Mr Semiu Okanlawon, a journalist, is Director of Bureau of Communications and Strategy in the office of the Osun State Governor. He is as such the spokesperson to the governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola. In this interview with WALE ABIODUN, he opens up on various issues including the administration of Governor Aregbesola.
What is the experience like as the Director, Bureau of Communications and strategy, office of the governor, State of Osun?
It is a pleasure working in my state and we are doing it with all the commitment required. I have been a journalist all my life. I am still a journalist. Apart from that, I am also a strategist. It has been three years down the lane; it has been quite interesting experience in the area of informing the people adequately about the various policies and programmes of the administration.
As a professional journalist, what are the challenges of dealing with journalists vis a vis carrying out your roles as the image maker of the Osun governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola?
Journalists must do their work and I must also do my work. So far, it has been a kind of symbiotic relationship. I have been a journalist. I am still one. I know that journalists must report it as it is and I must also say it as it is. I must do my own in such a way that my colleagues will be able to see the essence of what the government is doing. It is my duty to communicate with my colleagues, journalists who are the means through which we communicate to the mass of the people. I help my professional colleagues to do their jobs better by providing
information as at when due. We ensure that the information is passed in a positive manner to aid development. You remember what we call developmental journalism. There can never be development if the activities of the government are communicated in a negative manner. Governor Aregbesola understands and sees the nexus between politics and communication. He is a communication and political strategist aside being an engineer.
Let’s talk about the various developmental agenda of Governor Aregbesola?
When you are talking about development, we need to understand what we mean by development. Development for whom and for what? My governor also believes that there is a need for physical developmental infrastructures like good roads and good buildings. Physical infrastructures are the things we can see with our eyes. They are tangibles. But the foundations of physical structures are the intangibles. Things that ordinarily you will not see them with your eyes. The society requires them to be able to function well. The governor believes that if you don’t develop an individual, the person, the physical infrastructures are a waste. You have to build the mind of man to be able to utilise adequately the infrastructures you are putting in place. If you have a five-star hotel in a community dominated by peasant farmers and you are having high scrapers everywhere, who are the people that are going to use it? Of course, foreigners are going to use such facilities, like people that come for holidays. And the highest your sons and daughter can be in those facilities is either cleaners or cooks. It will be difficult to get a manager because such position requires intellectual ability. If you don’t equip your own people, they will be ill-placed to function in such society. Osun is a rural area; we are in a hurry to develop it. This is translating to physical infrastructures we are witnessing today.
Before that we have been building the mind of the people. It is from the mind that you are building the structures. At the end of the day, that is when you will say development is not misplaced. The people must be economically positioned to be able to contribute to the economic development of the society. We need to develop the mind first. That is why we came up with the issue of our education. In modern day, if you don’t have education, you are badly placed to function well in the society. In the past up to fifty percent of our students were
unable to secure admission into the higher institutions, despite the large number of students that graduate from our secondary schools yearly. This is as a result of poor performance. That was why we organised education summit which is the foundation of what we are doing in the educational sector now. What we are doing in the educational sector like reclassifying schools, providing buildings in our schools, training and retraining teachers, recruiting new set of teachers and motivating the teaching personnel. We are creating a totally new
environment from what we met on ground. Whatever we are doing today is as a result of economic summit that was chaired by Professor Wole Soyinka. In education, we have also done things that look like extra curriculum activities like Omoluabi for both boys and girls. We give them training that make them total men and make them people who understand cooperation and integration. We also have the Youths empowering scheme, which has become a household name in Nigeria emanated from Osun. The Federal Government had no choice rather than to copy it. The World Bank commended it that it is a noble programme.
Within the first 100 days we employ 20,000 youths. When we started this programme people were criticising it that we are using graduates to cut grasses. These are social services. Go abroad. Who are the people doing these jobs? We also have what we called Oyes-tech which is a training scheme for another set of 20,000 youths. They are being trained with a Ghanaian company on how to handle technology devices like phones, ipad and TV, and so on. We also have what we call Omoluabi Garment factory in Osun. This came out of our initiative of the school uniform. We asked the company to come and sew the uniforms in Osun that led to the creation of the factory in Osun. This company has employed over 3,000 youths from Osun and the company is also getting contracts from outside the country. On agriculture, we set up what we call Oloba cattle ranch. We even sent 20 of our youths to Germany to study the modern way of rearing animals.
Some stakeholders are saying that merging of schools is not in the best interest of the students, that students now walk extra miles to their schools. What is your reaction to this?
The students in the high school have grown up and they are already near higher institutions. We have elementary, middle and the high schools in the new reclassification programme. We merge these schools to save resources. Some of these schools in the past don’t have more than 50 students. We now said it is better to have these schools concentrated in one place with
facilities in place for the use of these people. We are building 100 elementary schools, 50 middle schools and 20 high schools. Each of our school is a combination of schools. One elementary school will take 800 to 1,000 pupils and one high school will take up to 3,000. People of Osun are well informed now. They are liberated and nobody can pull wool on their faces now.
On the Opon Imo, some stakeholders are saying that laptops promised students are yet to go round. What is your reaction to this?
The journey of one thousand years starts with one step. Before the administration of Aregbesola, was there any computer in any school? But we came up with this idea. It is a project in process and the process is ongoing. I know that nothing less than 20,000 have been distributed to the students. We said we would get 50,000 from the manufacturer while the remaining 100,000 will be manufactured in Osun. We want industries to spring up in Osun.
Some stakeholders in the state are saying that the current administration in Osun is just copying programmes from Lagos without considering the peculiarity of the state, like the issue of LCDAs. What is your view on this?
When you talk about copying things from Lagos, you have to know that the governor in Osun has been part of the government in Lagos. The government in Osun is a product of political structure in Lagos. The story of modern Lagos will not be complete without mentioning the name of Rauf Aregbesola. By applying the system of Lagos we have moved from N300million IGR to N1.7 billion through blocking the loopholes. If they say we are copying, copying is good.
Source: DailyNewsWatch
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