‘There is Nothing Bad in Borrowing’
Nseobong Okon-Ekong encounters, Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in Osun State who is confident that his clarity of vision and rare sense of service can add value to the people
Will it be true to say that Governor Rauf Aregbesola has positioned you to cover his track, after leaving office? What has he done? You see we have this funny insinuations. I want to say categorically that the governor is very transparent. There is nothing to cover. It’s just that he believes that majority of the members of the party believe that I should continue the transformation agenda of the state, having worked as Chief of Staff for eight years. With my experience in the private sector, spanning over 30 years, I think I have what it takes to run the state and I have been very much involved in the running of the state. It’s natural to say in a situation where you know somebody who is that experienced, he should be given the opportunity to take over. I emerge as the flagbearer through a very free and transparent process- direct primary, which allowed every member of the party to participate. I came first. I had 127,000 votes. The second had 21000. Looking at the result, you are talking about someone anointing me, maybe it is God who anointed me but I can assure you that I worked very hard to be where I am today. I visited all the wards, we have 332 wards, I visited all the local governments. I have coordinators in all, the 332 wards, and in all the local governments and I have canvassers in the units that are seriously engaged with the structure of the party. I am not surprised that I did very well in the primary election.
Are you bothered in any way by the challenges that you will be confronted with some of which you are very well aware of-the issue of debt, salary arrears; what really are you continuing? Life itself is full of challenges. In your life, you have challenges. If you have several companies, you have challenges. What is important is for you to prepare yourself for these challenges. The way to go about it is to identify those challenges and prepare to tackle them. They are not insurmountable. Debt is a necessity, sometimes, when you want to do massive restructuring. You can’t save the money you use on roads. How many years will it take you to have such amount to build a road? You borrow to look after projects; that is expected. What is not good enough is for you to borrow for your personal project. There is nothing bad in borrowing. What is important is what have you applied the fund to. Is it capital project? Don’t forget that if you don’t do those things at that time, there is no way you would have started doing that by now, given the foreign exchange content. When you look at the vulnerability of the exchange rate, by the time you start looking at when the exchange rate was N150 or N200 to USD1, then. Now, you are talking about N360 per USD1. The cost would have been 600/700 per cent more. The challenge is such that you continue to service the debt and creatively find a way of generating more revenue to ensure that you are able to meet your obligations in terms of repayment, to meet your obligation to workers and expenditure of government. What we are trying to do is to seriously develop our capacity to generate more revenue internally. We want to ensure that we block all the leakages. You must keep the economy at a level that you expect your people to have a level of revenue coming from their state. One of the ways is to look at the agricultural sector. This state is an agrarian state. If you are able to develop agriculture reasonably, particularly commercial farming, agriculture will be very profitable. Then you look at the value chain in agriculture, ask farmers to plant cassava, you should be able to provide a kind of value addition by encouraging processing plants where you can convert cassava to starch or ethanol. A few areas like that will bring some reasonable revenue which invariably will allow your people when you empower them to be able to contribute meaningfully to your idea. Another area is the area of tourism, there are lots of sites that have not been developed.