Speeches

I am always excited when I get invitations to speak at events that have to do with education. If I were told to choose just one of the four pillars on which to build the economic recovery of Oyo State, I will most certainly choose education as the foremost. Educated people cannot be held down. They will continue to push for development and embrace developmental efforts because they know better.

Elections are all about choices.

And the people of Ondo State must come out on October 10 to make the right choice.

A choice between stagnation and progress.

A choice between sustained poverty and economic recovery.

A choice between exploitation and development.

A choice between continued hardship and prosperity.

The reconstruction will cost N770 Million and the stores will be allocated to the original owners. The first phase of reconstruction will take six months and the second phase will take two months.

If we are telling people to leave wherever they are and come here, we should be able to give them what they are benefiting there and even more. We can keep saying Oyo State is ready for business, but without the right infrastructure in place, they will tell us they like our policies, but they want to see better facilities.

And this is how economies work: Investors will only go where they can be assured of profits. If we do not develop basic infrastructure like roads, it will affect the cost of production, which in turn means less profit for investors. So, we cannot be seriously discussing attracting investment into Oyo State when a majority of roads and other infrastructure are in a state of disrepair

Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. When a leader is honest, it means that they can be trusted. You can go to sleep and shut both eyes because if they have said they will do something, they will do it. If they have made promises as shown in their manifesto, they will not wake up one day and deny it. A leader with strong moral principles is a person of his word.

As I sign this revised budget, it is a good time to reflect on one issue that has plagued our budget implementation over the years—the issue of poor budget performance. We make robust presentations of plans that mostly end on paper because the funds are not available to implement them. When you have an annual budget performance of about 30%, you will understand why we keep having stagnation in economic growth. Or how else will you explain an IGR average of about N1.8 billion in the past four years?

One of the challenges that agribusiness is facing is that in most parts of Africa, when we talk about agriculture, the picture that comes to the mind is not a young man sitting in his office looking at a computer. It is an older man or woman, back bent, tilling the soil with a hoe or attacking weeds with a cutlass. And this is why initiatives such as STEP are important.

Our elders say when a woman marries two husbands, she is in the best position to tell which of the two have given her a better bargain. Nigerians in the southwest have had an opportunity to compare years of rule by the two major parties and a few smaller ones. When you feel their pulse, you will see that they are now gearing towards choosing people and not parties. This is the opportunity that we now have before us. An opportunity to show that the PDP, as it is now, has an ideology backing it.

Aside from the digitization of the courtroom, we need more rooms so that more sessions can sit at the same time, and justice can be accessed quicker. I have learnt that we only have thirty-four courtrooms and a good number are in a dilapidated state. We have to renovate these rooms.