{"id":4,"date":"2014-08-10T08:55:54","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T08:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=4"},"modified":"2014-08-10T08:55:54","modified_gmt":"2014-08-10T08:55:54","slug":"why-delta-state-is-finishing-strong-ogeah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"Why Delta State Is Finishing Strong \u2013 Ogeah"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Commissioner-for-Information-Barrister-Chike-Ogeah-620x350\"<\/a>Barrister Christopher Chike Ogeah is the Delta State commissioner for information. In this interview with Kola Eke-Ogiugo, he speaks on the development projects and several other issues affecting the state<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What do you mean by \u2018Delta State is finishing strong\u2019?<\/strong>
\nWhen the governor got re-elected for the second term, there were prolonged litigations and before that there were periods of elections, re-runs and all that took some time. As this time was going, the first tenure of the governor was mainly focused on finishing the projects of his predecessor and of course putting his own vision in proper perspective. In the second term, just as he got down to carry out basically the three point agenda: infrastructural development, peace and security and human capital development, those litigations began. Of course he got over that and that was why we described what we are seeing today as a harvest of projects all over the state.<\/p>\n

Delta is a massive state, we have over five million people, very diverse and so whatever project you are having in one place, you must replicate it at another. It is not the kind of state where you just develop the state capital and then everybody shouts \u2018Hosanna!\u2019
\nSo, because of that we had to develop what we call the two major economic zones in the country. I\u2019m sure Delta is the only state that has two viable airports and two massive economic zones; one of course is the oil and gas zone of Warri and the economic zone of Asaba. Asaba is 10 minutes away from the biggest market in Sub-Saharan African.<\/p>\n

One of our big projects is the Ughelli-Asaba dualization; over 173 kilometers one side. The whole idea is to be able to connect the two economic zones. We found out that a lot of or compatriots from across the Niger have accidents, spend days on air trying to clear their goods in Lagos ports, etc, so we realised that we have two ports here:\u00a0 the Koko and Warri ports. The federal government had given an indication that they were going to dredge those ports and once that was done, we knew that all we needed to do was link up those two zones.<\/p>\n

Coming back to your question, \u2018finishing strong\u2019 means that we have on-going projects scattered all over the state. We have mega, massive and empowerment projects because if you build all the bridges, roads and the people are hungry, there is still a massive problem. That is why we developed our Delta Micro Credit Scheme which has been acclaimed to be the best in the country. We strengthen our micro finance banks to give soft loans to a lot of our people who are very talented but have no access to credit. We harness their talents and they started making all kinds of fantastic things from this scheme. We found out that they were repaying, because these loans are interest free, short term. So, we had a lot of these programmes all over the place.<\/p>\n

We have re-habilitated, renovated, totally refurbished and built new schools, side by side with the training of teachers; we have built four new polytechnics.<\/p>\n

Looking at healthcare, see what we have done with Eku teaching hospital as well as the maternal and child care hospital in Warri; a first class hospital dedicated to just pregnant women and children. We have one in Asaba too. Oghara is the first hospital in Nigeria to organise a successful kidney transplant. If you go to Oghara, you will not believe that you are in Nigeria because the governor has taken that hospital to a different level altogether; not just in terms of the modern equipment, but also in terms of personnel.<\/p>\n

Tell us about your collaboration with Obasanjo in Ogwashi-Uku?<\/strong>
\nThe farms are there. The British High Commissioner is visiting Delta for the first time and he was there yesterday. He stated that it was the best farm he has seen in Nigeria since he\u2019s been here. It is a massive agricultural farm in collaboration with Obasanjo Farms.
\nSo, these are all the kind of things we are doing, the whole idea like I said is to be able to get these different areas developed so that we don\u2019t depend solely oil.<\/p>\n

Certain quarters assert that the Okpanam road should have attended to by now, what are do you think?<\/strong>
\nThe issue of the Okpanam road has been addressed by the governor several times. It is simple- Asaba is a valley and water keeps returning and you know water will always find its level. When water can\u2019t a find a way out what will happen? We are not saying that because of that we throw our hands up in the air; as we speak now a major design is on-going so we can get the water channelled into the river in Anwai. In a couple of months that whole thing will be over. I think there is just a major link that needs to be done underground somewhere around the core area and once that is done the whole issue will be a thing of the past. So, there is no point repairing those roads when they will keep getting washed away.<\/p>\n

What is going on in the transport sector?<\/strong>
\nThat is one of the areas we have scored fantastic; never in the history of Delta have we been able to attract sea, land or water transportation in the way we have done. We have bought those big Marcopolo buses with air-conditioning for inter-city travel, at very subsidised rates; we have bought small buses also for our inter-city, also safe and subsidised. We have bought lots of big boats for our brothers in the riverine areas, who were cut off from each other by the sea. We have also built jetties for them and floating petrol stations, because these boats are powered by fuel. So, those are the kind of things we have been doing.<\/p>\n

Is the government making moves to attract a federal university to Asaba, apart from the one in Effurun, which is a petroleum university?<\/strong>
\nYes! A lot of these things are in the works, but you don\u2019t talk when things are still in the works. Meanwhile, with the four polytechnics we are focusing more on skills acquisition and the technical side of things, because white collar jobs do not really transform any economy. So, you have 20 universities here and so what? We want to have welders; we want to have builders. Look up till tomorrow when we want to tile or paint our houses, we have to look for people from Cotounu and all that; we don\u2019t those people here. Skilled labour is what we require in Nigeria-that is what can transform this nation. That is why we are building more technical colleges and polytechnics.<\/p>\n

Regarding the IPP Project, is power failure going to be a thing of the past soon?<\/strong>
\nYou know electricity is one of those things on the exclusive list. So it is a federal government project and if we don\u2019t get our agreements right, the same problem that happened to us even with our own normal power stations here, will happen with the IPP; which is that we produce the power, it goes to the national grid and then finds its way to anywhere else in Nigeria but Delta. But we said no, since we are doing it with our money it must come back here. The expectation is that once that is done, then to a large extent our power needs will be met.<\/p>\n

Did the governor terminate the contracts of some foreign firms who asked for money before carrying out projects?<\/strong>
\nNo, I\u2019m not aware of anything like that. Asking for money for what? From what I see everyday or every week when we have our executive council meeting, every contract is different and of course is governed by a document. Now what happens is that of course the payment terms is usually an issue with the contractor; if a contract says 50 per cent upfront or 20 per cent upfront of course the onus is on the government to respect that, especially when the governor pens that contract. Aside from that I can assure you that there have been no controversies. The problem we seem to have in Delta is that usually contractors, after we have fulfilled our own side of the bargain, don\u2019t fulfil theirs. We had a problem with the Ughelli-Asaba dualisation when the contractor short changed himself with what he presented and then later found out that it wasn\u2019t feasible. So, we had to go and re-do the whole thing and these things take time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barrister Christopher Chike Ogeah is the Delta State commissioner for information. In this interview with Kola Eke-Ogiugo, he speaks on the development projects and several other issues affecting the state. What do you mean by \u2018Delta State is finishing strong\u2019? When the governor got re-elected for the second term, there were prolonged litigations and before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-state"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Commissioner-for-Information-Barrister-Chike-Ogeah-620x350.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/6"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}