Self reliance? Go to Daniel and be wise by Samson Omolólúwaléyìn Òkúlàjà

For a reasonable time now, I have decided not to write or say anything about my mentor, the former Governor of Ogun State, His Excellency, Gbenga Justus Daniel. My reason is simple: Ogun State politics is so flammable that one needs to be very careful in one’s thoughts and words, especially for infants like us.

Nevertheless, Otunba’s recent interview is too rich to be ignored by anybody whose desire is the development of our nation.

I would not have bothered to write this essay if Otunba is a fanfaronade who is only being mouthy, showing off, and just playing to the gallery; I am writing because we are talking here of a man who practices what he says.

While the intention of this write-up is not to run anybody down, I am of the opinion that we must give credit where credit is due and boldly highlight positive moves wherever we might have seen them with a view to learning from them for our collective development.

The first thing His Excellency said that tickled me was the need to be self-reliant in our consumption. Otunba emphasised this when he unequivocally stressed that we must depend on whatever we can produce locally if we must grow. I will not go into the nitty-gritty of this, as it is self-explanatory. My target here is to showcase how the man of his word practiced his belief in office.

From the blast of the whistle, OGD left nobody in doubt about the thrust of his government. He was so enthusiastic about it that within his first hundred days in office, his mission of self-reliance was conspicuously displayed. What did Asoludero do? He immediately called for the training of our teeming jobless youths in different vocations.

He reopened our farm settlements for training in agriculture and engaged professionals to train our youths in different vocations like painting and the production of paints. He was so committed to this program that within his first hundred days in office, all the painting work in the face lifting of the Governor’s Office at Oke-Mosan was not only done by the graduates from his training program; shock was that all the paints used were also products from the same school. We then saw here a governor who made jobless youths employers of labour within his first hundred days in office because he believed in self-reliance.

If this would not convince you what about his Ogun State Road Maintenance Agency ( OGROMA)? Again His Excellency with his cabinet members came up with OGROMA as our local agency for road maintenance in lieu of what used to be jumbo contracts to the foreign companies.

Within few months into his administration, OGROMA was already on our roads, filling potholes and marking our roads for safety purposes. We no longer depended on Julius Berger to do this for us; we were able to generate work for our teeming youths with what we had, we could also conserve foreign exchange that could have been used to pay the expatriates in the form of capital flight.

If that was what OGROMA all about, we could not have been so proud of it today. The real fulfilment was being living witnesses to how a nation could move from nothing to something if it premised its growth on the need for self-reliance.

Amazing !!! Within a few months into its operations, OGROMA, which started with wheelbarrows, shovels, diggers, and brooms, had metamorphosed into an agency with bitumen trucks. It had quickly gained the experience. Expertise and confidence are needed for road construction. In our very own eyes, the agency mapped out the plan to dualise Abeokuta/Shagamu Road. Really? Could it? Were the questions on everyone’s lips?

The man at the helm of affairs was determined to convince us that the only ingredient of development is the zeal to be self reliant. One step after the other OGROMA miraculously completed the dualisation of the road with streetlight and other safety devices in time. I need not tell us how much Government would have saved here comparing it to contracting out the same to foreign companies.

But that is not the beauty of this experiment; the icing sugar on the cake here is the conviction that we can do it if we dreamt it. His critics, dwarfed by his feat, then began to talk about the quality of the road; they failed to see this great motion with movement from dependence on foreigners to our self-reliance.

To his critics, it does not matter now if we should liquidate ourselves for foreign currency; it does not matter to them if our youths are jobless as foreigners pick their jobs. They would rather not start at all because of the fear of quality and remain perpetually dependent on foreign companies. We are where we are today because we produce leaders who lack confidence in our capacity.

For more than a decade now l have been living in Germany, a Country that pride itself in the best roads in the World; l have seen monsters spraying bitumen like rainstorm and downpour; l have equally seen companies working with shovels and wheelbarrows the way OGROMA started especially in the “Straße and Gasse”, what l am yet to see is a foreign company constructing road in Germany.

I have talked about reopening of our farm settlements for training above but Otunba Gbenga Daniel went extra mile; he remains till today the only Executive Governor in the State that mechanised agriculture for our collective benefits.

Under him, tens of tractors were bought and distributed to the farm settlements throughout the state. The mission here was self-sufficiency in what we eat. Under him, Ogun State indigenes would just write a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture via tractor managers in each Farm settlement requesting for tractors on their farms. Marvellous! Easy does it!! Too comfortable to be true? Doubt it not, that is what you experience when the administration of a land is in the hands of the people who crave self-reliance.

OGD stands out; he is not being mouthy in his proposal; he has done it before successfully. Until we begin to rely on ourselves for our needs, we shall continue to be a consuming nation with different garbage in our ports. Our companies will go into total comatose as we are now experiencing; our streets will be flooded with jobless youths; there will be pressure on Naira, and the devaluation will go haywire and unabated; the end effect shall be a laughable nation that is only big for nothing. OGD is right, yes, he is; oh you Nigerian leaders, go to Daniel and be wise… love and hugs.

Samson Omolólúwaléyìn Òkúlàjà (Flash). 2nd December,2020.