-Text of a paper presented by Dr. Kayode FAYEMI Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria As visiting lecturer for
the monthly ‘Nigeria in the World Series’ at the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Introduction
In March of 1995, I was on an Air France flight to Lagos, Nigeria. The plane was to make a stop-over in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, where I was to disembark. I was then a persona non grata in my home country, Nigeria. Indeed, I was on the list of those declared wanted by the autocratic and homicidal regime of General Sani Abacha. Among other “crimes” that the regime accused me of having committed was the fact that I was the arrow-head of the founding and management of the pirate opposition radio, which was initially, called “Radio Freedom”, and later “Radio Democracy International.” It was renamed “Radio Kudirat International” after the assassination of the activist wife of the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Basorun M.K.O. Abiola on June 12 1996, whose electoral victory was annulled by the military regime led by General Ibrahim Babangida in June 1993. As General Abacha’s Information Minister put it at the time, “the operators of the radio had been successfully tracked down by the security agents…let them bear in mind that what they are committing is treason but whenever they are picked up for trial, people will start shouting human rights violations…”
General Abacha had consolidated the annulment of an election which was globally acclaimed to be the freest and the fairest in Nigeria’s history. He also jailed the winner of that election. Even before the annulment of the election and the eventual hijack of power from the illegally installed Interim National Government (ING) in November 1993, some Nigerians abroad, including myself, had organized a strong coalition of activists to oppose military adventurism in our country and campaign across the world for the return of democratic rule in Africa’s most populous country. However, things reached a feverish point when Abiola, backed by a coalition of pro-democracy groups, decided in June 1994 to declare himself the duly elected President of Nigeria. The Abacha regime heightened its vice-grip on the country, jailed many opposition leaders, assassinated some and chased many more into exile.
Through all these, we increased the tempo of our activities against the maximum ruler in exile and worked hard to persuade the free world and its leaders to help free Nigerians from the shackles of militarism and autocracy. It was in the context of this that we started a pirate FM radio station which later broadcast to Nigeria from a Western Europe country on short wave transmission. But because our location was not disclosed, the regime searched everywhere in Nigeria fruitlessly to discover the location of the radio station. When it failed, it accused the American Embassy of harbouring the studios of the radio station. Unknown to the regime, what had started as a mobile broadcast station within Nigeria, was now located in Norway.
As I noted in my memoirs of this era, Out of the Shadows: Exile and the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Nigeria[1]:
The arrival of the shortwave radio [Radio Kudirat International] with a nation-wide reach…was without doubt the most direct message to the military dictatorship, that sooner than later, it will have to dialogue with the real representatives of the Nigerian people.
A media scholar in Nigeria noted that Radio Kudirat gave the Nigerian military regime “nightmares” and became the “spearhead of the opposition abroad.”
You can therefore imagine my own “nightmare,” when instead of heading for Cotonou, the plane stopped over in Lagos, where General Abacha’s security men were set to search through the plane to check if there were any dissidents on board, particularly those of us marked as “high security risk.” You can imagine the horror of a man who more or less had a price tag on his head having to wait in the plane for the forty five odd minutes stop-over in Nigeria. I will spare you the details of how I survived and was able to return to Nigeria at the end of the brutish reign of General Sani Abacha. But as many of you may know, the pro-democracy movement, supported by our friends across the world [and I would particularly like to pay tribute to Ambassador Walter Carrington – former US Ambassador to Nigeria in those trying years – who is in this audience with his lovely wife, Dr Carrington], eventually triumphed and Nigeria returned to democratic rule in May 1999. Since then, Nigeria has enjoyed its longest spell of democratic rule since independence in 1960.
I have told you this story to provide a context for my discussion of the challenges of transiting from the barricades of resistance into the veranda of power. For the better part of the first half of my life, I was involved in storming the Bastille of power, seeking to democratize and humanize power. And in the last few years, I have become one who is responsible for power, one holding power in trust, and one seeking to deploy power in the service of good causes. Therefore, my reflections in this lecture centres around understanding the relationship between fighting against and fighting for. While much of what we did during the years of pro-democracy struggle was constructed as a struggle against unaccountable power, it was also a struggle for accountable power, a struggle for life, for liberty, and for the pursuit of happiness – as the American credo would have it.
Therefore, because we were not merely fighting against a particular manifestation of unaccountable, irresponsible and even vicious power, and the injustice, inequity, inequality, social bondage, poverty, and economic misery reproduced by this unaccountable power, eventually, some of us were compelled to also seek for power to be able to fight for the reversal of all these negative experiences forced on our people. Our resistance was consequently not only to stop power from violating the commonwealth and the people’s will, but one that was geared towards seizing power and putting it in the service of the common good.
As a scholar, journalist, writer and activist who used a powerful life of the mind to confront mindless power, I am very mindful of how to employ power in propelling human minds, particularly in my state, towards the creation of a better life for our people.
Resistance, Power and State Reconstruction in Nigeria
Democracy is a permanent work-in-progress. So is nation-building. Few statements exemplify this better than the American mantra of making “a more perfect union.” If the United States, a nation forged out of common purpose and common consent, perpetually seeks to make a more perfect union, it is evident that the task of nation-building will be far more daunting in a state created without the consent of the people and imposed by a colonial power. It is even more dismaying if such a state refuses to re-create itself and re-negotiate the basis of its fundamental national association. This is the challenge that we have faced in Nigeria. But it is not a challenge that calls for despondency or despair, hence I often shudder at the various epithets used to describe the state of our states in Africa in political science literature – failed, collapsed, incapable states and so on, rather than acknowledge these challenges as nation-building trajectories.
One of the most salient items of the agenda of the pro-democracy coalition that fought for democratic rule in Nigeria from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, was the need for structural changes in the Nigerian feder
ation. There were many manifestations and dimensions of these structural fatalities. These included the issues of constitutionalism, fiscal federalism and revenue allocation, the nationality question, citizenship and bill of rights, sovereignty of the people and the integrity of elections, civilian control of the military, separation of power, checks and balances, independence of the judiciary, and so on. Given the fact that the resistance in the late military era was over-determined by the question of the sovereignty of the people, the integrity of elections, and human liberty, it was not unusual that after the termination of military rule, those of us involved in the pro-democracy movement had to engage in a new battle within the context of democratic rule.
I will use my personal experience to illustrate this new struggle and the challenges that this produced. When I first returned to Nigeria in 1999, I opened a Nigerian office for the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) – a research and training institution dedicated to the study and promotion of democratic development, peace-building and human security in Africa – of which I was the director in London, United Kingdom. Having served as an adviser to many governments, inter-governmental and development agencies in and beyond Africa on issues such as transitional justice, regional integration, constitutionalism, security sector reform and civil-military relations, I felt compelled to concentrate on using my energies and talents to ensure the full democratisation of the emerging and old public institutions in Nigeria. As they say, charity begins at home. Having helped in expanding the democratic space and consolidating developmental programmes around the continent of Africa, and while not abandoning such commitment, I felt the need to participate more in the new atmosphere of freedom in my country.
In conjunction with other civil society activists and our old friends who were now in office and in power, we decided to use our expertise, experience and commitment to do important things in the areas of constitutionalism, justice and human rights, reform of the security sector and socio-economic development.
First, we worked hard to convince President Olusegun Obasanjo to begin a process of truth and reconciliation. The long years of military rule not only bruised the national psyche, it also led to the violation of individual and people’s rights, mass killings, marginalization of the minorities and gender inequalities, among others. We mobilised our local and foreign partners to convince the president to follow the example of South Africa after the end of apartheid. Even though what eventually happened did not equal the scale and dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (otherwise called the Oputa Panel) which the Federal Government set up, was the first time in Nigeria’s history that the nation made a conscious and methodical attempt to confront its ugly past. I served as the main technical adviser to that Commission.[2]
Beyond human rights violations, we also recognised that one of the gravest dangers inherited from the years of military rule was the militarisation of the society and the politicisation of the security sector in Nigeria. We knew that to continue to keep the soldiers in the barracks, safeguard our democracy, and save the country from the terrible experiences of the past, we needed to reform the military, the police and intelligence agencies. Again, given my expertise as a civil-military relations scholar, and one who had been a technical expert to various governments and inter-governmental bodies on Conflict Management and Security Sector Governance, I was invited to serve on the Presidential Implementation Committee on Conflict Management and Security Sector Reform, helping to formulate a new Grand Strategy for National Security. This committee proposed important reforms and reorientation in the security services some of which, where implemented. I can proudly state that this has helped in ensuring the longest spell of democratic rule without military intervention in Nigeria’s history and one of the drivers of this fundamental change who deserve our commendation – General Abdul-Rahman Danbazau, former Chief of Army Staff is here in the audience with us. Thank you sir!
There were still other challenges. The many years of unaccountable power, both during military and civilian rule, had turned a country which used to boast of itself as one “flowing with milk and honey” into an indebted and derided nation, and one in which more than seventy per cent of population lived on less than one dollar ($1) a day. Therefore, I was happy to also be a member of the Presidential Implementation Committee on New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and Millennium Development Goals. NEPAD is an initiative of the African Union started in 2001 to pursue new priorities and approaches to the political and socio-economic transformation of Africa and I had been involved in its preparation from inception. The main objective of NEPAD is the enhancement of Africa’s growth, development and participation in the global economy. The Presidential Committee in Nigeria was charged with domesticating the continental goals of NEPAD. In regard of the Millennium Development Goals, which include ending poverty and hunger, ensuring universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability and global partnership, Nigeria joined all countries of the world and leading development institutions in the world in committing itself to these laudable goals.
In all of these, I realised that the challenges of resistance at the barricades were as grave as the tasks confronting those who were democratically elected into power. In some of the tasks I mentioned above, we succeeded. But in the face of opportunistic politics of the ruling party in Nigeria, the fundamental questions of our time were not been adequately addressed.
I saw clearly – based on my earlier experiences at the barricades, in civil society activism, in development work and now in providing strategic assistance to the government of Nigeria – that at the centre of my trajectory and public life was the issue of governance. The question was fundamentally one of how to ensure what one of the greatest visionaries in our part of the world, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, described as “freedom for all, and life more abundant.” To do this, there was no question in my mind that we had to start at the sub-national level of governance. I saw the challenges at the top of the political architecture in Nigeria and came to the conclusion that real reform was not going to happen there unless and until we drive it from the margins. I also realised that it was not sufficient to come out of the shadows – as the title of my book on my years of exile and activism is called – only to provide development and strategic assistance to those in power, particularly given their failure to confront the fundamental questions of governance in Nigeria. I concluded that it was time to move towards the veranda of power; to confront directly poverty, hunger, illiteracy, diseases, gender inequality, infant and maternal mortality, and the other evils that limit the possibilities of Africa’s most boisterous and most populous nation.
Democracy, Elections and the Power of Resistance
Yet “Elections do not a democracy make!” As the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). IFES Vice President for Programs, Michael Svetlik, recently reminded us: even though there is an increase in the number of countries holding elections, the will of the people is not automatically reflected in these elections and thus there is no direct correlation between holding elections and deepening democracy.
Yet, among the many qualities of democracy, election is one of the most important. In fact, it is a central quality
of democracy. Without committing what scholars have described as the “fallacy of electoralism,”[3] we can say: no election, no democracy. To actualise democracy, we must have elections. Staffan I. Lindberg[4] argues that, “in newly democratizing countries [elections] do not signal the completion of the transition to democracy but rather foster liberalization and have a self-reinforcing power that promotes increased democracy.” Elections “also facilitate the institutionalization of and deepening of actual civil liberties in the society and are a causal variable in democratization.” While agreeing that elections constitute a “viable means of ensuring the orderly process of leadership succession and change and an instrument of political authority and legitimation,” at the start of the 21st century, Said Adejumobi stated that, in the African experience, “both the structure and process of elections, the former being the organizational infrastructure for managing elections and the latter, the precepts and procedures of elections, remain largely perverted. Election rigging and brigandage, violence and election annulment are common practices….”[5] He concluded that “Elections in their current form in most African states appear to be a fading shadow of democracy, endangering the fragile democratic project itself.”
If free and competitive elections can be pressed towards the service of the consolidation of a small elite, even an autocracy, such as in Tanzania,[6] it is easy to imagine what then happens when elections are not even free, fair or competitive. In such contexts, we will be in the zone which some African scholars have described as one of the “abrogation of the electorates.”[7]
I will illustrate this attempt to abrogate the electorate, suborn the judiciary, terminate the freedom to elect and be elected, and subvert the very essence of democracy with my experience in Ekiti State.
As I stated earlier, having decided to confront the challenges of governance squarely at a lower level of governance and in my own state, that is, to move from the barricades to the veranda of power, I brought together a group of like-minded thinkers, scholars, civil society activists, and a couple of politically-savvy persons. I announced my intention to contest the governorship race in my home state of Ekiti, having agreed to the prodding of many highly respected figures in my political environment. Having being involved at the global, continental, regional and national levels in the struggle for the humanisation of our world, it was time to bring the gospel home. My campaign motif was “Collective Rescue Mission.”
The case of my home state was particularly pathetic at this point. Despite the envious history evidenced by the many decades in which the state was at the centre of the enlightenment project in the Western part of Nigeria, producing more professors per square kilometre than any other part of Africa, the state had been captured, literally, by a cabal of vote-stealing, thieving, irresponsible, and violent politicians. Political assassination and maiming and harassment of the opposition were the order of the day. Against this backdrop, many people warned me against running against the violent gang in power in my state. They asked: “What does a scholar like you know about politics? Politics is violence and corruption, you cannot survive.” But I remained undaunted and had confidence in the yearning of our people for good governance, despite the temporary reign of an illegitimate governor and his party.
The New York Times reported my bid for the governorship, in a story published in November 24, 2006, that is, a few months before the election, headlined: “Money and Violence Hobble Democracy in Nigeria.”[8] Let me quote some parts of the story:
‘ADO EKITI, Nigeria — Early one Sunday morning in June, a mysterious text message flashed across Kayode Fayemi’s cellphone. “Since you continue to oppose Governor Fayose, we shall kill you,” the message read, referring to the bare-knuckled incumbent at the time, Ayo Fayose. It was signed, “THE FAYOSE M SQUAD.”
Mr. Fayemi, a candidate for governor in this tiny state in southwest Nigeria, tried to brush off the threat. But if there was any doubt what the M in the message stood for, it evaporated six weeks later, when another candidate for governor, a World Bank consultant, was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in his bed….
“This is democracy at work in Nigeria,” Mr. Fayemi muttered as he drove between campaign stops in Ekiti in early November. “Murder and money, violence and fraud.”’[9]
This story captures the danger I faced and the task that confronted me. Eventually, the elections were held in early 2007, and I won. But while the results were being announced, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) colluded with the ruling party, the People’s Democracy Party (PDP), and its governorship candidate, to declare Segun Oni as the winner of the election. Fraud, violence and money had “won” temporarily.
For someone who has been tested in the battle against military rule, one who had spent several years at the barricades, this was not the end of the road. I headed for the Elections Tribunal to plead my case. Yet, one of the factors I mentioned in the New York Times story prevailed. The tribunal members were suborned. They declared my opponent as the winner. I went to the Appeal Court. The Appeal Court ordered that the elections be conducted again in 63 of the 177 wards to determine the winner. The PDP rigging and violence machine went into high gear. Indeed, there has never been anything like the re-run election in Ekiti State in April and May 2009 and I pray there will never be anything like it again. It was like a badly produced Nollywood movie complete with a cast of villains, heroes, heroines and bullies, all acting out a bewildering script that kept changing by the hour. Yet, I won the elections. But before the head of the State electoral commission, Mrs Ayoka Adebayo, could declare me as the winner, she was threatened. She therefore went into hiding. This was two years after the initial election in 2007. When she emerged from hiding and was summoned to Abuja, she was intimidated to declare my opponent as the winner. Again, we went back to the Tribunal, urging the people to eschew violence. In the end, on October 15, 2010, three and half years after I won the election, the Appeal Court finally declared me as the validly elected governor of Ekiti State and asked that I be sworn-in immediately.
This is the power of resistance. We took the barricades to the veranda of power. The voice and the vote of the people prevailed and the whole state erupted in joy.
Governance and Resistance in Power
One of the biggest impediments to good governance in Africa is the absence of strategic planning and strategic thinking by those who seek power before they start the process of seeking power and before coming into office. We are lucky that in south-western Nigeria, we are heirs to a tradition of strategic planning and strategic thinking in public administration and governance, a tradition that even predated formal political independence. By the late colonial era, that is in the 1940s and 1950s, when many parts of Africa were still gripped exclusively by the sloganeering of anti-colonial activists, our leaders sat down to do a forensic analysis of the political, economic and social circumstances of our region and the rest of Nigeria. They came up with practical solutions to the challenges confronting both our region and the federation of Nigeria. Therefore, by the tim
e they got to power, they were fully prepared to deliver on the promises made in the areas of education, social welfare, agriculture and health care.
Therefore, as heirs to this progressive tradition, we could do no less, despite the violation of this heritage before we came to office. Long before I announced my bid for the governorship, myself and my team had spent many months to study the reality in Ekiti State and to debate the critical areas of intervention that were needed. This resulted in what we called “A Road Map to Ekiti Recovery.” This road map was elaborated in the 8-Point Agenda. Our 8-Point Agenda were fully guided as much by the globally-accepted standards of measuring good governance as they were by the socio-economic and political realities of Ekiti State.
There is consensus around the world that good governance denotes the “political and institutional processes and outcomes that are deemed necessary to achieve the goals of development.”[10] The key elements of this, as acknowledged by local and international organisations, include participation, rule of law, transparency, responsiveness, consensus-building, equity and inclusiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, and accountability.
Against this background, our 8-point agenda which aggregate all aspects of socio-political economy of the state include: Governance; Infrastructure Development; Modernisation of Agriculture; Education and Human Capital Development; Health Care Services; Industrial Development; Tourism development; and Gender Equality and Empowerment. In this 8-point Agenda, not only are the key elements of good governance evident, we also paid attention to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Through the modernisation of agriculture and human capital development, we have paid attention to the Millennium Development Goals of ending poverty and hunger; through our focus on education, we have paid attention to such MDG of ensuring universal education; through our programmes on health care services, we have taken care of child and maternal health; through the development of tourism and infrastructure, we have contributed to environmental sustainability; and through the attention we have paid to gender equality and empowerment, we are meeting the Millennium Development Goal of gender equality.
However, I will be remiss if I do not emphasize the fundamental question of public culture. Given the state of affairs in the eight years preceding our coming into office, bad governance, corruption, official violence and brigandage had all led to the erosion of the values that hitherto defined public culture in the state. Therefore, we needed to also resist the corrosive practices that had become institutionalised by the time we came into office. We also needed to resist the culture of anything goes in the bureaucracy, within government agencies, and sadly, even in the public sphere and civil society. Another form of resistance was consequently needed to face the task of governance squarely and ensure that the people had access to the benefits of egalitarian rule – which we had promised them during the years of campaign and struggle to reclaim our mandate. Helping to recreate our political culture had to be the starting point and the guiding principles of rebuilding infrastructures and ensuring development.
As leading sociologists and political scientists – starting from the American political scientists, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, and followed by European political scientists, such as Gerhard Lehmbruch and Arend Lijphart, have noted – political culture is at the centre of the operation of any political system. Since Almond and Verba’s famous 1963 work, The Civic Culture, many people, both in scholarly and lay literature, have concentrated on how the dominant beliefs, values, and attitudes about politics and the character of the political system, can constitute both cause and effect. Political culture has political, economic and social consequences. They give order and meaning to the political process and they constitute “the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behaviour in the political system.”[11]
Therefore, an essential first step that we took was to rechristen the state as ile yi, ile eye (“The Land of Honour”). Against this backdrop, we redefined governance in Ekiti State, such that public commentators now acknowledge that there is a renewed sense of pride and belonging in the citizens of the state, based on the restoration of the core Ekiti values of passion, courage, integrity, meritocracy and honour. We have also restored the confidence of both local and international developments partners and investors, many of which are now back in the State.
State Reconstruction
Let me provide a few concrete examples of what we have been able to achieve in the last two years in the veranda of power. [During the question and answer session, I will be able to illustrate these further and make further clarifications.]
In the area of Governance, our goal was to enhance participatory governance and accountability, thus motivating the citizens with ideas for better productivity, and creating an intellectual bank for policy formulation and implementation. In this bid, we have taken a number of crucial steps and recorded important achievements.
For example, for the first time in the history of the state we established a regime of legislations to guarantee a predictable environment of good governance and promote transparency and accountability. We domesticated the Freedom of Information Law, therefore, in our state, citizens have the right of access to government documents which are not classified – the first state to so do and we also enacted into law a Fiscal Responsibility bill, a Public Procurement Legislation, a Public Private Partnership Law and a Gender Based Violence Prohibition Law amongst forty new legislations passed into law. For the first time in the 16 year history of the state, which was created out of the old Ondo State in 1996, we have replaced the Edicts and Laws of the old Ondo State with the Laws of Ekiti State.
Second, we adopted a merit-based system of appointment and promotion of civil servants, including at the highest levels of the bureaucracy. The chief bureaucrats, including the Head of Service, Permanent Secretaries, and the Accountant-General, were all selected through an open and competitive process. In an environment which had been dominated by patrimonialism and clientelism, this was a transformative step and it has led to the rejuvenation of the civil service, such that we now have civil servants who are capable of driving the people-focussed policies and programmes of the government. We also focussed on increasing the revenue base of the State by reducing our dependence on what comes from the Federation account.
We also instituted a social security benefit scheme – the first of its type in any state in Nigeria. This is backed by law so as to ensure continuity. It is therefore now a scheme of the Government of Ekiti State and not merely the policy of my administration. Based on this scheme, we give monthly stipends to indigent citizens over the age of 65 years. We currently cater for over 20, 000 senior citizens in the State. This is in addition to our Free and Compulsory Education programme up to senior secondary schools and our free health programme which focuses on the vulnerable segments of our population – children, the elderly, pregnant women and those with physical disabilities.
In the terms of Infrastructural Development, our goal is to establish optimum communities that will improve the lives of citizens and attract investment. Our target is to ensure that every part of the state is accessible by major roads by the end of our first term – which is in two years. This has never happened in the history of the state. We are also making water dams in the state functional so as to increase water supply by eight per cent (80%), while using the public-private partnership to
increase the generation and supply of electricity. In the last two years, we have focussed on urban renewal through many projects. We have embarked on massive road construction and expansion, rural electrification project in communities that previously had no electricity; we have established a State Ambulance Service unit which is able to respond to emergencies; we have provided portable water and water treatment plants to many communities.
Agriculture employs about seventy-five (75%) of our population. Therefore, agriculture is at the centre of our programmes. Nigeria used to be a world leader in cocoa production up to the early 1970s. In fact, the enlightenment project re-started by the late colonial era indigenous government in our area of Nigeria was partly based on the economic resources derived from the sale of cocoa. Ekitiland in south-western Nigeria was an important part of cocoa production. That ended from the late 1970s. We are now reviving cocoa plantation to make Ekiti a world leader again in this area of production. This will generate employment for tens of thousands of our citizens, particularly the youth and also focussing on cassava, rice and oil-palm. We project that 20, 000 of our youths would have been trained and employed in mechanised agriculture by the end of our first term in office. We also project that agriculture will contribute fifty per cent (50%) of our internally-generated revenue. To achieve this, we have improved the conditions for farming in the state, thus guaranteeing effective cultivation, harvesting and processing of agro produce.
We want agro-business to thrive in our state and change the fortunes of the state as well as those of our citizens. Towards this end, 15, 000 farmers have been assisted through the supply of agro-chemicals and fertilisers. This has led to the cultivation of several thousands of hectares of land. We have funded overseas training for agro-workers in cocoa rehabilitation in Indonesia and China; we have refurbished the Orin Ekiti cassava processing plant and upgraded the plant output from 10 tonnes to 60 tonnes per day under a private-public partnership with Vegefresh Agro-Allied Company. We have also rehabilitated and constructed many kilometres of farm access roads; cultivated and supplies 500, 000 cocoa seedlings and 60, 000 oil palm seedling to farmers at highly subsidized rates, and collaborated with British America Tobacco Nigerian Foundation and FADAMA III project in the construction of a $1 million cassava cottage industry which has created jobs for about 3, 000 women and more than 1, 000 youths.
In the area of education and human development, our target is to put a computer on the desk of every secondary student by 2014, while providing free and compulsory education up to senior secondary school level, including special initiatives for the physically-challenges students. We have delivered 17, 512 computers to teachers and 33, 000 Samsung solar laptops through the Ekiti State E-School Project. We have invested vast resources in the last two years on knowledge acquisition and skill development to enable our citizens to work effectively in a rapidly changing and complex global environment. Our investments in human capital represent our most critical intervention in the process of state reconstruction in Ekiti State. Other accomplishments include the complete refurbishment of all the public secondary schools in the state; procurement and distribution of furniture as well as science and sports equipment to all public secondary schools across the state. We have also sought to improve teacher quality whilst successfully merging the States’ three universities into a better funded single state university. Other initiatives focus on skills based technical and vocational education in the State. [There are several other initiatives that I can discuss during the question and answer session]
Human development is not sustainable without massive investment in healthcare delivery, which include capacity building and infrastructure and staff welfare and disease control. Therefore, in the area of Health Care Services, we have been providing, in the last two years, free medical services for children, pregnant women, the physically-challenged and senior citizens. We have also established health centres in all localities, while increasing immunisation coverage. This year, we have embarked on our ‘Operation Renovate all health centres and hospitals. More crucially, we have embarked upon a strategic re-development of health management information systems while embarking upon the rehabilitation of health training institutions. We have greatly improved maternal healthcare, disease control, while also making the regulation of private health institutions more effective. Through our investment in medical education, in the specific case of the Ekiti State School of Nursing and Midwifery, the students in the school achieved a 90% success rate in the National Nursing Examination. We have constructed a new Accident and Emergency wing in the Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, while also creating a State Health Data Bank. We have renovated and extended the secondary healthcare facilities in the State, and enacted the Primary Healthcare Development Agency Act. Our health sector indices vis-à-vis the national average bear testimony to the significant steps being taken in the health sector. Ekiti has one of the lowest maternal and child mortality rates in the country, the lowest HiV prevalence and the highest life expectancy in Nigeria.
To be able to generate employment, development and empower the citizens to pay taxes, we have been providing the enabling atmosphere for industrial development. To jumpstart this, we have create technology and industrial parks for small and medium scale enterprises, established micro-credit facilities for promising entrepreneurs, while also promoting agro-allied and solid minerals sectors. We also plan to make Ekiti State a most attractive destination for relaxation and holidays by developing the Efon, Okemesi, Ikogosi and Ipole-Iloro tourism corridor, a heliport, and world class hotel and accommodation facilities. We are incredibly blessed by nature in Ekiti State. For instance, we have the Ikogosi spring where both natural warm and cold water flow from the hills to the valley. I invite you to Ekiti State to enjoy this most fascinating and unusual blessing of nature.
Our administration is just concluding the re-development of the first phase of the Ikogosi Warm Spring & Resort as the flagship of the tourism industry in the state. About 116 hectares of land was acquired for this new Resort, with plans for theme parks, spas, high-altitude sports academy, resource centre for women, gold course, edutainment centres, and sports academy. The hotel part of the Resort will be a 150-room branded international three-star hotel. We plan to spend N1.5 billion in creating a mini-paradise in the Ikogosi Warm Spring & Resort to which I invite you all when next you are on vacation. No doubt, it is now a place that the world will come to and enjoy the beauty of nature. Electric power is very central to jump-starting the local economy, especially in the area of agro-processing which is our focus and we are working an the development of independent hydro and solar power generation in the State.
Finally, in the area of gender equity and empowerment, we are committed to promoting gender equality and empowering women to maximise their potentials. In this context, we reserve no less than one third of all appointments and promotions for women, while mobilising resources to attend to issues of concern for women from maternal health and child care to employment and freedom from abuse. Specifically, I signed into law, the Gender-Based Violence (Prohibition) Bill in November 2011, making Ekiti State, the first state to domesticate this law in Nigeria. We also domesticated the National Gender Policy, while providing skills acquisition programme for out-of-school girls, supporting girl-child education and inaugurating the Family C
ourt for the implementation and administration of children and family matters.
Conclusion
It is quite fashionable in both lay and academic literature to emphasise how and why Africa is not being governed well. Much of the evidence adduced in the literature is, no doubt, not only true, but also troubling.
As a civil society activist, scholar and even dissident for many years, I am aware of both the structural and agential bases of the dark prognosis on political power and what passes for government in Africa. Nigeria is one of the starkest examples of the consequences of how bad leadership can complicate colonially-induced structural fatalities. However, I will like to conclude by making two important points.
One, in the theorizing democracy in Africa and in analysing the challenges of democracy and state-reconstruction in post-Cold War Africa, it is important that scholars and development experts begin to look beyond the macro-state, that is the national-state, in understanding the processes of delivering good governance at the micro-state, that is, sub-national level. Perhaps all the received cynical theories of African political pathologies can lend themselves to some instruction concerning a well-articulated agenda for development based on good governance which are often under the radar of a paradigm that perpetually expects basket cases to emerge from Africa.
I can say with confidence that the process of state reconstruction and actually-existing governance in Ekiti State today is not reflected in any of the pathologies and dark prognosis popularised and almost romanticised in the literature represented by such works as Bayart, Ellis and Hibou’s book, The Criminalization of the State in Africa,[12] or Chabal and Daloz’s Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument.[13] Neither is Ekiti State emblematic of “The Politics of the Belly” popularised by Bayart in his book, The State in Africa.[14] This is not to say that these books do not reflect much of the reality of contemporary Africa, I am only arguing that Western social scientists, journalists and development analysts should pay as much attention to state reconstruction, development and governance at the sub-national level in Africa as they pay to the national level. I am proud to say that in Ekiti State, we do not run the kind of kleptocracy that some have come to associate with our part of the world. We are running a government that is participatory, transparent, consensus-oriented, inclusive, responsive, effective, efficient, accountable and one based on the rule of law. Many independent bodies continue to attest to this and the latest is the Special Report on Africa in The Economist Magazine of London last week, which states as follows about Ekiti:
Better governance is creeping beyond the metropolis. When your correspondent emails the governor of Ekiti State in impoverished central Nigeria, he gets a reply within minutes, with the entire cabinet copied in…Cabinet members are highly motivated and have private sector experience. A new employment agency sends out job advertisements by text message. All secondary school pupils are getting free laptops with solar panels. All civil servants, including teachers, are tested annually; those who fail stand to lose their job…To be sure, this sort of governance is still an exception. [The Economist, March 2nd, 2013]
We are committed to ensuring sustainable human development. This is also true of our sister states such as Osun, Lagos, Oyo, Edo and Ogun States and this is why we are involved in a pioneering regional development agenda for Western Nigeria.
However, having said that, let me now flip the picture. And this brings me to my second concluding point. What many of the dark prognosis about Africa say is largely true at the national level. However, in our bid to federalise good governance in Nigeria, our party and political associates are working hard to ensure that we build a strong opposition platform which can wrest power from the ruling party at the centre, so that we can begin the process of humanising the totality of the Nigerian space.
For us in Ekiti State, as well as in the other states governed by my party, what is left is to federalise good governance in Nigeria; to ensure that if infant and maternal mortality rates are reduced in Ekiti and Osun States in the south-west, they must also be reduced in Sokoto and Zamfara States in the north-west of Nigeria. This is important because we are not only co-citizens, we also share a common humanity with all our compatriots in every part of Nigeria. The realisation of this shared citizenship as well as humanity makes it insufficient for us to ensure good governance in Ekiti State and not care about Jigawa and Yobe or Borno and Akwa Ibom States.
This is the new phase of resistance that people like us who were formerly at the barricades have embraced. Indeed, it is the new barricade; the barricade against bad governance, ignorance, illiteracy, injustice, inequity, incompetent leadership, want and misery in a nation which has earned over $400 billion over the last five decades from oil sale alone.
In the face of the daunting odds that our compatriots face all over Nigeria, people like me cannot restrict the struggle for good governance to my state only. Therefore, I cannot abandon the zone of resistance, even while being in the veranda of power. With seventy per cent of Nigerians living below poverty line, the reality of the poverty trap is an unacceptable paradox when measured against the country’s wealth. It is akin to what the notable political scientist, Terry Lynn Karl once referred to as the “paradox of plenty”. As I stated in November 2009 in the paper I presented at the Panel on “Ten Years of Civilian Rule in Nigeria” at the African Studies Association Annual Conference in New Orleans, “Bred by unequal power relations, the structural and systematic allocation of resources among different groups in society and their differential access to power and the political process, the distorted distribution of the nation’s wealth has resulted in the enrichment of a minority at the expense of an impoverished majority, and this minority… now use the wealth to continue to entrench their power. Inevitably, the chronic nature of poverty in Nigeria has a link to historical and continuing mismanagement of resources, persistent and institutional uncertainty, weak rule of law, decrepit and/or absent infrastructure, weak institutions of state and monumental corruption.” It is also now responsible for the insecurity that the country is experiencing.
I added that the immediate challenge is how to rescue Nigerians from bad governance, stating that: “There is an urgent need to build coalitions and platforms in the public sphere that are beyond parties and personalities, but all embracing enough to those who subscribe to the core values of integrity, honesty and dedication to the transformation of Nigeria….In my view, the problem is still about the nature and character of the Nigerian state, and it is not one that election can resolve, no matter how regular, well organized and untainted they may be. It is clear to most people in Nigeria, including the political leadership, that the question of the national structure is the central issue that will not go away in Nigeria’s quest for democratic development and effective governance.”
I will remain at the barricades, even in the veranda of power, to ensure that this quest is satisfied, not only in Ekiti State, and in the south-west region, but all over Nigeria.