Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom in this interview with ADEOLA BALOGUN and ENIOLA AKINKUOTU argues why governors should not shy away from taking loans and other sundry issues
You recently said you were not comfortable with the use of the state’s private jet and you were thinking of selling it off. Have you done that?
I have heard a lot about selling or not selling the plane. But let me say something. If I abandoned the business approach to governance and came in with a showmanship approach, I would have scored cheap political points but at what cost? If we look at today, our domestic airline business doesn’t favour any serious businessman. That is why you see in Nigeria, the number of private jets is higher than the number of factories. You can’t be a businessman and cope with the structure of our domestic airline business. It will still take us some time because we are a developing nation. Today, we move around a lot. Sometimes investors come and just stay in Lagos and tell you to come and meet them there. They will tell you they cannot come to Akwa Ibom and a lot of this comes at a short notice. Most of these domestic airlines do not have enough to cover Nigeria. So, what you would resort to could cost more. If you look at the cost of hiring a flight, because you must deliver, that cost is far more expensive than what it takes to maintain an airplane that you can use at anytime. Mind you, there is already a sum cost. It is only the marginal cost that will make a difference. The question is, what is that marginal cost compared to the cost of hiring and using commercial flights? So, why go the populist way and hurt the system and the economy that is down already. And everything in terms of hiring domestic flight requires immediate payment. Whereas, even this one, if I don’t have money, the people maintaining it will continue to do so knowing that I can pay in arrears and that is what we do. So, that is why the plane is very essential and it is meant for the government. Any business without a credit option is not a good one. And that is why the plane is so essential now. It is for the government and not for the governor. As I am talking to you now, with the meagre resources that we have, we are building a second runway. It will serve as a taxiway but in case of an emergency on the first runway, any plane can land on the second one. These are contingency plans that you make in businesses. Because once you open the MR way and start the cargo business, no one wants to hear that you have closed the airport for two weeks. Heathrow which is the gateway to the financial world has never been closed down for two weeks before. If you close Heathrow for two hours, 1,000 planes will be in the air looking for where to land. Even in London they have other airports. It is either you land in Luton, London City, Gatwick or any other one. They have so many international airports. In Lagos, there is just one but it has two runways. In Abuja, there is only one runway. The taxiway cannot land even a small airplane except it is an emergency landing.
There is fuel scarcity now. If you were to advise President Muhammadu Buhari today, what would you tell him?
Let me tell you why we are experiencing fuel scarcity today. A cargo costs about $26.5m. Today, what is the position of our reserves? And the Western world has drawn a line. So, for instance, if Nigeria goes below $30bn in foreign reserve, we are on the redline; so we must stay on 30 or above 30. So, the question now is, at the rate of consumption today and the leakages we have in terms of all these imported products, can our exchange rate sustain this at a crude oil price of $40 to a barrel. Today as a governor, I am running at 20 per cent or less of what we used to run when the price of crude oil was $128 and meanwhile, the cost structure is even higher. So, extrapolate and know where we are operating from. And you cannot bring most of those costs down because it may spell political doom for you. So, the problem today is scarcity of foreign exchange to actually cater for this. If I was in a position to take a decision today, I would take a two-pronged approach. Number one, the Federal Government has no business running a refinery. We need to create an enabling environment for the private sector. As a governor today, I have concluded everything with two private investors in refineries. I just need some papers between the NNPC, DPR and others for them to come and run. And they don’t have a problem selling because if we deregulate the market, we can easily sell. Secondly, I don’t see any reason why as the sixth largest producer of oil, we cannot have a hub. For example, there is a very tiny island that is called Tenerife. It is the coast of Morocco but it belongs to Spain. It is not an African country. But when you are talking about efficiency in aviation kerosene service, every airline stops at Tenerife to refuel before crossing the Atlantic Ocean because there is no way you will spend less than seven hours across the Atlantic. So, a lot of people, especially those using smaller planes, stop at Tenerife of Cape Verde and the government has no business running that kind of things. So, people like us should be encouraged to bring in investors and open refineries everywhere. We will create a hub where everybody will be stopping to refuel because of our location. That is why the deep-sea port we are building is being built as a transhipment port because Nigeria must take its rightful place. We can tranship the entire Gulf of Guinea because of the location of my state by the Gulf of Guinea. How can we the sixth largest producer of oil and every day, we keep talking about Warri, Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries? How many years can we do this for?
Free the market and there will be employment. A lot of us that were in the financial services still miss Chukwuma Soludo. He and former President Olusegun Obasanjo recreated the middle class. I have done both investment and consumer banking. Back then, a young manager in your office would walk across to the other side and pick up a Honda Accord and issue a post-dated cheque and they would honour it. That created a middle class. There is no economy in the world that can expand when you don’t have the consumer market because that is the bulk of expansion of our economy. That is what will stimulate the Small and Medium Enterprises. There must be a consumer market. The consumer market today is dead. Americans live the life of 2017 in 2015. We like cash and carry too much but we don’t need that. Let us free the market. Let us encourage consumer credit. The market won’t crash.
Is it true that former governor Godswill Akpabio still lives in the presidential wing of the Government House and is that why you have refused to move in since you assumed office six months ago?
My predecessor is in Abuja. It’s just politicians trying to run down somebody. Before he (Akpabio) became governor, he was MD of Emis Telecoms Company. Immediately I became a government official, everything I had acquired while in the private sector, it seemed it had turned to government property. I bought my property in Parkview in October 1999. At age 35, I was sitting on the boards of four corporate bodies, profit making companies. When I left the private sector, I was already a group director. There is no group director in financial services that earns less than $1m but you will be shocked to go on the Internet and see all sorts. One of the houses on the Internet that they claimed I used government money to build is where I have been staying since I became SSG. Was it a miracle that the house transformed into a different thing for me to live? Secondly, if you go to my father’s compound, the foundation was laid in 1953 and I come from a place where they do not allow a young man to marry if he doesn’t have a house. That was our practice. So, my father had a very good house. The only thing we did was to renovate and we are six children in my family. If you have a child that at 34 was on the board of different companies and at 40, was already on the board of large conglomerates. (I was in charge of investor relations in this country for good nine years. I was in charge of foreign subsidiaries of all Zenith groups until I left. So, even if I didn’t do anything, the sitting allowance, the director allowance, the out of pocket expenses you get for one year can train your whole family. My mother is late but my father lives in Lagos. If I had left my father’s house the way it was, they would have said look at this man, he is a banker, he cannot even clear his father’s compound. So, I cleared my father’s compound in January and expanded the chapel and made it look modern and that was the hall I used for my inauguration. I expanded the sitting room and four bedrooms and I did that before I became a governor in January. But they said on the Internet that I spent N6.3bn to build a house. As exposed as I am, is it in the village that I would build that kind of house? And people who are educated believe that? They said I built it in four months. Even what they said about the former governor is a lie. This is someone who came in as the MD of Emis telecoms. So, why should he come and live in government house? Now that we are in a different party, the President and his deputy don’t come as they used to. When we were in the ruling party, if you came to my state, you would not want to leave the same day. The man is in Abuja and where he lives is far better than the Government House. The Government House that has cameras everywhere! Is that where a man will come to live?
The reason I have not moved into the Government House is simple. You see, every government has a phase. I took an oath of office that I will never put my interest above the interest of the people. I inherited a situation in a country where I am running with 20 per cent of what used to be with the cost structure of $140 per barrel. Our government house was renovated by Julius Berger and it is not cheap. If you want a WC, they will go and manufacture it in Germany and import it. The one they wanted to make for me was shaped like an egg but I told them that I have bigger problems. Can you keep this? I have a house that I live in. I started life quite early. By 21, I had graduated from the University of Lagos and I started with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Things were good. I have slept in the best hotels. There is no plane that I have not flown in.
What of the N18,000 minimum wage that some governors came out to say they can no longer pay, are you not part of them?
I am already paying that, so I have not done any research on that. You know we run a unitary system even though we are all federating units. So, what I have been able to take care of is not a problem, so I can’t solve a problem when there is no problem. You see, time is precious; for some of us, we don’t want to be distracted. So if I have solved that problem, let me move over to another problem. I have series of problems as a governor.
Like?
Paucity of funds.
But you recently made a gift of N2m and a house each to members of the state football team and yet your commissioners are complaining of paucity of funds.
Reward and gifts are not the same thing; you must differentiate between the two. Number two, if you are building a society where there are young people, they must have something they are looking up to. Reward can never be taken as a gift. You reward hardwork and the question now is that, what social profit are you making out of that? The social profit I am making is that I have just launched a social rebirth, telling my people that they must rise to realise their potential. So if people have potential in sports and you don’t encourage them, it means that something is wrong. This thing you are calling a gift, if you go to the UK today, somebody who never attended a college will be earning 200,000 pounds a week, do you call that a gift or reward for success? Today, I am setting up 10 sports centres across the 10 federal constituencies in the state. I want people to look at sports as an avenue of also earning a living. I am preaching to my people that they must earn a living instead of begging for a living. There are certain people even if you put them in a classroom with the best facilities, their legs are eager to run. So the brain is not adapting to what you are showing them on the slide. The legs of those people want tartan tracks, so put them on tartan tracks and encourage them. So that is actually what we are doing. What we did was not a gift but reward for success; it was a reward for social profit and social impartation.
You are a member of the panel looking into the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, how far have you gone?
We are not probing; we are to look into the activities of the excess crude account and other revenue generating units. You know, we are governors, we are to steer the ship; we are not passengers. So what we did was that we charted a course, giving a direction. If you are the captain of the ship, you can not be the mechanic at the same time. But as the captain, you discover where you need an engineer and so on. That is why we employed the services of consultants; and they are working. We gave them timeline, when they finish, they will advise us on what to do for a way forward.
Is it true that the excess crude account is empty as one of your colleagues claimed?
I don’t say things when I don’t have facts. Because of my position as governor, I should say things based on facts, so I don’t have facts to say anything on that. Let me say something, we are running an executive system of governance and it is only the chief executive that should give the financial condition of what is happening in governance and we have only one chief executive which is the president of the country, So, I can’t speak on the purse of the country when I am not the president. Why do you want me to take up the job of the chief executive when I am a governor?
It means you never liked the way your colleague was saying things about the excess crude account?
I don’t know; I didn’t hear it. At times, we can be so busy to even read the papers. So it could be the day that it was reported that I was very busy, so I don’t know. It could have even been on a Sunday because on a Sunday, I must have been in church. But what I know is, it is the responsibility of the chief executive to give the financial condition of any body; be it public, be it private and I am not the chief executive of Nigeria. The chief executive of Nigeria is the President; when time comes, he will give the financial condition of the federation.
It is said that governors have killed local governments, so in your own case, do you also collect their allocation?
The answer is no. You know, we have the federal, the state and the local governments. In my place, we don’t kill local governments. Local governments function very well in my state, exceptionally well. If you go around some states, there are many where local governments have not paid primary school teachers and local government employees for months. We are not owing even one day salary. The only thing some of them might complain about might be leave allowance and so on but we are paying salaries. As a governor, I have never attended any Joint Allocation Committee meeting. I have never even asked for the statement of the joint account of the local governments. We don’t intervene in most of the things that they do.
Why is it that this is the time that you are renovating your house in the village?
At times you have to live up to your responsibility but the question is the source of funding. Let me give you an example of what happens in Africa, if your daughter wants to get married, you would not put your visitors in your father’s house that was probably built in 1950 because it would not match your status. You are talking to somebody who had been in the corporate world for over 26 years who is an international figure, who speaks in international conferences all over the globe and you are giving him a responsibility to be a governor. If he refuses to renovate the foundation of his father’s house, then something is wrong. If I refuse to renovate the place now, and leave it the way it was, you will think that I am stingy since I came from bank. There is this misconception about bankers, that we only receive money, we don’t let it go. The renovation has nothing to do with the finances of the government. Since I became governor, I have been driving my private vehicle; I am living in my private house. So if I can have a house in Uyo, the state capital that is good enough for a governor to live, to do an extension of my father’s compound and do a four-bedroomed house that can actually contain some friends that come from all over the world, it is something that the governor needs no government money.
Are you not bothered that the time for the election rerun was not stated at the tribunal, or are you doing something secretly about that?
There is no secret in politics because politics is an open campaign. You are talking about rerun, all these things are in stages. The lower court is saying you should rerun election in 18 local governments, the appellate court might not say the same thing. But let me put one record straight here: if you put 2015 election on a scale in this country, Akwa Ibom State had one of the best elections. You know there is a clear difference between a satanic propaganda and God’s own agenda. So in Akwa Ibom, we are running God’s agenda, not satanic agenda. The satanic agenda is what you are hearing. That aside, be rest assured that with the advent of democracy in Nigeria, PDP in Akwa Ibom is like a religion. On a Sunday, a young lady who goes out there to do praise worship, instead of saying praise the Lord, she says PDP! So no matter what you do, once they see PDP in the ballot paper, they will not remember any other party. No matter how many times you do rerun, even if it is 10 times, it is the PDP that will carry it.
But legally, don’t you think that your emergence as governor is defective when only 13 out of 31 local governments voted for you?
Let me even follow you on your political arithmetic; you know there are some states in this country with only eight local governments; assuming I had 13 local governments, the question is, what is the strength of other political parties in the 13 local governments? If you have 13 things and out of that 13, you collected about 96 per cent in all, what would that be?
But legally…
There is no legal thing here. If you listened to those who sat at the tribunal, they pronounced that Udom Emmanuel remains governor of Akwa Ibom State, so what legal thing are you talking about? The legal people have pronounced, so what else are you trying to say?
Your predecessor said it was his wife that discovered you, how do you still feel about that?
He didn’t say so. You are still coming back to the same thing. I say there is a difference between the satanic agenda and God’s own agenda. The former governor never said so. I was actually present at the meeting. The way we play politics in this country is not right; falsehood should never be part of how we run politics. I am the one that said so that womenfolk formed a formidable force in politics; go anywhere, women are more, be it church, market, name it. The First Lady of a state is the leader of women. What we said then, my wife and I, was that our number one campaigner and supporter was the governor’s wife and I still stand by it. If I am to count people that stood by us, it was the immediate governor’s wife. She went all the way out to campaign for us, why because we came on a platform of divine mandate.
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