Ondo State governor, Dr Olusegun Mimiko, recently spoke with a group of journalists in Akure, where he X-rayed his 17 months in office. Yinka Oladoyinbo was there. Excerpts:
How have things been in the last one year?
They have been challenging and, at the same time, exciting. You know the circumstances in which we came in; we were confronted with challenges of local government elections, which we said were not properly conducted and we also had the challenge of an initially hostile House of Assembly and, of course, the challenge of the expectations of our people. Before we came on board, everybody believed that ‘’whenever Mimiko comes on board, even if your wife has been barren for 20 years, he has a magic wand .’’ So, we had a challenge of such proportions. And I must thank God that, down the line, we have been able to prove again that our people are people of reasonable expectations, they know the limitations of government and appreciate the little honest effort being made to improve their lives.
As a medical doctor, what informed the policy thrust of your administration in the health sector of the state?
When we came on board, we identified our point of intervention that would have maximum impact on the lives of our people. We looked at the vulnerable groups in the society and we picked the pregnant women and children under five years. You are all aware of the fact that Nigeria has the unenviable record of being the country with the largest maternal mortality rate in the world and this, in our opinion, is very unacceptable and must be reversed.
Before our intervention, we carried out a base-line survey and we went on facility tours all over the state. The first shock we had was that only 16 per cent of pregnant mothers who registered with health facilities ended up giving birth in those places, meaning that 84 per cent are out there whom we cannot track. So, whatever statistics is based on such information cannot be correct; if only 16 per cent eventually give birth, it means that whatever mortality rate you are calculating will be on the 16 per cent, which will be a very far cry from the real situation on ground. We have, for so long, relied on external bodies for planning data and we thought that ‘’look, we need this base line study to know where we are and to be able to measure our intervention down the line, we said that the best way to do it is to ensure that every maternal death is registered in the state and we came up with the confidential enquiry into maternal death. Simply put, it means any death of a pregnant woman must be reported ; otherwise,there will be sanctions ranging from fines to jail terms, or even the closing down of health facilities which refuse to report such deaths.
One big achievement of your administration is the Mother and Child Hospital, can you give us more insight into the operations of the hospital?
The Mother and Child Hospital is part of our integrated maternal and infant care programme, which starts from primary care level. As a matter of fact, we’ve taken care of community and household levels. In our pilot programme, all pregnant women got registered and we have health personnel who we designate as health rangers. A health ranger is allocated to a group of 50 pregnant women; they are people who are equipped to take care of emergency situations at the home level, but they visit the pregnant women allocated to them at home, interface with them, educate them on nutrition, anti-natal care, what to do in case of emergency, and so on. Of course, this also includes improvement of health care facilities and designated health facilities allocated to women. We have also tried to use information technology to actually facilitate health care; each of these pregnant women is armed with a mobile phone, belongs to a caller user group. She has free access to a health ranger, midwife, doctor and health facility.
The Mother and Child Hospital is a referral centre. It is supposed to take care of complicated cases that cannot be handled at the primary level and, to some extent, secondary facility level. So, we have to establish a whole Mother and Child Hospital dedicated entirely to our mothers and children and under our social and democratic responsibility, health care is free of charge. Yes, the hospital is state-of- the-art; I usually boast that if you go anywhere in the world, you can’t have better facilities than we have here.Those down the ladder of socio-economic struggle in this place also deserve good things, so we have state of the art medical equipment, obstetricians, and a good environment, but they are free of charge. The whole idea is to arrest maternal death at the most critical stage. There is just a thin line between life and death, when you need skilled hands to make decisions and choices that would determine whether the woman lives or not.
What are the moves being made to change the status of Ondo State from a rural to a developed state?
Let me just say this, Ondo State is not a rural state; the state has rural population like any other state. For so long in this country, we have been the state that produced the manpower in this country. Look at the Nigerian Merit Award winners up till now; the majority of them are Ondo State indigenes. Ondo State people are professionals, but the problem with this state is that we produce the professionals and they service other climes, but that is changing now and we are attracting our professionals back home. Look, in terms of the opportunities we have, people have said ‘let’s find empirical evidence for it’, but in terms of quality manpower, we probably have the best and highest in this country.
In terms of natural resources endowment, we are probably second to none in this country. What we need is to put all of these together and that is what we are doing. It is like you want to cook. What do you like? You like pepper soup and have all the ingredients. All you need is put all of these together and you have an exciting pepper soup. We have all the ingredients to make Ondo State the number one state in the country. Let us talk about rural development. We have our own share of rural population, and, for so long, government had pretended that people in the rural areas did not really matter. But I was at a seminar recently when people said that for every man who eats food in Nigeria, we are being subsidised by the rural community because if they actually charge the labour cost for the food they produce, we will not be able to afford it.What we have done actually is to put together a programme that will ensure that the people take over their own development and they take ownership of programmes and projects that will develop their capacity. That is what we call 3Is initiative. These I’s stand for infrastructure, industry and institutions in the rural areas.
This is exactly what we are doing in our pilot programmes in 80 communities. We tried to allow people to identify their priority projects and we have executed 80 of such projects in the areas of health facilities, markets, cottage industry, and town halls all over and now. We are in 150 communities in the state, meaning that we are back in those 80 pilot communities to build the capacity of the existing governance institutions and train them in financial management and project assessment and all those 80 communities now take up the project themselves and execute them, with technical backing from the state government. It has been an exciting and impactfulexperience.
What is the policy thrust of your administration on education?
As I said, we’ve been the breeding house of quality education or manpower in Nigeria, but I must confess that in the last few years, we have not been happy with the products of our schools, the state of the schools and the level of incentives for teachers, among others. Therefore, our focus is to ensure that we continue to produce globally-competitive students out of our institutions. It is also very important to ensure that socio-economic factors do not deprive people of quality education. As it is today, public schools can no longer compete and what we are doing is to re-create our public schools. We are coming up with what we call mega-schools at the primary level and these are the state-of-the-earth schools. For instance, we have 1,140 primary schools in Ondo State, some of them merely in name, so the first mega school we are building in Akure will have a population of 1,250 pupils, meaning that five schools will collapse into one school.
So, are you planning to reduce the number of schools?
Yes, we are reducing the number by building one real school with state –of-the-art equipment and this is targeted at children who cannot afford private institutions. I hope we won’t run into problems of people withdrawing their children from private schools to public institutions. In fact, at the site of the school located in the Iro area of Akure, there used to be about three schools there with a combined population of 400 or so. The Caring Heart Mega School we are building, which is well under way, is going to have 1,250 students. That means about five, six schools have collapsed into the mega school. But the whole idea is to have proper schools with administrative structures, with good offices for the teacher, arts rooms, resource centre, sporting facilities, information communications technology (ICT) centre, computers, laboratories, so that those children can, from the beginning, be in the position to compete with their mates all over the world. We hope that they will graduate into our secondary academy. In the first phase, we are hoping to build nine of state-of-the-art secondary academies. The public schools have broken down completely.
Should we expect the same treatment for secondary schools, because there are so many of them?
In secondary schools, in terms of number, they are not even up to that. What we want to do in secondary schools is to rehabilitate the facilities that exist in the first phase. We hope that we will be able to start on three senior academies for secondary schools and rehabilitate the existing facilities. If we do a study, there is hardly anybody in our Public Schools that gain admission into the University in Nigeria to read Medicine or Engineering, most of them come from private schools because the public schools have no laboratories. They have been run down. So we are improving on facilities and incentives to teachers and that informed the approval and payment of 27.5 % increment to our teachers despite the fact that we came on board when the state revenue was low.
http://www.tribune.com.ng/index.php/politics/9024-ondo-state-ll-lead-others-in-the-next-three-years
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