Bayelsa State Governor, Henry Seriake Dickson in this interview held with editors of Lagos-based newspapers in Lagos last weekend bared his mind on the leadership crisis of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the raging controversy on the notice served the Igbo by Arewa youths in Kaduna State to leave the North.
Governor Dickson also spoke on how he is placing the Bayelsa on the path of peace and development. Excerpts
How far is the airport project in Bayelsa now? What is the full story?
When I came on board, I wanted an airport in Bayelsa State -the heart of Ijaw land to boost our economy and play an active role in the Gulf of Guinea. I lobbied the Federal Government for partnership on the airport, I was told contract for sand filling of the airport was already given to someone by NDDC, which they said was about 50 per cent of the cost and I said no problem but I wanted to drive essential elements of this airport by myself so that it won’t suffer unnecessary delays. I told the contractor, your contract with NDDC stays, I’m not interfering. I cleared another place and gave the contractor that place to stockpile the NDDC sand. After all, we can use it in the other development projects in the state. Up till date, the contractor has not delivered on the sand.
I then took over the dredging of the sand for the airport proper and called in the biggest dredging company in Nigeria and gave the contract to them, paid them. Then I went to the Bayelsa State House of Assembly and secured a N50 billion facility to deliver on the airport and tied it to the various contracts that would be awarded.
So, immediately the dredging companies verified, they went to the bank, they knew that their money was there in the bank. They worked day and night and within one year, they finished the dredging, and we expanded the scope of the airport from two kilometers runway to 3.5 kilometers because we have to make it commercially viable. Right now it is only in Lagos that all these big cargo planes can land, even cargo plane servicing the oil industries bring in oil tools, big cargo, carry merchandise that can’t land in Port Harcourt, they can’t land in Enugu, they can’t land in any other airport in the South-south. Cargo planes can only land in Lagos, Kano and Abuja airports. So we have to structure it for that type of traffic – actually cargo airport, to cover the South-south, South-east, you know, big cargoes they bring in from China and other places can land in Bayelsa when the airport is completed.
So we are building actually the biggest state-owned airport, 3.5 kilometers, the contract was awarded to Dantata and Sawoe and it is now almost 90 percent completed, we now have the runway, we have the terminal building, now I am awarding the contract for the navigational instruments, when they are installed, you have the airport.
Why airport?
Airport will open up the state, enable people to fly into Bayelsa and fly out both for business, pleasure and generally create a hub for businesses. The airport will help to take Bayelsa to the world and bring the world to Bayelsa State. You know Bayelsa State is a historical centre of oil and gas, yet there is no activity and when you ask the companies why they are not in Bayelsa, some of them would say because there is no airport; they can’t fly in and fly out, you know, so we don’t even control elements of the oil trade because there is no airport, no seaport.
I don’t know whether you are also building infrastructure to enhance operations at the airport? I’m really talking about the roads, if you can really connect a road between the airport and the East-West road, that can take one straight to Warri, then you will also be thinking of capturing the Warri market
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Oh yes. It is all part of the calculations, we have done a road now going to Amasoma, which the late governor DSP Alamieyesiegha started but which my government re-awarded to CCC. The company did a great job, they built culverts, bridges, from 2012 when I gave them the job and the road is very solid. But we are doing a road from that road to the airport, so from the East-west, you can easily get to the airport. We will capture all that market, Warri, Ahoada, Ughelli and so on. But we have a strategic plan targeted at opening the airport for business because it can accelerate our development. To develop any state, or any nation, you must create a business friendly environment, build the capacity of the people as we are doing in Bayelsa and build the infrastructure that can attract and encourage businesses to grow.
So we have a strategic plan and that’s why this airport is so critical to our development as a people!
There is a plan for a deep sea port from the airport, about one hour drive, you get to the Agge Deep Sea Port, again we have been laboring to build the road that will take us to Ekeremor, the next local government which is 50 kilometers. These are the big ticket projects we will commence. Visit Bayelsa, I will like you people to have an idea of what we go through to build roads. We are already building the road from Sagbama to Ekeremor which is about 50 kilometers, we have sand filled about 47 kilometers already. I moved in a second dredger recently, even in this recession we are doing that even though it is costly, very expensive. They are pumping sand day and night because we’ve to get to that local government and see how we can move from Ekeremor to Agge which is about 67 kilometers from Ekeremor. We also did another 70 kilometers to get to Agge that is by the ocean.
As I always say the wealth of Bayelsa lies in the sea. We have the most beautiful beach in the whole of this area, the Agge beach – white sand, long stretch of beach, lot of things can happen- tourism, maritime related investment and that is the best location for a deep sea port in this country. As we know, we don’t really have a deep sea port in Nigeria, we have lots of trans-shipment going on. The Ekeremor road I talked about will cost over N40 billion! I am even scared there will be other variations, because of inflations and the exchange rate and so on. We are bent on delivering on that road before the end of my tenure, we have already stabilized up to 15 kilometers, sand filled, stabilized and now vehicles can run on it. Already they are calling me that the economy is improving, there are young people who are now in the business of loading vehicles in some of the Ekeremor communities for the first time, they have some young men in the parks shouting, Ofoni, Yenagoa.
From that deep seaport to remote areas, we are opening up a joint trade corridor in the South-south and South-east because the end of my local government, Sagbama Local Government is very close to Onitsha and there are a lot of oil facilities – gas flaring going on. What I have started doing as part of our strategic plans is to engage even the oil companies, NNPC and I have visited all of them, gotten their support to provide power, 24-hours. We have acquired 400 hectares space of land and we shall make it a huge market for industrial estate linking it up with the South Eastern market – Onitsha and so on.
How much of these you have enumerated can you finish before 2020?
As I have said the airport is already being completed- end of this year. As a matter of fact, some months back, an aircraft on a mission landed there and took off, because what we call an airport is a road, essentially fortified road with the navigation materials. So they will be delivered. We are working with our partners collaborating on the big industrial park, collaborating with IOCs, the NNPCs, on supply of power, they are flaring the gas even as we speak. We are converting gas to power, so that when we have 24-hour supply, it will now be a manufacturing hub for companies that want to manufacture. Part of the challenges in Bayelsa State is we don’t have strong private sector participation, the whole economy revolves around the state government expenditure, so that puts a lot of pressure on governance, affects the politics adversely and these are the reasons why we need the participation of the private sector.
We have invested heavily in security and today, Bayelsa is the safest and stable state in the Niger Delta even though it is the epi-centre of the Niger Delta issues, concerns and struggles. You can see that my agenda is of course to a large extent delivered. The social investment end fully delivered. You have the best public schools, not private funded schools in Bayelsa State.
In Bayelsa we have made a revolutionary intervention in education not only in terms of the scholarships that we are giving out and our students are doing very well but we are building schools. I did declare emergency in the education sector, but it was not just a political slogan. I really meant it. primary and secondary education are free and compulsory in Bayelsa State.
We now have for the first time boarding schools in the state. In the Ijaw National Academy for example, a school we designed and built from scratch in Kiaima. It was a massive forest designed and built from scratch. It’s now like a university but it is a secondary school and you have 1,000 students right there now, all on state government sponsorship. And it is boarding. In other words, you see them they go for feeding, three times we feed them, their uniforms provided. We select the best students from all the primary schools, boys and girls, top students, and they do an examination and we select the very best again and tell their parents from now on till they end their secondary education, these students are state government ‘‘property’’ what you do is only buy buckets, cutlass and then the hostel wear.
We are embarking on massive mobilization of people, I had to even threaten parents and guardians, I have built the schools, the facilities are there, the children have been tested, exams taken to select them school by school, the best set, if you don’t allow your child to go I will order your arrest. Look at Ijaw National Academy, 900 Bayelsa were offered admission, the rest of 100 are Ijaw drawn from states like Ondo, Edo, Delta, Akwa Ibom and Rivers because a Bayelsa Governor has a responsibility to cater for the Ijaw outside the state. The head girl in the Ijaw National Academy is from Edo State and I selected them four years ago. Initially, what I did was to give scholarships and sent them to the best secondary schools in the country, after building these schools, I brought them back home. So in every local government we have well-equipped schools and in Kolokuma-Okpokuma Local Government alone, you have Ijaw National Academy and the Sports Academy.
Is the state not taking too much by doing that?
Well, that is the reality of Bayelsa and the reason we are doing that is because unless you consciously intervene and build a new generation of citizens, leaders, there is no meaningful development that you put on ground that can last and that is why we are investing in human capital development.
I also want to talk about the health care investment. These are the key areas we have done wonders in Bayelsa. We have the best public health care facility now. It is an investment we have been making over time, we now have hospitals in every local government headquarters which was not there before and I’m very pleased with that. In Yenagoa, the state capital, you have the Diagnostic Centre which will be commissioned soon.
And under my watch, every local government now has a functional modern hospital, where they were non-existent before I came on board. Now, I say every ward must have a functional health centre and the residential accommodation of the medical personnel, a number of the wards have health centres but no personnel there, everybody wants to stay in Yenagoa or Port Harcourt.
What is the state of the Ogbia-Nembe road?
The Ogbia-Nembe road is a product of a very good partnership between NDDC and Shell. Budgeting and funding stalled the project. I had to intervene like I did on the airport because I was concerned. In 2012, when I became governor and because of the importance of that road, I called the community leaders, Shell and NDDC for a meeting and I was told they had no money to continue and I asked the contractor, ‘how much do you need to take this road to Nembe, and he said N3 billion?’ I immediately directed the release of N3 billion to them and that was how they tarred the road and that was how Nembe became passable and became like an upland local government. We need to start a similar partnership in other critical areas. Having reached Nembe, the challenge now is how to hit Brass. Most of these constructions we call roads in Bayelsa are actually bridges because there is no land for you to build on particularly when you are moving towards the ocean, like the road from Sagbama to Ekeremor, we have been dredging for four years now.
In all of these, what can you say is your central focus?
It can’t be one thing at the expense of the other, it has to be all. For example in agriculture, you are seeing the biggest cassava starch processing plant investment, the first of its kind in Bayelsa, we have over 300 hectares of land in which we are planting cassava, most of it already planted. We now have a starch processing factory in Ebidebiri. There is a market for the starch and its derivatives in Europe already and the factory when completed will employ over 15,000 Bayelsans. As we speak, our partners, a Danish firm is installing the machines, the cassava plant is there for everybody to see. We have a lot of aquaculture projects going on, the most penetrative is the 500 ponds per local government which we have started. The first one in Yenegoa, we have a hatchery which can generate the fingerlings and train people who can do that as a business, then you have the processing plant, when you harvest you process them, dry them and so on, then you have the feed mill installed, integrated with the schools already built.
The idea is to train these young boys to attend that school for training and then we allocate the ponds to them and they now take each pond and we give them the fingerlings produced there, we give them feeds to feed the fish and when the fish is matured, you buy from them. It’s a very revolutionary intervention in the field of agriculture. Our poultry has capacity of close to a 100,000, it is actually running now, the birds are there, over time, this will help to train people on how to run some of these ventures on their own, people can now, or the state can now divest and then privatise them. So, Bayelsa, unknown to a lot of people is a state that can do very well in agriculture because that is the best place for palm plantation, aquaculture comes with our terrain, everybody there is a fisherman or fisherwoman, we can even do trawling which the country is not doing yet. That’s why running a state like Bayelsa is very excruciating and doing it in a recession and without federal support. We bleed in Bayelsa to drive and force development. And I can report to you that after me, Bayelsa and the Ijaw nation will never be the same again!
What is the future of your party, the PDP?
I think the right question should be what is the future of Nigeria’s democracy? The tragedy of our democracy today is that we neither have a strong political party in Government nor a strong political party in opposition. You all know the efforts we in my committee made to reconcile the various tendencies in PDP so that the party could come back on stream to play its role as a credible opposition platform. As a matter of fact, Nigeria’s democracy is worse for it, without a strong PDP. Unfortunately our party has not been playing a role of an opposition party because of the needless crisis plaguing us. What is happening in PDP is a great danger to Nigeria democracy, but I still believe that all hope is not lost. But what is happening in PDP is not just peculiar to PDP, it is also happening in APC.
For our democracy to be secured, we need a strong party in government, strong cohesive united party in government, pursuing their democratic agenda as well as a virile party in opposition. But so far our democracy is weak because of the absence of these. There is crisis in APC, it is brewing and nobody is talking about it. The sooner we in the PDP salvage our platform that is now terribly suffering a lot of de-marketing the better for our democracy. It is unfortunate that a political party has to go to the judiciary to resolve its internal problem that is essentially political. Relying on the court to resolve internal crisis is an indictment on the political class, it is an indictment on the democratic credentials of all players. My belief, my views might be in the minority, but my belief is that the judiciary is being over worked or over labored unnecessarily by political actors of all parties. We have abdicated our responsibilities as political players, we have surrendered too much to the judiciary, we have involved the judiciary in too many unnecessary political issues, and thereby exposing them to ridicule and we are not helping the judiciary.
Political leaders who are key players in the democratic system should show the maturity, the political temperament, redemptions to be able to recognize and solve problems within themselves and see politics as essential element of democracy, which is a market place of ideas. We all do not need to belong on one political party, even within our parties there are tendencies, there should be contestation of tendencies but the irony in Nigeria is that politicians in Nigeria are more militant than the military. Honestly, politicians in Nigeria do not know how to argue, disagree amongst themselves, we don’t listen to ourselves, we can’t argue amongst ourselves. If you hold a divergent view, you are marked for destruction or blackmail, or tagged as doing anti-party and this is so because our political actors, leaders neither have the skills and the democratic temperament to drive the political process and these are partly the reasons why the crises in both PDP and APC are strong. In the US for example, you see all the tendencies playing out, Clinton on the centre of the Democratic Party, you have Bernie Sanders on the left of the Democratic Party and others so also in the Republican Party, all marketing their ideas
But I am confident PDP will still bounce back after the Supreme Court judgement, but my view is that we have no business going to a court. If PDP leaders had agreed to implement our template for reconciliation, a national unity convention would have held this month to elect a brand new leadership. The irony of it is that the Judiciary does not reconcile, it only adjudicates. Even after the Supreme Court judgement, the party will still hold a convention and embark on aggressive confidence building and reconciliation. So what is the real reason for going to court?
I was opposed to Senator Ali Modu-Sheriff when some of my colleagues and others brought him, I didn’t like that, I thought that our party needed a fresh face to craft a fresh message after losing power at the centre. Losing election is bad but that is not the end of the world for a party or for a politician. Unfortunately those who brought him for whatever reason, fell apart with him. And when the Appeal Court upheld Sheriff as chairman, I as a product of the law, as a law-abiding citizen adhered to the Court Judgement by duly recognizing him as Chairman and the same people said I was a Sheriff man. As politicians we shouldn’t be law breakers or hold the Judiciary in contempt. We should not personalize judicial pronouncements by selecting the verdicts to respect!
Why should a politician for example want to pocket his party, why should you be the one to select the National Chairman and secretary and all the other posts, they must be in your pocket for you to be a member of that party, does that make sense, is that not madness? If that is the thrust of a politician then you can go and form a political party of your family and be in charge then, but once it’s a national party, it is an aggregation of all interest and top of which is the national interest. After the Supreme Court judgement, PDP must address many its problems top of which is funding.
We want to know your views on this quit notice on Ndigbo
I condemn in strong terms the quit notice on Ndigbo. Nigeria has gone past that. We must remain as one indivisible country because our strength lies in our diversity. We didn’t even need the civil war we fought as a country because it didn’t result in anything. I support what the Northern Governors Forum and their counterparts in the East have done. I read the statements by my governor colleagues and I believe that all governors are united in this to see how we can promote peaceful co-existence and harmony. I believe that the APC-led Federal Government could have done more in the area of promoting national unity in the country. I have spoken about this severally, the country was too divided. The Federal Government should consciously promote national cohesion, unity and unite the various ethnic groups in the country. But unfortunately Government has not done enough to promote national cohesion whether in the national management of federal political power, appointments or in evolving a national strategy to deal with the menace of herdsmen. The Government must evolve the right strategy to contain all these as quickly as possible.