CROSS RIVER GUBER: MY PAST, PLANS AND PROSPECTS - IMOKE

In the interview he responded to questions on his achievements in office, his stance on the tenure of governors and raises issues on the incongruity of farmers in Cross River paying for the subsidy in the price of petrol. Excerpts:

What  would you say were your achievements in office in your first term?

I don't like to talk about myself; I think it is immodest to speak about what you are doing.  Over the last 12 years, Cross River state has had the benefit of having a very holistic approach to governance and has enjoyed tremendous support. We focused in the last few years on people.

The people are beginning to feel government in the sense that it is one thing to see government in the papers and another thing to touch government.  The people are beginning to touch government in many ways - women are getting free healthcare.

We recorded, in one or two of our local governments, zero maternal mortality. We have taken government to those who need government; we are able to touch their lives and affect them positively. The same goes for education. Enrolment in public schools will continue to decline because of poor standard.

But, in Cross River state, enrolment has gone up over the last three years by nearly 20% because of our programmes in those areas and they are mostly in rural areas. So everybody is affected by this programme. Our percentage pass in the school certificate exams has gone up from 5 per cent to 33 per cent.

Rural areas that never believed they would have electricity supply have been electrified (about 167 communities) over the last 2 to 3 years.

We have continued with our other initiatives as our key programmes particularly our urban roads. We continue to expand our street lighting programme.  In short, the people are beginning to feel the impact of government so that, at the end of the day, there is no community that doesn't have health facility that is delivering services. We have thousand of kilometres of roads either constructed or ongoing, all in rural communities.

So I think that our people have had the tendency to be appreciative of government. If I tell them I don't want to commission project, everybody is upset with me and if I don't commission, they would say I am not working. If you commission a project, people will come out as if you have done them a favour whereas what the government has done is to fulfill its responsibility to the people. I am hoping that, with time, governance will change.

I think all in all, we have been able to have continuity in government programmes and policies. If there is one government that has never abandoned one project, it is our administration.

You described the Supreme Court verdict as a setback, could you expatiate more on that?

From a personal point of view, I think anybody should not do more than two terms of four years. Having said that, I still query the annulment of my first election.

That judgment is perplexing; I think that at the end of the day, what is most important is the will of the people. So the annulment of the first election and the next election, which came a couple of months later, saw people still responding in exactly the same manner. So I don't know what we achieved with the first annulment especially when the judgment was based on irregularity in three or six polling units.

So I think these are the constitutional issues that we need to look at because everybody now understands, through Imoke's Judgment, that based on technicality, you don't really need to campaign.

Gov. Imoke
Even though they have got the popular mandate of the people which is what democracy is all about, I don't need to do much, all I need to do is to be on the ballot paper and I can go to the court. So, based on the technicality, we can circumvent the popular will of the majority of the people and these are the things we need to address to move forward.

There is a need for us to accept the fact that democracy is about the people; it is important that where the will of the people has been expressed, we should be careful in drawing back the hand of the clock.

I think we should pay special attention to the cost of the entire process to the public of any election-the logistics, what INEC spends, security cost not to talk of what the politicians will expend is hugely significant and the disruption in policies and programmes is also much more significant.

While I believe in the 4-year tenure, even though I am affected by it, if you look at the list of the party, my name is not there.  I did my primaries in January of 2011, but we are bound by what the court says.

So I think it is imperative now that this judgment has come in this manner, I think in the interest of public policy, the timing of the judgment is important and even though it is a good step to straighten out things. Like I said, I believe in four-year tenure and I don't think anybody should be in office for more than two terms of four years.

I look forward to ending my tenure in 2015, if by the grace of God, I win the election. I also don't think it is good for us as a state to be out of sync with the federation. Some people don't seem to understand. But for me, it is important that Cross River state should be in sync with the rest of the federation.

Now that the elections in Cross River have fallen out of sync with that of federation, it means we  cannot participate in the selection of the leadership of the senate for example at that particular time. So it is better if you are in sync.

You are one of the oldest members of the National Executive Committee of the PDP. Why do governors always keep mum on national issues except when they want to hold elections or when they want to hold the president to ransom?

I will remind you of something that has never happened in the history of this country; I think it was in either September or October, if you recall, FAAC was not distributed for two months.

So when you say that governors don't respond, that is not correct. Why did we reject it? We said you cannot account for the increase in the deduction to pay the subsidy, so since you can't account for it, let us stop the distribution until you can account for it and stop deducting state government's allocation to pay for subsidy, so that was what happened.

And for that to happen, it means we debated the matter, considered at various levels long before the strike. So, for us, it has always been an issue which we can discuss and we can actually reach agreement on. That was why FAAC was unshared for two months because we took a position against the continued huge deductions from the account to pay for subsidy. It became more and more difficult for us to understand, as governors, the details of the operation of the sector.

Some of us made a strong case for the subsidy to be based on consumption. For instance, I can't understand why in Cross River state-between the state and the local government- contributed N13Bn.  Cross River is a very small state.

Now if local governments in the state contributed to the subsidy, it means that the poor woman who doesn't even go on motorcycle to her farm in Bakassi Local Government and whose husband uses canoe to go fishing is contributing to subsidy.

Do we consume N13bn worth of petrol in Cross River state in a year? Why is the subsidy not on consumption? Why is it deducted from FAAC and local government funds on the basis of the revenue sharing formula?

Very odd and strange subsidy! When we met for the first time, the 36 governors took a position that the deductions were unprecedented and as such the solution was to remove the subsidy and that the state governments will now use this fund meaningfully for the development of their states.

There was no governor that will say he was not part of that unanimous decision. Some governors from other parties were even more vocal about the deduction.

How we reacted to the protest was different but there was a unanimous decision and I think it is something we need to debate. For me, in Cross River, if I want to have a subsidy, let the subsidy be on consumption. Why is this product the same everywhere in the country when I know that it might cost more to land it in Calabar than in Lagos, why do the people of my state need to subsidize consumption in other states?  Those are the things we still need to put on the table as our democracy grows and if we are committed to developing our economy.

So its not just a question of subsidy or no subsidy, there are much more relevant and important issues that we need to discuss at that level. After four years as governor, what are your principal regrets and if you were to address a rally in the state today, what would you say to convince the people to vote for you?

I will just show them all the projects and all the programmes that have been delivered in the last four years in the communities and what is on the cards for them. The people, like I said, are beginning to touch the government; they don't just see it on the television. So that is what I will tell them.  I will be very sincere and honest to them like I have been in the past. I think the whole thing is about trust and that is what we are really driving at.

On the question of regrets, I have regrets of the fact that we lost our oil wells, we lost our revenues, we had to redesign some of our programmes, we had to slow down on some of the things we had set out to achieve and also the consequences of the loss of Bakassi was such a heavy burden. So there are things like that that occurred.

Like I said, I wish my elections were not annulled not because of me personally but because of the interruption we create in government in terms of our policies and programme because we spent a lot of time planning. So there are things I will like to see happen. I will like to see those in the public sector become much more responsive to the needs of the people. We have really been able to do quite a bit for our people.

There was a time we needed a small bridge in Cross River and it was commissioned. Now, a lot of bridges are being constructed. So in terms of regrets, those are the key things. But we have much more to be grateful and thankful for than to regret. I believe that we must have ambition; ambition on its own is good. For us, our future has to be better than our past. We have had a situation where, our future, when compared to past didn't look so good.

Today in Cross River, we are beginning to see a brighter future and that is because of the deliberateness of the policy of planning of our programmes. We are striving to create in Cross River a service_driven economy, not an oil based economy.

And that economy would be driven by key sectors like tourism and hospitality; it would be driven by technology, processing and manufacturing, enhancing agricultural value chain. It would create an economy that would not be totally dependent on FAAC.

Today, the only economy that I know that stands like that in Nigeria is Lagos for obvious reason. Going forward, we will fast track our programmes and our initiatives to make sure that that the mission of creating a service-driven economy is achieved.

So the future is bright, we are going to do the basic things and they are the things people can see like infrastructure, healthcare and education which we are oblige to do as government but beyond that, we need to key into the future and initiate programmes that would truly see the development of economies that are not oil dependent though not necessarily in my tenure.

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