One of the governorship aspirants of the All Progressives Congress APC in Ekiti state, Victor Olumuyiwa Kolade has said that successive administrations in the state have been monumental failures describing the incumbent Ayo Fayose as the most wasteful governor in the history of the state with his attempt at building “a bridge that leads to nowhere”.
Speaking with newsmen in Abuja on Wednesday after obtaining his nomination and expression of interest form at the APC national secretariat, Kolade said it was regrettable that the people of Ekiti are still very hungry despite Fayose’s policy of ‘stomach infrastructure’.
He said: “Ekiti state was created in October 1996, but one thing that is certain is that there is no tangible development. You cannot see an improvement. Anybody who visited the state when it was created and now, would agree with me that there is no substantial development.
“The infrastructure that the governor is talking about is a farce. What he is talking about stomach infrastructure is nothing but a fraud. One thing I have always told my audience is that the human capital in Ekiti is not developed.
“The sitting governor has done a bridge and has not completed it. As of today, he has spent N20 billion and has not completed it. He keeps on reviewing the cost. If you want to go the Ghadaffi way and you divide this money by the 2.5 million people in Ekiti, each of us would be entitled to about N4 million.
“Now, if you take N1.6 billion for instance and give N100 million to each of the 16 local governments and then form co-operatives, you then ask people to access the loans, you would have created more millionaires in the state. The bridge is so long that no one will even use it except few people travelling very far because, underneath it, there are so many easy outlets that motorists can use.
“The three problems we have are; government is the only employer of labour. There are no factories. If you do not work with the government, you work in the hotel, filling station, the saw mill or you are an ‘Okada’ rider.
“It is mostly a civil service state. If we had successive governments and they were not able to discern that this burden should be taken off the shoulders of government, then what are we talking about? Successive governments in Ekiti state have failed.
“The second problem we have is hunger. We farm so much but so well we are hungry. It is like 90 percent of everybody in the state is a farmer even while doing government work, but hunger is still prevalent in the land. You remember how someone was cooking, went inside in the house and by the time she came out, the food had been stolen from the fire. It happened in Ekiti state.
“It is like this because there is no government interference in farming. Farmers till the ground hopelessly. They farm on lands that have been farmed consistently by several generations earlier on.
“Thirdly, the behavioural attitude of an average Ekiti person is going down the drain. Most of the youths now take to drugs. The social order in Ekiti is bad. There is so much to be done”.
