Dr. Olusegun Mimiko

Dr Mimiko speaks on why he wants to lead the people of Ondo state to greater heights:

“You go to a town of 4,000 people, a government would come there, you see one miserable looking borehole there as sign of their achievement, yet in the vicinity you have at least 10 perennial streams. All you need is the technical know-how, get a technical man, get the community to contribute their sweat, and create a dam for them, which they will own…They don’t want a man that would go there and make his brother chief of staff, make his wife’s sister SA Protocol, and make his son a key figure on the revenue in the state. They are looking for character and experience, like I have.”

The Interview in full: Ondo is looking for someone to trust, says Mimiko by Idowu Ajanaku Guardian

HOW have you merged your acceptability with your structure on ground in Ondo State?

Some people have asked me how a relatively unknown party be the vehicle to deliver a governor within the time frame. We are present in every village, town and hamlets in Ondo. I want to say that LP is bigger than PDP and the other parties put together in Ondo. We have structures on ground, functional structures that can be the machinery for redeeming of votes.

What are your chances against the incumbent?

Incumbency carries its own inherent encumbrance. You have a governor who has been there for almost four years so you can tackle him on the basis of what he’s been able to achieve. So to us that has been positive. It is a question of looking at the approximate resources that has accrued to this state, measure that against what is on ground.

The question is whether this is the type of performance that you desire or that will take your state out of the doldrums. Because of the support from the people, their passion for change will upset whatever incumbency advantages the government has. We will also exploit the incumbency advantages that would accrue to us because we are now asking people to assess his reforms.

Do you see rigging as a problem?

There are different levels of rigging, one is the rigging that take place at the polling booth or somebody sensing that his party has not performed very well, carries the box and runs away hoping that INEC would cancel the result of that particular unit. We have men on ground for each polling booth, we will inform people to ensure that nobody does anything funny. I must say that for an unpopular incumbent that we have in Ondo, it is a no-win situation.

After you are left the PDP, why didn’t you go back to the AD that became Action Congress?

We left AD for PDP because the leadership of AD then in the state sabotaged the internal mechanism for change. When we decided that the PDP was no platform to be used again, it was because the leadership of the party did not hide the intention that this was a personal estate. They made no pretension about the fact that they would not even provide a level paying ground within PDP in Ondo. And when we decided that was not the platform to use, we went for a party that we can use without encumbrances and crisis of people who will now say that we came to hijack the party. We wanted a party that had a clear progressive credential and that was why we went to LP.

Why do you want to govern Ondo?

I want to provide leadership, the type of leadership that would motivate the people to take possession of their own development, a leadership that would be able to drive a paradigm shift.

In development, it would take us 2,000 years to be able to meet up with even the least developed European countries. We do unorthodox things in unorthodox ways; we must drive development in some new ways.

Government has to show a presence. There is no single street in Ondo, no matter how far-flung that does not have a street landlord association that is yearning for development or that is contributing little money to clean their street. We want to scheme one unorthodox way of mobilising our people. But you need credibility. Once you have credibility, the sky is your limit, people will be making sacrifices, yet they would be happy because they would know that they are working for themselves.

You go to a town of 4,000 people, a government would come there, you see one miserable looking borehole there as sign of their achievement, yet in the vicinity you have at least 10 perennial streams. All you need is the technical know-how, get a technical man, get the community to contribute their sweat, and create a dam for them, which they will own.

A minimum of 84 mini-water works will be built to provide water for communities in the next four years and they will owned by the communities, run by them. We will have dams for dry season farming and once the people believe in you and your leadership, they will be ready to assist and you put funds on ground coupled with technical know-how and mobilise them, the sky is the limit.

I have the unique advantage that probably other contestants don’t have. I have been in and out of government almost all my adult life. Ondo people want a man that they know, that would not let them down or compromise their interests. They don’t want a man that would go there and make his brother chief of staff, make his wife’s sister SA Protocol, and make his son a key figure on the revenue in the state. They are looking for character and experience, like I have.

What I want to offer the state is unique and my hope is that eventually it would serve as a model for rapid development in Nigeria because the way we are going about it, we’ll never get there.

I was in Igbokoda the people still use wood to smoke fish. I told them, ‘this is what your progenitors and forbears used, we need to adapt technology to our own use.’ I have seen solar dryer, it is no rocket science, it is about the basic needs of our people. But we must be ready to adapt to adapt new technology to our needs.

Government has a responsibility to intervene directly in some critical areas. You need to carry everybody along. Until you carry everybody along in the development of the state, you won’t get the change. I want policies that would change the lives of the people. By our own thinking today, what is absolutely impossible, make it possible.

Within the contest of riverine areas in Ondo, there would be great infrastructure, which is massive dredging and land filling to create new cities. We have OSOMPADEC, our own version of NDDC. About 40 per cent of derivation fund goes to that. I told them at Igbokoda that in my first term, 45 per cent would go there. I’ve not told them what I would do with the five per cent. The five per cent would be for sand filling.

We have incredible opportunity in oil and gas. British gas is bringing 18 billion, but we are going to embark on aggressive and appropriate training of indigenes of those communities to be part of the middle level scheme that is going on. In four years we want them to be involved in the middle level crew, hoping that in eight years, the highest level of crew in those companies will be from the state. This is what I see as solution to the problem of the people.

There is no investment in infrastructure, I won’t go shouting around the place saying ‘I’m looking for investors.’ They would come.