The outgoing Governor of Lagos State,
Mr. Babatunde Fashola, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, speaks on his
eight-year administration of the state, non-payment of salaries by
states and sundry matters in an interview with journalists from select
media houses. KAYODE FALADE, KEMI ASHEFON and LEKE BAIYEWU were there
What are the things you are going to miss the most when you leave office?
I cannot think of missing anything. This
is a public trust; it has a beginning and an end. And it finishes when
it is finished. My life did not change when I took this job; not in any
way that I know. My food has not changed; my clothing has not changed.
Perhaps, the only thing I had to do more was travel, and now I will
travel less. This is not something to miss; this is something to say
that you have done your bit, get off the stage and let the next manager
take over.
Does it mean you are going to be relieved after leaving?
I will not use the word relief. I will just be done.
Are you leaving a fulfilled man?
Yes, to the extent that I was able to
deliver substantially on everything I promised, and more. I have done my
bit. You must contextualise fulfilment with the nature of the
undertaking. It is an undertaking that never ends; it is a job that
never finishes. The question is ‘did you add value?’ Yes. ‘Did you make
an effort?’ Yes.
It has been said that you are
leaving behind about N418bn debt and one wonders what is responsible for
the huge debt profile despite the huge revenue generated by the Lagos
State Government.
I have answered this question many times
and it seems people just dwell on debt but in the context of debt, let
us look at the assets too. I am leaving behind hundreds of kilometres of
roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, courtrooms, social services, skill
centres, streetlights and traffic lights. I am leaving behind also
people who now have jobs, who did not have jobs seven years ago. I am
leaving behind a stronger security force; a stronger LASTMA, a stronger
KAI. That is where the money went. I am leaving behind a rail system. I
am leaving behind so many assets for the continuity of life. I am also
leaving behind a bigger workforce – a better equipped workforce. I think
we should talk less about debt and more about development.
Lagos State Government still has to
continue to raise more money and this takes me to the Internally
Generated Revenue that you are talking about. The IGR – standing on its
own – is averagely N20 billion. Let us do the math. Some months it is
more than that, some months it drops. The monthly allocation from the
Federation Account is averagely N10 billion; sometimes it goes up to N11
billion, sometimes it drops to N9 billion. Let us use an average of N10
billion, even though in the last few months it dropped to six and half
(N6.5 billion). If we have averagely N30 billion, do the math, divide it
by 21 million people. You will get one thousand four hundred and
something naira per person in Lagos. It is easy then to say let us
collect the IGR you think is big but you are seeing the IGR alone and
not seeing the responsibilities.
Our population has also grown by forced
migration in terms of the Internally Displaced Persons across Nigeria. I
just sent a team to somewhere in Apapa where there are people displaced
from the North-East of Nigeria in camps. We have to go and intervene;
we cannot leave them there without help. The sanitary condition there is
horrendous. If we want a government that only deals with what is
available, then every month is the government going to tell everybody,
‘go and take your N1,400; go and build your roads, go and build your
schools, go and build your hospitals, manage your security?’ But we have
to be futuristic, we have to think ahead. The IGR that you also talked
about does not come as N20 billion to us. It comes when somebody pays N1
million for land today, somebody pays for his vehicle registration
tomorrow, and somebody pays his ground (land) rent. It is because we are
accountable that we always announce at the end of the month, ‘this is
what we got.’ If we wait for 30 days for the money to accrue, it means
we won’t do any work.
People should understand that we won’t do
any work because the money has not accrued. What do we do? We borrow
against it. The banks which we collect it from know that we will pay
because the money (IGR) comes through them. So, we take a loan. But we
don’t borrow to pay salaries; we don’t borrow for recurrent expenditure,
we borrow for capital investments. I cannot go and tell the person who
is waiting to take his child to the hospital and there is no hospital
space; that they should ‘wait, I am waiting to collect money.’ If I give
you the contract to build a hospital, I cannot tell you ‘take one naira
today, I am waiting for two naira tomorrow.’ It is not a way to plan
construction. You must gather your building materials and you must move
men to the site. We borrow from the banks. When the monies come, the
banks deduct them.
The borrowing you are even talking about,
measure it against the assets. We took N275bn bond over eight years.
The first thing we had to do was to repay the old bond of N15 billion
because the Lagos State Government drew N15 billion out of the N25
billion bond. We had to repay that so that we could take the full
benefit of what we were planning to do, which was going to be issued in
series. And we did all these in public. What did we use these monies to
finance? We used them to finance infrastructure. As the monthly IGR is
coming, we are returning 15 per cent of the IGR into a consolidated debt
service account. We can’t touch it. Take out 15 per cent of N20bn. We
have over a N100 billion in that account to pay the debts. Those who are
saying we owe, the system for paying bond is secured. We just paid the
second bond, which was the first that I took. We paid it last year. The
next bond will be due in 2017 and it is about N60 billion or N70 billion
but we have N100 billion in the account. In any event, we have
over-secured our liabilities as far as the bonds are concerned. As far
as the local short-term loans from banks are concerned, we were able to
pay.
If we don’t want a life of debt, then Lagosians must
agree that we reduce our budget to what we earn. We have a budget of
about N489 billion. Let us use our IGR as an example: N30 billion
multiplied by 12 months is N360 billion. We are already in a hole of
about N119bn. If Lagosians want us to reduce it, then will
Lagosians agree to stop demanding more services? Certainly, no! Thus,
this is the context. And when you look at the countries we aspire to be
like: America owes $16 trillion – they owe the whole world – but they
have the best space ships, aircraft and army, and they can decide what
our military does with the debt they owe the world.
What is the biggest problem you are leaving behind for your successor?
I did not govern to leave problems for my
successor. Let me say, first of all, that government loses its
relevance when there are no more challenges. The only reason why
government exists is to solve problems. I inherited my challenges; my
predecessor inherited his challenges but I can say that what we expect
to see is that the job gets easier as we move on. All we have done here
is to improve the quality of what we met in order to make it easier for
the next person. We have built stronger institutions, we have
strengthened ministries; we have increased revenues in order to meet
increasing demands, we strengthened government capacity to respond to
services. We just set up a citizens’ relation management platform on the
Internet so that the government will be able to more efficiently
respond to issues, using current communication methods with Internet and
telephone. But every problem that we solve creates a new problem. That
is life.
About 200 years ago – I’m not sure
precisely, the average life expectancy in Europe was less than 30 years.
You got married; you had a child; you would be expecting to die. But
what did the government do? The government started to expand the
frontiers of health care. Today, life expectancy is about 70 or 80 but
it has created new problems. They have won on health, they now have
social problems. People are not dying quickly enough and no government
can come out to say it wants people to die quickly. What that has
created is huge pension bills. You saw the debate in the last British
election – the pressure on the National Health Service is largely by the
ageing population. But that is the price of the success of health care.
The Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said states are responsible for their inability to pay salaries. Do you agree?
I won’t want to have a public debate with
the Finance Minister because if it was a matter she was willing to
debate, let her call a meeting and we will have a public debate on it. I
think the sense for the public to understand is that the country made a
budget on the basis of certain assumptions. There was a national
budget. Those assumptions have become unrealistic. If you are leading a
family, and your children or members of your household trust you or
trust your leadership, and you say that these are the things that you
expect to happen; that this road is safe, let us walk it together and
that road turns out to be unsafe because the nation did not earn enough,
so your assumptions were faulty and what the nation earned is mired in
debate and controversy about how accurate the accounting has been in
terms of oil proceeds and sales. Is it morally right to say it was the
fault of the children that they couldn’t go to school when the revenue
and resources to go to school had been halved because you led them to
believe that this amount would come in?
I think the time has come when people
must take responsibility for their actions and to say ‘you know what, I
got this wrong. I am sorry.’ It is possible for the uninformed members
of the public to misunderstand that statement and think that they
couldn’t pay salaries because they didn’t want to pay. But the admission
you must first make is that their income has declined. Let us go
forward and all of us must understand this: the money that goes to each
state from the federation account is for the entire state, not for the
public service. Let us understand that. It is for water, for road, for
security, for this and that. It is not to pay salaries alone. What
number does the workforce constitute and what proportion of that money
do they take every month? After paying salaries, government cannot fold
its hands to security and it cannot close its eyes to health care
issues. It seems to me that if there were more revenue, the states would
not be in this position. That does not suggest that all the right
choices have been made.
I think the larger issue that I want to
address is that it provokes us to rethink the viability of the current
state structure. When the debate for the creation of more states
started, one of the things I said was that I did not think we should
have more states. One of things I said – and I think I was the only one
who said it – was that it was time for people to think out of the box;
that the states that felt they were not viable on their own could merge.
Some people had some scathing words for me on that matter. But the way I
view life is that if you unbundle something and it does not work, you
must have the courage to put it back. And we cannot entrap ourselves
that there is no other answer. The same way that we put back the
decentralised Police Force many years ago, we are now afraid to unbundle
it again. But it is not working. This is the way that I think public
trust and even our private lives should be.
How can we say a state is not viable when the state executive has up to 2,000 aides being paid?
We must really decide what we want. It is
important that we own our government. How many of the people that we
call aides are, just for example, the immediate family members of the
governor that we can fairly accuse him of nepotism? They are members of
the society who want jobs. They are your friends, your cousins, your
brothers. The man (governor) does not advertise that he is looking for
workers. I still got a CV this afternoon of somebody looking for work.
It is always a top-line thing to keep on your head: how does this add to
my cost of running government? Suddenly, you will see the numbers. The
man does not advertise that he does not have aides; he probably has more
than he needs. Somebody like you and me put the pressure. Therefore, we
are using employment as our social safety net; employing some people in
some instances that we really do not need. That is why whenever I hear
that there is no social safety net in Nigeria, I just chuckle and laugh.
In some organisations, privately, and in some organisations, publicly,
you will see that one person can do the work three people are doing but
we cannot afford to lay off people because we will only create more
social problems.
We speak to ourselves and I know the
burden. ‘Please, help me; please, help me.’ And even when I could not
employ, I have met people in the private sector, ‘Please help me to
place this person.’ And when I don’t hear a reply, I know what the reply
is – that ‘we are watching our balance sheet’ because they are there
for profit and the profit is cash and dividends. The profit of
government is the welfare of its people. And so, one more person who can
go to work, the government can say ‘I have created a place for this
person.’
During your years in office, can
you recollect some of the wrong decisions you took and what things you
could have done differently?
As for things I could have done
differently, hindsight is always 20/20. As I said recently at an event,
our job is like that of actors on a public stage but the stage is live.
We are making videos; live production of cinemas on any production.
Unlike the great movies in which you can edit and retake, we don’t have
the opportunity to edit and retake. It is done, it is done. In that
sense, for two thousand nine hundred and something days – every minute
of the day – I am called to act either on a file, on the phone, through
text or in a meeting. If you do that from morning till night, almost 16
to 17 hours every day; I have taken hundreds of thousands of decisions.
Can I think that I would have got all of them right? Certainly, not. I
acted in the circumstance of what I understood the problem to be; I
acted in the circumstance of what time of the day it was; I acted in the
circumstance of how tired I was. I will rather make a decision than
postpone a decision. I will rather make a wrong decision than be found
not to have decided anything. In that sense, I cannot get everything
right. And I will never know how any people were adversely affected by
my decisions. I always make people to understand that this is a public
trust; it is not personal.
President Goodluck Jonathan
conceded defeat at the presidential election and that step has earned
him commendations worldwide. Do you think that action elevated him?
I won’t join the debate because it is a
raging debate; some say he is now a statesman, some say he is now a
hero, others say he is not a hero as he did what he was expected to do. I
will just say that first you must understand what we have become. All
of us are looking at an election. Do we normally, as a people, accept
that we have been defeated? Let us ask ourselves that question. Let me
animate it a little: can you remember how many times in football that we
lost – we can’t qualify – and some people will still be saying ‘no, if
somebody beats somebody by 20-0, we will qualify?’ And they will
continue to raise hope where, clearly, hope is gone. Logic says to you
‘this is over.’ That is us. We don’t accept that it is over. It can be a
positive energy somewhere else, to fight to the last. But in that
context, I think we should acknowledge what President Jonathan did as
the right thing. If you lose, you should concede that you have lost.
I won’t join the debate on whether he is a
hero or a statesman, people will have their views. But was that the
right thing to do? Yes. And I hope that from there we can pick an
example. Was it courageous? I would think so in the circumstance that I
have created. He had to go and tell a party that wanted to rule for 60
years that we have lost and I have accepted it. There is a saying that
while it seems ordinary to praise people for doing what is right or what
is good, we must understand that it is not just for doing what is right
or good that they got the praise or acknowledgement. It is because they
avoided evil. And the kind of evil we could have seen is unfolding in
Burundi now. The question is to ask the many ifs; ‘what if he (Jonathan)
had said no?’ That is my final word.
The National Assembly was on the
verge of amending the nation’s constitution but the executive stopped
the process through the judiciary. Do you think it was right for the
executive to do so?
My general disposition is to first say
that the constitution is the supreme law of the country and it is not a
law you want to easily change as if you are changing your underwear or
as if you are amending the minutes of a village meeting. There must be
very serious and compelling reasons to amend a constitution. And to see
that our constitution has been amended in the last eight years – we have
had all sorts of amendments to the constitution – the first question I
am asking myself is that those things that we have amended in the
constitution, are they things that probably should are been put in a law
– an Act of the National Assembly?
Something is wrong with a nation that
amends the constitution almost in every parliament. We probably put too
much in there. We are putting dates for elections, dates for this and
that; they should not be in the constitution. We have ‘over legislated’
our lives and put everything in the constitution. Sometimes, it is very
difficult because constitution amendment is a major event in any
country. The whole nation almost comes to a halt on what is going to
change. Now they are amending the constitution and we are just carrying
on with our lives. Constitution amendment is a very serious business, if
you ask me.
The question I ask is ‘is it the
constitution that is the problem or is it us?’ Let us look in the mirror
and see whether we like what we see. I have argued publicly that when
there is a common purpose; when there is candour; when there is a shared
value, even a bad constitution will work. And no constitution will ever
be perfect because it is made by men and women. And when there is
something that looks like a “perfect constitution,” with the bad values,
without candour, without a shared purpose, it won’t work.
The APC merger was not without the shared
value of the people who formed the APC was united by a common purpose –
to take the PDP out. And that was why people were willing to compromise
even if they were not comfortable. They did not get everything they
wanted. The ACN went into that merger with six governors; it lost its
colour, it lost its name. Therefore, you don’t need a constitution to
put us together; we set up the merger before the constitution came. That
is the sense. It is a shared purpose – it was us. What are we willing
to sacrifice in order to get the nation going? Is everybody going to say
‘this is my position and I am not moving from it?’ No constitution can
supplant that.
SOURCE - Punch
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