ISSUES/POLICY: Power Is Responsibility (I)

Being the text of an addressed by the Osun Head of Service, Dr Olowogboyega Oyebade at the 2018 Civil Service Lecture and Award Ceremony at Aurora Event Center, Osogbo.

Ogbeni Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola, today is Tuesday.  In our Yoruba culture, it symbolizes victory.   Your successor will equally be sworn in on Tuesday 27th November, 2018. This type of coincidence does not just happen.  It simply means that it is God that is ordering your steps.  God is always proving His presence and touch in your life.  I join millions of your admirers and students to celebrate you today. Mr Governor!  For 8 years, you served as the head of State Government and the indisputable leader of the executive branch, you were saddled with the execution of state laws, alongside the responsibility of appointing state executive, diplomatic, regulatory, and judicial officers subject to the approval of the State House of Assembly members.  You had the powers to proclaim the State Assembly at the beginning of their legislative assignments and the sublime powers to dissolve them when their tenure expired.

You had the power of veto which could only be overridden by a two-thirds vote of the State Assembly. You had the powers to appoint all commissioners and advisers subject to the approval of the State House of Assembly.  You had the power to make executive orders that were grounded in Law.  You had the power to nominate the Chief judge of the Stateand all other Judges of the State High Courts, President of the State Customary Court of Appeal and all other Judges, Magistrates and Presidents and members of the Customary Courts, all in consultation with the House of Assembly and in some cases approved by the National Judicial Commission.  You have the powers to appoint the Attorney General, the Chief Law Officer of the State and the only such officer that has the power of nolleprosecui.  As Governor of this State, you had the power to grant pardons and reprieves to those having infractions with the law.  Equally, you had the power to approve death sentence passed on any condemned felon by courts of competent jurisdiction.  Yet, you were calm with power with the least appeal to the worst in us, including your detractors.

Ogbeni RaufAdesoji Aregbesola, the Constitution of Nigeria contains an ineligibility clause that forbids the Governor of a State (and all other executive officers) from simultaneously being a member of the State House of Assembly.  But you are the 27th member of the Osun State House of Assembly as you were gratuitously awarded the honour by all the members of the House at a special session.  By that honour, you are free to bear the title ‘HonourableAregbe’, except that you are not title-crazy. You taught all of us that nations are built by exemplary men and women and sustained by institutions that promote good governance and socio-economic development. Definitely not high-sounding titles.  My leader, you are that rare shining example of one such a person in our State of Osun.    Until you came, our State was in the woods.  I am happy to say that you are leaving a better legacy for posterity, a legacy of prosperity visible enough for all to see.  You are such a wonder.

OgbeniAregbe, no doubt, States are an important part of a country.  By the coincidence of our history, Osunis just not a State, but the capital city of Yoruba race.  As Governor, you witnessed and ruled side by side with two Ooni of Ife as a self-styled Oranmiyan.  It was an unusual coincidence.    However, I would like to emphasise the fact that you seized the tide of this challenge by the line and you gave it life. To start with, you approved without agitation official recognition of Yoruba traditional religion and you approved a public holiday to mark it officially.  That was the first time that history was created.  Second, you invoked a revolutionary cartography to re-draw the colonial map of the Yoruba nation wrongly drawn in 1884 to 1886 Berlin Conference that forced the Yoruba people in Ajase to be ceded erroneously to Republic of Benin.  You performed diplomatic functions by bringing them home, rehabilitated them culturally and economically.  You inspired them to dig into our science and today, through your efforts and encouragement our brothers in Ajase have invented new Yoruba alphabets that are our own.  That singular achieve is putting us on the voyage of self-discovery for the first time as a race.  You had travelled to them a couple of times.  You had encouraged economic ties with them.  You did not stop at that.  You have re-united the Yoruba people of the South West with their siblings in Kogi, Delta, Edo and Kwara States.  In your expansionist philosophy as a re-incarnated Oranmiyan, you wooed diplomatically the Yoruba people in Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Bahamas and the Oyotunji Yoruba Community in the United States of America.  As the helmsman, you caused to happen a socio-cultural and religious pilgrimage for all the Yoruba people in diaspora to come home to visit Ife, our ancestral home.  You simply named it ‘Ile LaboIsimiOko’ .

Ogbeni, your governorship did not happen by historical accident.  It came from men and women with vision and resolve to change the face of Osun and the cause of our dark history.  I salute Asiwaju Hammed Tinubu for this vision.  Your coming was a product of conscious statecraft.  It was not happenstance. Your commitment was always a work-in-progress in a State constantly in need of nurturing and re-invention.  You were always in a hurry to achieve development.  It is against this background that I humbly wish to remind you that  statecraft never stops and true nation-builder never rests because we are constantly facing up to new challenges. My leader, I hasten to declare that the challenges have just begun.  As our teacher, we will continue to be at your feet, doing the beats you apportion to us to move humanity further to civilization.  We are many in your school of leadership.  Leadership that is a responsibility.

First on the list of the challenges is the need to building a political entity which understands the past, present and future of this State with the tendencies of the left. History and practice had shown us that the tendencies of the left are more compatible with our history and culture.  Our dialectics favours symbiosis.  The secondchallenge taunting us as a race the need to building institutions that will strengthen our preferences as a race in terms of education, culture, economy and general re-orientation. You cannot be weary at all in the propagation of ‘Omoluabi’ ethos.  Our State and country need more sturdy handslike you in the helm of affairs.  You cannot rest now!

Since the time of Adam Smith, every serious nationalist and politician has come to know that the wealth of a nation is not based on the wealth and opulence of its rulers, but on the productivity and industry of its citizens. You have encouraged us on this path at every given moment. Just yesterday, many of us witnessed with you the graduands of Ijinle Heritage Academy in Lagos.  You sponsored some youths for training in traditional Yoruba dresses that are fast going into extinction.  Equally, you created quality time to witness their graduation ceremony.  By that you opened to them international routes to prosperity.  That had been your haul-mark. That was your usual tendency.  If not, how do I explain how you sent the first batch of over forty youths to Germany for six-month training in Agriculture without any of them being your relation?  How do I explain how you sent the second batch to the same training in Germany without any of them being your relation?  Ogbeni!  How do I explain how you sent the third batch to Germany for the same high-tech training in Agriculture without appeal to nominate any member of your family for such rare opportunities? Your breed is scarce.  And your generation should be cloned.  You voluntarily descended from all plutocratic principles by electing to stay permanently with the masses.  If not, you sponsored about two hundred medical students to Ukraine to study Medicine.  At least, two of them broke the national record of intellectualism in the field of Medicine in Ukraine.  Alas!  None of them was your relation. That was the first time such altruism was demonstrated by our leaders South of Sahara.    You created a new anchor for many youths from indigent homes to glue to life more abundant.  You continue to teach us that in today’s world, skills, industry, productivity, and competitiveness are the determinant factors of national greatness.  That is the summary of your interventions in our youths.  The various foreign investments you have attracted to our State continue to factor in your vision on these youths.   We are grateful.  You must not surrender to stress.  Obstacles are everywhere.  You cannot pass under obstacles.  You must jump over them.  This must be work-in progress.

Permit me sir to note that the operational environment in our country is challenging.  We have the challenge of poverty manifesting in various forms.  How do we explain a little slip, particularly as our people accept Greek gifts to compromise our hard-earned democracy?  The hunger in the land has always received your surgical knives.  Sir, we have the challenge of socio-economic inequalities, the challenge of an appropriate constitutional settlement, the challenge of building institutions for democracy and development; andthe challenge of leadership.

My leader, curiously, some people blame our problem on colonialism.  We blame our problems on historical legacies of colonial rule. Unknown to many people, there were few countries on the planet that did not have the influence of European colonizers brought upon them. There are just only ten countries that were never colonized by Europeans.They are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, Thailand, China, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Ethiopia.  Out of these countries, only Japan, China and possibly Iran can boast of development.  The rest of the countries not colonized are still poor.  Britain was once colonized.  The United States of America was once colonized. Yet, they are prosperous.   It is a hasty generalization to blame our under-development on colonialism.    Some observers blamed our challenge to military intervention or the incompetence of military men.  .  If the thesis was true, where do we place the contributions of Ramat Muhammed, Colonel Umar, EbituUkiwe, Dan Suleiman and of course NuhuRibadu?  It is a fact of history that the present President Buhariis the first and only Nigerian that got elected again into power, not because of his wealth, but on the account of his integrity.

You had once told us long time ago that the father and grand father of all crimes is poverty reflecting copiously in our socio-economic inequalities. You did not only identified the problem, you rose up stoutly to arrest it.  To smoothen the edge of this challenge, as a Governor, you developed social welfare safety nets to establish a base-line of social and economic rights which all members of the community must enjoy to avoid ‘social exclusion’ as far as basic social and economic rights are concerned.  We are happy that you have laid the template here and its tide is moving round Nigeria.  Part of the tide is the O Meal initiative which is now a national programme.  One of it is O YES initiative which gave birth to N-Power programme.  Another is AgbaOsunProgramme which now ttansforms to Conditional Cash Transfer.  Your economic inclusion policy that made you to create a viable micro-credit agency in our State is now taken over by our Bank of Industry. The impact was so intense to the extent that the parliament of Great Britain, our colonizer, had to invite you to address the parliament as a mark of honour for your ingenuity and value-chain of prosperity that your programmes impacted on the people.