Senator Foster Ogola (PDP) representing Bayelsa West Senatorial district Comprising Sagbama and Ekeremor Local governments said the election in Bayelsa State was relatively peaceful on the day. The excited Senator spoke to African Voice Newspaper’s Olubunmi Omoogun in his office recently.
African Voice: Talk us through the recently held supplementary election in Bayelsa?
Sen. Ogola: The PDP worked very hard and warned its supporters not to be violent and also warned against the use of thugs and ex militants. We won because the people have the right to choose and we won because the government of the PDP led by the Hon. Seriake Dickson, former member of the House of Representatives worked very hard from day one. From January 14, 2012 we have never rested. Not just because we wanted to be voted for for the second time but because we had a duty to impact on the people positively and we are determined to leave a good legacy so the first thing we did was to institutionalised the process of governance. Probity, accountability and transparency in governance. So every month we are the only state in Nigeria that was declaring how much we receive and how much we spend and the balance. Even out of that balance the first line of charge is the compulsory savings. We had a strategic savings and compulsory savings. The strategic savings the governor cannot go there and touch the money. Before we can spend out of it as a state government, the state House of Assembly must approve with two third majority for capital use in case we have falling income both from Federal government and Internally Generated Revenue. That is when the money is tampered with.
SECURITY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE.
We make security a cardinal project. Protecting lives and properties. We inherited a backlog of almost N500b. Some of the projects we cannot even see but we wiped off those debts by over N400b and without borrowing, officially the only borrowing we have done is N40b to construct our component of Federal Government partnership to construct an international airport in Bayelsa state. As at now as a government we have finished the runways but the parking space and the terminal building which are for the Federal govt have not been done although we have gone ahead to do part of their own by dredging insitu, an area bigger than Abuja international airport. They are just to provide concrete surface and then put the terminal building and the tower.
EDUCATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE.
We went again to declare an emergency on education and embark on infrastructure development on educational sector by building 25 model secondary schools compulsory from SS1 to SS3. You must be in the boarding, the principal, patrons and matrons must live there. Everything you can find in a secondary school in a developed world we have it there. We felt that the manpower capacity of the state was not good enough and so we embarked on another project called post graduate scholarship. I was the chairman and so we awarded over 1,000 scholarship. 21 of our students are in Lincoln University now. They are going into the 3rd year, we are at the threshold of all of them making distinction. Most of them have 4.0 CGPA. Then we embark on massive construction. In fact one of our campaign programmes was turning Bayelsa into a massive construction yard. If you go to Bayelsa you can see the facelift. And everything we are doing we have a spread. You will see health projects in Sagbama, Ekeremor, Nembe and even in the bigger LG like Southern Ijaw will always have an extra. That is the way we work. We established school of Agriculture but we believe not everybody studied science so we established school of Music and school of Fashion of international standard. We even have a drug store monitoring system with the name Late Dora Akunyili. We have almost completed the 500 bed hospital that is going to be an international diagnostic centre. We are the only government who have built 60 Doctor rooms for house-manship training and then doctors in training resting places within the FMC. We built another 250 within the 500 bed hospital referral centre where those working can work and rest because we believe in rest and work. We pay senior citizens N5,000 every month. You can see why people voted for us.
