step, your family will ask you questions: where were you that you allowed this sort of thing to happen to you?
That again boils down to the level of poverty and illiteracy in this country. So, for me, yes it is okay, we all want to be principled; but let’s look at our model; all the people who tried to be principled what did we Nigerians do with them? What did we do with Awolowo? It’s only after his death that you are now singing his praise. When he was there, his greatest challenge was from his backyard, Ikene, and after he is gone, he now becomes the best president they never had. What does that now translate to?
It has been like this, and that is why some people keep saying is it that our country is cursed? Is it a natural phenomenon? Is it that our colonial masters programmed it this way? There is something fundamentally wrong. So, when you cast blame on people who are acting out of principle, it is to some extent; but when you look at it, nobody wants to be a Ken Saro-wiwa. At the end of the day, if you don’t care about your own life, what of the people you brought to the world?
So those are the challenges that we had, I only pray that the country does not become a one party state because it is also good to have options and alternatives, but the calamity we have today is that the composition of PDP is not primed to play opposition; they are people who have been programmed to be in government – forces of the status quo; they don’t know how to go into the trenches; they don’t know how to organise battles; they don’t know how to organise opposition; they don’t know how to organise media.
All the instruments of propaganda are not in their hands and they don’t know how to create. So, this role reversal that has happened is a big challenge in our country, because the people who know how to oppose are now in government and that is why even in government they are still campaigning. Whereas the people in opposition don’t know how to play opposition; they think they are still in government. So, that is the confusion we have in the country today, but I guess at the right time everybody will take his rightful position.
So you are hopeful this phase will pass?
What I know will happen, is that the diversity of this country called Nigeria cannot sustain a one-party state for too long. So, if PDP does not get its act together, another force will come, maybe there will now be two or three forces but that is inevitable. And when you also look at the Nigerian history, it has always been about three regions with three major political parties: NPC, NCNC and AG. So if we are not careful, that is probably where we are going to head to because for the first time in the recent history of this country, everybody is now talking about regionalism. And if we are not careful, that probably is going to be our strategic direction. We are going to have three parties – each one strong in a particular region. That is what I think may happen if we go on like this.
What’s your take on the early release of election timetable by INEC?
Oh, that is a good one. I am particularly excited that they are putting everybody on notice, although it means, without necessarily saying so, they are kick-starting campaigns on a very high level because everybody is now conscious that in less than two years, there is going to be an election. So, the thing is going to enter the next gear very quickly.
In another 20 years, where do you see this country in spite of the many challenges it is facing right now?
Things that we need to guide against are the deviant behaviour, which appears to be based to a large extent on religious and ethnic sentiments. There has always been an ethnic sentiment in our country, but to a very large extent, it has been controlled, especially after the civil war. There has always been some little religious sentiment, which is not strong. But with this radicalism in religion that is coming and we are seeing things that we’ve never seen before, we definitely need to worry and we need to begin to put systems in place that can douse this tension.
My own solution is economic, reason being that I have found out that poverty knows no boundaries and when you look at what is happening today in the polity, you look at the amount of support that the present administration had in the build up to the last election, even from the northern part of the country, it was massive. But if you go and check it today, it is without gainsaying that the rating would have dropped, even in the north dramatically. What could be responsible for that? The religion has not changed, but their expectations have not been met. These expectations are poverty related, hence economic.
For me, logically reasoning the solution to our problem is to tackle the economy, tackle poverty and there are simple straightforward models to do all of this, but for reasons that are still not clear to me, we are shying away from where the solution is and I will continue to bring Ogun State under my tenure as a case study, because everybody thought that there was prosperity and that there was so much money in Ogun State, simply because we devised a way of ensuring that whatever money comes into the state, stayed in the state and that money was being rolled over and everybody was busy. Keep Nigerian money in Nigeria and to a large extent, the incidence of poverty will go down and I think poverty is directly proportional to ethnic and religious sentiment, that where poverty goes down, those things will also go down.
For me they are fundamentals and there are no shortcuts. I still insist that heaven will not fall if Nigeria bans importation of certain food items, and then the money that we conserve from that we can now use it to import technologies that we don’t have here, not tooth picks.
What’s your position as succession battle takes off in Ogun?
My position today is very simple. I have looked at all the combatants, for me as a person, I don’t believe that I can be in a worst situation than I am in now in terms of the hostile succession that I got, so this is the worst case scenario for me, and if God can enable me to survive this worst case scenario, whoever is coming, for me, can only be better. And there is none of them that is coming that is not talking to me directly or indirectly, even the people in the ruling party and my position is may the better person win, the one who will do the right thing for the people of Ogun State.
When the time comes, maybe before the election, if I now become persuaded that this is the way to go, of course, I’ll lead the road and I will lend my weight to that kind of person. Quite a number of people that are trying to come, from what I have seen are competent. Ogun State has developed to a large extent, it will be difficult for a nincompoop to take over the administration of the state, so I can see quite a number of intelligent people coming out, making effort, running around and I am very happy and excited about the quality of people that I see. So, Ogun State is going to be very interesting. Between you and me, I am going to stand by whoever I consider the best and there is none of them today that I think cannot do the job that I see.
Do you still buy the idea of a Yewa successor?
Yes I do, but I am now a realist. Let me use my own as an example, when I decided to run in 2003 election, the sentiment was that people of Ogun Central had been governor, the people of Ogun East where I belong had been governor, so it should naturally be the turn of the people of Ogun West. But when the party looked at all the people that had come out they knew that the factor of winning is not just where you come from, there has to be capacity and sagacity, and I think that was why I won the primaries; and ultimately the election.
When I was going to leave, I also felt that if we have been talking about equality, justice and fairness, we shouldn’t wait for our own Armageddon locally, for the people of Yewa to start carrying guns, so let us therefore concede it to them and that was what I stood for in 2011, and again it didn’t work for various reasons. Apart from the internal wrangling, which you know – two people came out from Yewa and we were not able to get one of them to agree to step down for the other.
(See concluding part on www.thisdaylive.com)