Special Interview With Gov. Henry Serial Dickson

Bayelsa State governor, Honourable Henry Seriake Dickson, recently hosted select newsmen to an interview  where  he enumerated the developmental strides in the state. He also spoke on other issues. Taiwo Adisa brings the excerpts:

Question: IN recent times, you have been quoted as saying that your government is spending so much on road construction. Is it the focal point of your administration?

Gov Dickson:
There is construction everywhere because that is what I promised the people of the state and that is what they deserve. We are preparing our state for industrialisation. We are preparing our state to be a foremost tourism and investment haven. We are preparing our state to join the league of developed states.
I am in a hurry to see development. When I started, a lot of people said “where is he going to get the money to do all these; his dreams are too big; too big for this state; too big for four years; even too big for eight years.’’ But they didn’t know what I know about myself, which is that I raise the bar all the time. I try my best in all the responsibilities that I have been privileged to handle. I try to make a success, however modest it is, and this will be no exception. I am in a hurry to see this place become the Dubai of Africa, and this is no joke. Very soon, you will see tourism unfold; very soon you will see people rushing into Bayelsa as they already doing now. You have seen improvement in security.You asked why Julius Berger and all these companies. It’s not just Berger. All major construction companies in Nigeria have a presence here. A lot more are even coming, because the whole state is about construction.I have also succeeded within this short period to create an enabling, secure environment.
The honourable Commissioner for Works, who is a committed, selfless young man, understands the vision and he is effectively supervising and leading the charge. Let me add this. Bayelsa was the least developed part of old Rivers State. So, when we came here, we just saw ourselves living in an abandoned forest, an abandoned swamp with all its challenges, the difficulty of our terrains and then the challenges of under-development of the people themselves.That brought a lot of negative consequences - rise in militancy, high level of illiteracy and low level of unemployment and employability and all that. So, we are tackling all these.
But the key to it is to open up the state and that answers the question “why road, road, road?’’ We’ve got to open up the state because a place that is inaccessible is a forgotten place. Nigeria forgot this part of the country. This underdevelopment predated Nigeria’s independence and that was why our leaders and chiefs at the time before Nigeria’s independence was agreed upon requested for a conference and the colonial masters listened and summoned the Willink Commission. That was how the Willink Commission came into being. It came into being to study the complaints of the minorities of the Niger Delta, who felt that their terrain was very difficult and the majority groups in an independent Nigeria would not take care of them, develop them or even understand their challenges and the British government saw reasons and convened the Willink Commission. That was how they now granted special status to these areas. That was the beginning of the developments Basins - Niger Delta Development Basins and all of that.
So, this is a very special area. The terrain is so difficult. What I spend on one kilometre of road here, as you have seen, you can use it to construct 20 kilometres in other places. So, imagine me doing what I am doing on a dry land, you would have seen that even the 14 months that I have been here would have been something else. But here you’ve got to first  excavate up to eight feet, in some places even more, and here that’s why I’m selecting first class construction companies. Whatever I put in place here, I will like it to stand the test of time.

Question:What are you doing about human capital development?

Gov.Dickson:
The challenge of human capacity building, in fact, is the most important that I need to confront. Part of the consequences of under-development of this area is that the Human Development Index is very low. No good schools; I know that the standard of education, generally, has fallen in this country. But here, it is something else.
Everywhere, the standard is always higher in urban areas than it is in the rural areas. So, for a state that is completely rural, a state that is inaccessible, you can imagine what is going on. I noticed that to prepare for tomorrow, you’ve got to invest in the human mind today and that is why we are investing so much in education. You must have been told about our declaration of free education for primary and secondary schools.
A newspaper comment, I think in This Day, last week, said beyond my declaration of emergency (on Education), not much appears to have been done. I know that whoever wrote that didn’t have the facts. In one year, we have built 400 schools; 400 teachers’ quarters. I’m not aware of any other government building teachers’ quarters.At the secondary school level, we are constructing modern secondary schools with modern facilities. 
The key is to have boarding re-introduced. Most of us passed through boarding schools and they taught us a lot of things, not just academics. So, the key for us in this state is once this boarding schools that we are constructing are finished--- and we hope to finish a number of them by September---secondary education in this state, generally, will be boarding and the state will take responsibility for their (the students’) feeding and maintenance.
In other words, once a child gets into secondary school, the boarding school, the parents will pay little or nothing. So, the state has to intervene in a revolutionary manner on that. We are building eight model schools – one in each local government headquarters which will have a capacity for 1,200 students. But now, we are decentralising it also. Every state has constituencies, so we also have constituency boarding secondary schools.
We are building 26 constituency secondary schools.We have 24 constituencies but there are some areas which are highly populated and we have challenges of illiteracy, so I’m putting more there, Southern Ijaw precisely. In all the 26 of them, construction is going on and most of them are at roofing stage.
Also, in the area of scholarship awards, in one year, we have given over a 100 PhD scholarships within this country and outside; over 250 to 300 Masters degree scholarships; over 400 undergraduate scholarships; even selected 250 pupils from primary schools. As we speak, they are in top boarding schools in this country – Nigerian-Turkish, Bell, Loyola, all over. They are indigent students who are bright.The programme was started by the President (Goodluck Jonathan) while he was governor, but my predecessor (Timipre Silva) stopped it. So, for some five years, the programme was cut off. The ones that the president started with about 100 of them, I think, they passed out last year. So, we are now starting the programme again and a number of them  have been sent out on scholarships.
We got support from the Amnesty Office because they do a lot of training.In this state since I became governor, no student has paid for for WASCE, NECO or UTME. It’s free. You just need to indicate that you are set to take WASCE, NECO or UTME and the government pays.  We supply text books, notebooks, even writing pens, school bags and uniforms.
I just directed the Finance Commissioner to release N5 million to every local government area and N10 million to the two largest councils – Yenagoa and Southern Ijaw – for the chairman and the committees to now buy more school uniforms for them. Why we are doing this is because in vain do we build roads and bridges if we do not develop human beings. 

Question:  What is your reaction to the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) crisis?

Gov. Dickson
Quite frankly, there is no governor who would say he is not touched or he is not sad by the development in the NGF. We are as outraged and saddened as any other Nigerian. It could have been handled better. I think that governors are responsible people, not irresponsible people as the outcome may have suggested.
We are putting our heads together, consulting across divides and very soon, with the feelers that I have, the misunderstanding will be resolved and NGF will be back. But the NGF that will be back, I’m sure, is an NGF that would have learnt its lessons; an NGF that would have learnt to stick to the founding principles of that organisation, which is a peer review mechanism, not a trade union, not a platform for personal political aggrandisement, not a platform for playing partisan politics.
These are the guiding principles of the NGF. We are there actually to compare notes and also to be a platform for collaboration. It is a bipartisan or multi-partisan organisation that enables us to focus on what is the best, how we can deepen democracy and collaborate with the Federal Government on the challenges of development,  national security and so on.Well, the problem didn’t start now. PDP governors, who became chairman of the forum over the years, turned it to be a campaign platform – a platform for occupying national political space, a platform, when necessary, for promoting personal ambition, a platform also for promoting the ambitions of others.
It didn’t start now, it didn’t start with Governor Rotimi Amaechi: even before him, that was the tradition.  So, there was the urge of the Chairman of NGF to want to become the President or Vice-President. Once an organisation of equals, a voluntary organisation of equals, starts on that note, things could fall apart and the centre may not be strong enough to hold. I think that was what happened basically.

Question:What about this insinuation that some governors are pushing for a neutral candidate that will just emerge as the NGF chairman? 

Gov. Dickson
I’m not aware of that. The nature of the resolution, I don’t know. What I just know is that we are working together to ensure that we do things right. It’s just a body of equals, 36 governors. Quite frankly, for some of us, even if you dash me chairman of NGF, I won’t take because its additional wahala and additional stress. It is basically additional responsibility.
The responsibilities we have in our states are enough challenges. Quite frankly, that is why I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion because some people wanted to use it to achieve other ends, other ulterior motives, even when there was no need for it. In the United States, people don’t even know who the chairman of the American Governor’s Forum is, because it’s not important. The chairman is just there to preside over the meetings of equals. It doesn’t make him a super governor. But you know everything Nigerian, people want to distort and then make something out of nothing. There is nobody who has become president or vice-president through the NGF. You don’t need NGF to discuss  with your party.
If you want to become anything, you set up your campaign platform and you battle for the ticket of your party and you talk to Nigerians. You don’t need an NGF. But I think there is this unfortunate misconception of NGF as a platform that could be used for the national political space. I think heavy investment was also made to project it that way. For me, it’s nothing I am even prepared to accept right now because the challenges of governing your state is serious enough. As governors, the mandate we have is to govern our states.

Question:Can you shed light on the Safe City and Safe State project?

Gov Dickson
We want to provide fool-proof security as much as it is humanly possible and we are calling in technology because that is the trend all over the world. You saw what happened in Boston, USA. You can’t prevent all crimes. The important thing is that the one you cannot prevent, you should be able to apprehend and punish the offenders as quickly as possible. I want our law enforcement agencies to have that kind of capacity in Yenogoa. This is what we should have in all our cities, really. But over the years, just as we have abandoned investment in education and then we allowed the  generation to grow up without values, without morals, without knowledge all over the country – and it’s hunting us now. We didn’t invest in security. So, we are reversing that trend. We want people to troop to Yenagoa, feel safe here, do business and live here. I hope that by the time the new Yenagoa City project is launched about November or December, the new Yenagoa City will be like Dubai.When you come to that new Yenagoa City, you won’t believe you are in Nigeria.
Already, we have started that process – the polo club has started; the five-star hotel. As a matter of fact, it’s a six-star hotel which will be completed by September or October. We are even building a chapel there for those who want to marry to come and do their honeymoon in Yenagoa, in a safe city, in a safe state.
There will be bars, there will be casinos and everything you can find everywhere in the world. It will be one-stop leisure relaxation centre. With several plots of land that will be available, we will tell other Nigerians and other people to come and invest and live here.  There will be shopping malls, so Yenagoa is being programmed for prosperity, for security and for development.

Question:How much progress have you been able to make in the area of agriculture?

Gov.Dickson
Yes, agriculture is one major area we are looking at. We are actually doing a lot. But last year, our agricultural investments were stalled because of the flood. This year, we’ve done, for example, 40 hectares of seed multiplication because of the big farm that we want to do. But then, the flood projection is a source of concern.
My commissioner has advised that we should put all the contracts we have awarded in that area on hold until after the flood because if we do anything now, the flood can wipe it out. All the things we did last year, flood destroyed everything – the rice, all the cassava investments. Not just the ones owned by the public, it also affected the private ones, including my own fish farm. I was very sad when he brought the advice, but I knew that what he was saying was the right thing.  There is no point going to create massive areas, plant seedlings, only for the flood to wipe everything. Agriculture is one major area we are looking at, as a matter of fact, to diversify our economy. This has made us to look into two areas – tourism and agriculture.  We don’t want to be number 1 in oil and gas alone. We want to be number one in rice production, in fishery and other areas we have comparative advantage.  Right now, we have sent 500 youths for specialised training in agriculture in Cotonou.  The whole idea is for them to be trained and come back and run the farms we want to establish but, like I said, the flood issue is troubling and this is because the whole state is below sea level.  All major rivers run through this state to the Atlantic Ocean. 

Question: What is your government going to do about the 500-bed hospital that is enmeshed in controversy?

Gov. Dickson
We are not abandoning that project . I don’t know of controversies but issues on the hospital are not insurmountable. They are not things that cannot be resolved; they are not serious issues. If you went there, you would have seen the diagnostic centre that is coming up there.The whole idea is that when that centre is finished, then we will begin to fix the development of that hospital. The hospital was conceived without due regard to available manpower that will run it and so many other fundamental issues involved.  So, we are working with the private sector.
That is not a hospital that can be run by any state government. We are looking for people – major firms, major medical firms. A lot of them have shown interest because of improved image of the state. They have come from India, from South Africa, Dubai and England to come and look at it. We are looking at their proposals. We want to outsource that place for them to use and with the diagnostic centre we are building, to complement it. That place will become a centre for medical excellence. So, it is not abandoned at all. Very soon, you will see major developments but I don’t want to put further government resources there. I want the private sector to come in and drive that project and the private sector is responding positively.
We will work with them to bring it to completion. 

 Question:What informed the drug mart project that the state recently decided to partner r Minister of Information and also former Director General of NAFDAC, Prof. Dora Akunyili ?

Gov. Dickson
In health sector we are doing so much. If you going to every local government, we are building standard hospitals. Some days ago, former Minister of Information and former Director General of NAFDAC, Prof. Dora Akunyili was here to collaborate with us to build the first ever pharmaceutical storage facilities that will be handed over to drug manufacturing firms for them to store their original drugs. We want to phase out this syndrome of fake drugs in this state and also support that process in this country. This is to ensure that any drug here is original because all the manufacturers will have their own storage facility and man it. Then all retail traders will now buy from them. They won’t sell retails in this market, they will sell wholesale. Only drugs from the market will only be allowed in our medical facilities.
  That place will also have a laboratory so that from time to time we will be testing fake drugs, substandard and expired drugs. It is a major facility, which when completed by the end of this year, hopefully, will go a long way to address this issue, not just in Bayelsa but at least in the South-South. I talked about the modern diagnostic centre.
When we finish it, a lot of Nigeria will not need to travel out of the country for diagnosis. Our doctors in this country are quite good but they first need to find out what is wrong before they can treat effectively. We want to put up all the facilities there so that people will not need to travel to India or the US and we are backing it up with health insurance, which I will soon sign into law. Once you subscribe to it, you will not need to pay anything when you are sick. So you will do your diagnosis at the diagnostic centre and the doctors will treat you and will be paid for by the insurance fund. We will start with those in the public service and even those outside the public service can contribute can be part of it.

From the Nigerian Tribune