Chances of getting the PDP’s governorship ticket
CHANCES are in the hands of God Almighty. First as a governor of the state, I have been very loyal to the party and serve well to the best of my ability, implemented the party’s manifesto, in carrying out development programs according to the transformation agenda right from the inception of my administration. We have done well looking at the kind of fund available to me.

Kogi State has witnessed tremendous development in the last four years as we have focused on rural development, fixing rural roads, health centres, water and a lot of things. I believe that on that basis, it would be logical for the party to represent me for the November 21 governorship election.

Internal disagreement within the Kogi PDP
I agree with you because obviously whenever there is an opportunity for governorship election, people within a democratic party also look for the highest positions in the state. Some of them even aspire to contest the governorship ticket with the siting governor. People are generally interested and the fact that rumours is spread and many intrigues and innuendo, so one should just be ready to face the challenges as they come.

In regard to our party, I believe that we’ve learnt a lot of lesson from our defeat during the last presidential election in Kogi and as a party, we know that it is important and crystal clear to organize ourselves to position the party in time for us to succeed in the coming governorship election.

Whatever the internal crisis we have now, I am sure that our leaders are focusing on the solutions to ensure that we resolve them before the election.

PDP’s performance in Kogi
It is expected of the to say we have not done anything no matter what you do. To them you can never do well. They will always tell you they can do better. But the reality is that if you measure development in relations with the funds and finances available, I think we have achieved a lot.

Kogi is basically a Civil Service State but we have done enough to move it from a Civil Service state to a self-sustaining and economically viable state. We have records of the things that we have done, some of them are published and there are evidences to back up our claims.

For example we are building 11-storey Kogi House in Abuja. It is a symbol of our state. We can also generate a lot of revenue from this because everybody knows the value of property in Abuja.

We have lands for the state in prime locations in Abuja and we believe that the property would bring good income for our state in future.

Look at our Liaison office in Lagos, it was formally in disarray but now we are working and reposition it to making it an income generating property in Victoria Island Lagos. We have land in Apapa, which we are working on. We also have about 500 Housing units in Lokoja and we are building a modern stadium that can compete with the best in the world.

We have the great Lokoja water, which was the dam, it was done by my predecessor and we have put a finishing torches and we have also secure it from flood by fortifying it with some embankment. This is done with the aim to preventing any future flood in the state.

We are also building a new embankment in Kabawa area to protect the original people of Lokoja from flood.

We built 272 flood-housing units for those who were affected by flood so that we can knockdown their houses, which were affected and rebuild so that in future it won’t be a major disaster in that we’ve learnt our lessons from that.

We are building a dual carriageway bypass from Lokoja to provide the new development area with satellite, structured with proper mapping of the area. Proper layout of a modern wing of Lokoja is ongoing and it has reached advanced stage.

We are building a mega motor park, first of its kind in Northern Nigeria to stop indiscriminate parking of vehicles on the road. In about two or three months it should be ready for commissioning.

We have built a very ultra modern vocational training centre in Lokoja, which was commissioned recently in collaboration with Korea Development Agency. The most modern vocational development centre in Nigeria, which trains people in ICT, engineering, agriculture, metal fabrication, wielding and others so that young people could acquire knowledge and set up on their own. This will enable them to fend for themselves.

We are also providing the manpower to feed industries. All our secondary schools have been renovated. We build hostels. We have developed our rural electricity and as we talk over 58 trunk roads have been fixed.