Godwin Obaseki, Edo State governor, spoke with a select group of journalists at his residence in Lagos, on some of his administration’s policies, reforms and interventions in several sectors aimed at repositioning the state in the last eight years. INIOBONG IWOK, who was there, brings the excerpts:
Your administration is popular for its transformative reforms in public service. What moved you to prioritise civil service reforms and what were the key challenges you faced in implementing them?
I always said that if you imagine the government as a vehicle that is moving people in a certain direction, then the engine of that vehicle is the civil service. If that engine is faulty, that vehicle is not going to move anywhere; it is going to be stunted and from that perspective you have to understand that for the government to work the civil service has to work. Whatever the government has decided that they want to do, it is the civil service and they have a process through which they make it happen.
So, if that institution is not working, if it is being castigated like it has been done in the past and if there is uncertainty, they would not do much.
The owner of the government is the civil servant; what we have done in the last thirty or forty years is to denigrate them, to make them feel less-important. We have not supported; we have not enhanced their ability to deliver. Firstly, when you go to the premises where they work, you would not encourage your children to go into the civil service because of lack of infrastructure. When I came into office, sometimes, when I called a director they would say; she is not on seat or he is not on seat. Why? Because the person has gone across the road to use the toilet in the filling station because there is no toilet in their offices. It was that bad. So, one of the things we did was to restore respect and credibility to them and today, you would want to be a civil servant in Edo State, because their offices are one of the best work places. Fortunately, because we partnered Ossiomo Power, we have 42 hours of electricity in their offices. We have connected fibre connectivity; there is high-speed internet. Now, we have gone digital; we don’t carry files and no file get missing again in Edo State, because everything is digital now. Everything was straining, and that is how it was since during Lord Lugard time.
You have not trained them; you have not updated their skills. One of the things we did in the John Odigie-Oyegun Centre is to continuously train them; we reduced the cost of training by having our own training centre. Another thing we did was the compensation, Edo has never waited for the Federal Government to set minimum wage for us. We believe that if you don’t pay people well you would not get their loyalty. Across the world, people don’t become millionaires by working for government, but they live a relatively comfortable lives; they raise their families. We have said if you work for government there are certain benefits you get. You would get health insurance, we build the school system, so you don’t have to take your child to private school and government school can take care of them. One of the things we noticed was that certainty, after work is important, when you retire and have large sum to take care of your needs and every month, you have something to sustain you. We re-instate sense of belonging and pride in the civic service; today, a lot of our workers do wonders. You know, we do a lot with World Bank and foreign multilateral agencies; when I see our staff stand with them, I feel proud. For me, if Nigeria is to move forward, we must rebuild the civil service.
Read also: How Obaseki transformed Edo’s primary, secondary education
Edo is hailed as Nigeria’s most digitised state, particularly in e-governance, which the World Bank expects African states to adopt. How has the digital transformation enhanced governance and how do you see this evolving in the coming years?
The truth is today’s world is about digitalisation, it is about data, it is about internet. It is about artificial intelligent. So, anybody that expects to still participate in this new world and still be analogue you know you would be lost. The greatest mover of change is government and if society is going to change it starts from government. Right now, in Edo, our teachers teach digitally; each teacher has tablet. That tablet every day you come to school you must synchronise your own with that of the head teacher, if you don’t, it means you are not in school that day. So, this initiative dropped the rate of absenteeism in schools. The truth is that if the teacher is not in class, the child would not learn. With that device, he has taken attendance in his class and it also has lesson note that the teacher would teach. With the tool you can also motivate the children. In the area of health care, every primary health care you go to in the state has computer and device; as you go there, they would take your data and somebody would follow up to attend to you. In the case of land administration, we mapped the entire state. We have area survey which makes it easy for us to be the best in the country. We now issue Certificate of Occupancy with 60 days and you can’t pay more than N60, 000.
Till the state was created until when I become governor, the total Certificate of Occupancy given out was about 2,000. In three years, I issued 30,000 certificates of occupancy, because of digitalisation. But for digitalisation to work, it is not just about the computers. Firstly, you have to have infrastructure, you should be able to link the devices. If you collect data in Agenebode and that data don’t sit in Benin, of what use? That is why we decided to invest in fibre optics cables and connections. So, we are the most connected state in Nigeria today; we have over 2,000 kilometres of fibre. Every local government is connected. The implication of this is that fraction of the cost, is reduced because it would make us to have zoom meetings. I can call the entire local government chairmen and we have meeting on zoom, rather than all of them coming to Benin and we make the decision. Digital is the way of the future; all the data you collect help you in decision-making and once government takes the lead everybody follows.
The Edo Health Insurance Scheme has been pivotal in making healthcare more accessible. What were the primary obstacles in setting up this scheme, and what strategies are in place to ensure its sustainability?
The biggest issue with health today in Nigeria is cost, most people don’t like to go to hospital because they feel they don’t have the money to pay. What happened is that once they get there they would say; this is how much you pay for card and so on, by the time you are reporting illness it is already getting late and too expensive.
What have happened everywhere else in the world which we introduced in Edo is to say; just pay something small, just give us N50 and N100 every day and you can work into any primary health care centre and take treatment. That is what we have done. Today, we have one of the largest insurance schemes in the country. We have almost 350,000 enrolees; just imagine that and everyone cannot be sick at the same time, there is always money. People often ask; where are the health centres, or clinic if I’m sick?
What the Ministry of Health did was to unify the health centres where you can get primary care and when you get your card you just go in there for treatment. God forbid they need to take you to clinic, you can’t determine where they would take you to. What we have done is to sell this idea and the biggest obstacles have been the trust. It should not be when you get to clinic there is no staff on ground to attend to you as a patient. Training the human capacity to work in these health centres has been a problem which we try to overcome by moving it away from local government into separate agency. We had the primary healthcare development agency; it is no longer in total control of the local government; the local government contributes in staff. It is autonomous; we train them and the local government pays 60 percent and the state pays 40 percent to maintain that agency. The other obstacle we have had and it is really not an obstacle, is that there are still many people who could not afford it. Fortunately, there is Federal Government basic health care provision fund, what they pay as premium is not what we can collect, but we collect to support what we have. That has helped us to take care of the poorest of the poor who cannot contribute and we are still able to treat them free.
The John Odigie-Oyegun public service academy stands out as a major achievement. How does this institution contribute to the modernisation of the public service workforce and how does it compare with others?
When you are undertaking reforms, it is not enough to say we would do this, you have to handle the process. Somebody who is used to writing letters, you are now saying he should come and handle computer, you have to coach, train and teach that person. So, the John Oyegun Centre is world class and one of the things I told them was that the lunch served to people there must be supper, so that they can be motivated to come. This is because it is practical and they teach you what you need in your work place. Because of the training we are carrying out in our work place, we now need this centre to help teach people, train them so they can cope. If you go through the comments of the people who went through that place, you would be amazed at their reactions, because we are teaching them some of the things they never knew. Beyond civil service rules, we are training them about lives skills and other areas they need; it has helped us to build capacity and build confidence in our workers. What we are doing, many states don’t do it; we have gone completely digitalised and I don’t treat files manually again, except digitally and e-copy.
EdoBEST has earned both national and international acclaim for its innovative approach to education. What plans do you have to further this progress, particularly in the areas of secondary and vocational education?
When I came into office in 2016 one of the biggest issues that confronted us was illegal migration and human trafficking. I can remember comedians joking and saying then; what is the capital of Italy? And they would say Edo. In February 2007, the International Office of Migration came with a report that there were over 30,000 Edo boys and girls in Libya trying to cross. If you have 30,000 in Libya trying to cross the Sahara can you imagine how many would have died? And there was no boat that had access that you did not find our people there. We set up a process to begin to bring them home and as they came, we received them and got the data to find out the root cause of this mass migration system to abroad. One thing that came out was poor education system. How can after finishing school, you are doing barbing or salon work and someone comes to tell you to bring $2,000 and they would take you abroad and give you work. If you go to school, you should be able to ask questions. We knew that the main thing we had to do was to tackle the issue of education. People come and say; I’m in this polytechnic, but they cannot read. We told ourselves we have to go and fix the school system and what is the issue? It is the teachers. There was so much absenteeism, appointment was based on political affiliation and people who did not go to school were becoming teachers. Absenteeism was a big issue, one way we dealt with that was to give them devices so we can track them. The other thing we did was we trained them. After about two years of implementing EdoBest, one woman came to me one day, she had tried to see me severally and I asked her what the problem was? She said she had two sons, since we introduced EdoBEST, the junior one doesn’t play like before again. She said when they came back from school, they want to do their homework and after one term, the junior one is almost beginning to read at six years, but his brother who is 10 years cannot read. She said the older brother often comes back home from school and want to go play football. The younger one does not want to play football, he wants to go to school. We changed the system of education in Edo State; the children now want to learn. When you see the performance of the children you would know that we made fundamental changes. We are talking about 40,000 children. Same lesson note is delivered across board. There are countries that are pioneering education globally, about eight or nine countries, Edo is the only sub-national among them. We have fixed primary 1-6, but the law is that basic education is primary one to six and junior secondary school. After 25 years we did not separate school, in those days, you find out that the secondary school you attended is still the same thing. You have senior by one side and there is junior at another side. The junior is regulated by SUBED and the senior if you are lucky, it is the state that is regulating that. The way they pay the teachers could be different. We said let us go back to national policy on education, basic education is nine years and not six years and the way we have treated these teachers by primary one we must take them to junior secondary.
Today, we are so committed to that, because when you look at our data, we saw that the dropped off ratio between primary six and senior secondary one is 50 percent. Have you ever asked yourself why we have so much street hoodlums? The high street hoodlum is because when these people finish primary six, half of them don’t go to secondary school they just disappeared.
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