Atorough: Governance Not About Rousing Speeches, It’s Hard Work

Julius Atorough, a financial expert who seeks to govern Benue State on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party tells George Okoh about his political aspiration in 2023. Excerpts:

What was the outcome of your consultation with Zone A stakeholders?

I have been consulting on a personal level with stakeholders with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) across the state but on a structured level I have had discussion from my own clan, from my ward, from local government level and I have had the privilege to have discussions with the exco, stakeholders of PDP of the entire Zone A. Essentially I went to them to present myself for consideration for running as a candidate for the party in the 2023 gubernatorial race. It is important that they should know who I am, what I have done, where I have been, my level of education, my professional proficiency and what kind of person I am before time because for you to consider someone suitable as a gubernatorial aspirant, you need to know the person very well in detail and that is what I went to do. I have been a banker for about 23 years and I only work in the financial industry, I have been a business man and I have been in the state for a very long time. I travelled to every single local government in the state in this state and I have done business almost everywhere. In the course of the interaction, I was able to know that there are gaps for utilization of the natural potentials of the state and I know how we can best explore those opportunities to bring out the best for Benue. I have not been a politician before, but I have those solutions basically in my mind. These are very simple things turned to be difficult issues for a lot of people. I believe that I am gifted to bring out solutions. I am actually a solution minded person. I don’t meet problems and get deterred. Problems actually motivate me so when I hear that there is a problem, I just see a solution. I see opportunities for Benue considering the kind of problem we are having. As far as I am concerned and as long as I can see, the opportunities we are more towering than the problems that we have on our hands. We just need to put on our thinking cap, put on the cap of unity and work with a common purpose and Benue will rise higher. I believe that Benue should be among the top five economies in this country. When you count Lagos, Rivers, Delta and Kano next should be Benue. But our potentials cannot translate itself, we have to work it into being and make it count that is why I decided to join the gubernatorial race.

As a human being, I believe in the development and on a personal level I have done quiet a lot of development in this state but you can only do so much as a private individual. For you to be mainstream and make your impact felt on a general level, on a macro level, you have to be in the mainstream, you have to be in governance, you have to be able to contribute to governance. Now, you can do that directly or indirectly. I have tried my best to do that indirectly working with people who are in government, giving advice, partaking in committees and all of that but at the end of the day, the person at the centre and their own lieutenants decide what happens. Sometimes the lieutenants will not allow you get the very important message you have to the main person who is there and the person doesn’t even know that somebody is coming with a good idea. You can write all the letters and memorandum you want, they may not even reach the person. So you don’t even blame the person at the centre. But I have now decided that I will join the race to contribute to the development of Benue State and this was the message I took to the leaders and stakeholders of Zone A.

You named agriculture as one important sector that can take Benue out of where we are and we also know that on a private level, you run a micro finance bank and you have pursued agriculture vigorously on a private level. In terms of agriculture which areas will you focus on if you succeed?

It goes without saying that Benue State’s most comparative advantage is in agriculture. We have very fertile soil; basically anything you plant in Benue will grow. That is just one side of it. We have very hard working people. All the people in Benue are hard working on the farm and it is in Benue and few other places that people go to farm in the morning and don’t come back until evening. They have lunch on the farm and continue working. They work like horses, so we have that also going for us but there has been total lack of planning. There’s absolutely no proper planning that will harness the best of us in agriculture. We have River Benue and some people don’t even know that as an agric resource. We don’t have a single functional dam on the River Benue and up till now we are cropping once a year. Once the dry season comes that is the end of it. It is River Nile that made Egypt what it is today. We are unable to tap into River Benue as an agric and economic resource. Why shouldn’t we have a dam along the River Benue and why shouldn’t our farmers be farming twice a year? If this question was asked 30 years ago, we would have two or three dams and the level of poverty we have in this state, won’t be there. How can we convince the Federal Government to dredge River Benue as a starting point? Politics is a trade off. You want votes from us? What are you giving us in return? For example, in Benue, most of us except for little example of the palm industry in Zone C, most of our farmers engage in annual crops. If you don’t farm that year, you won’t eat. With yam, for instance, they make heaps every year. There is no standard infrastructure that you will do once and leverage on for long. So every year, you have to make heaps. The year you don’t make the heaps you are gone. Consider Cocoa, you will only plant Cocoa once and for the rest of your life until you pass on and pass it to your children and generations to come. A Benue farmer starts farming at the age of 17 and he will farm till he is 70 with no retirement plan. By the time he becomes older he can’t carry the hoe every year, he starts to beg; living from hand to mouth. So we don’t even have a tree crop economy. A tree crop economy is what Benue needs to stand in agriculture especially in the light of this onslaught by herders. If we plant Cocoa would cows eat Cocoa? If we have Palm trees, are the cows going to eat up all the whole palm trees? I will give an example with coconuts, today the Malaysian breed of coconut produces between 120 to 150 fruits on one single tree. If you are selling that coconut for N200 each and there are only a 100 fruits on it, you are getting N20,000 on each stand. If I can get the average farmer to have 10 of that stand, after 18 months to two years, you will be having N200, 000 passive incomes every year for the next 60years. How many farmers in my village make up to N200, 000 every year? They are not up to 10 that make up to that at once but 10 stands of coconut is absolutely nothing if you even say use coconut to make the fence of your house alone, you will have 20 and that is N400,000 to N500,000 passive income. You do not require fertilizer every year, you don’t need to tend it, and you don’t need to do anything. It will just be providing money for you for the next 60years. So if plant them today when you grow old, those trees are going to feed you. Now if you have to plant it on a farm land, you can plant and space it and still produce any other annual crops you want to do on it. As a matter of fact, those coconut and all of that are going to be helping you pay for fertilizer, pay for tractoring services and buy improved seeds. If you go around Tiv land, Zone C is even better, I have been to all parts of zone C, I have not seen one thatch hut that human beings are sleeping inside. When you see a mud house it is usually covered with zinc. If you see a thatch one, then it is crops that they put inside not human beings. It is storage but go to our own Zone A and B, you will go to a house where it is a living house and there are 15 huts in one place. If fire gets there everything is gone. You can remove all of that but it takes a simple strategy. Lagos State has N250 billion coconut scheme, they are planting coconut from Lagos all the way to Cotonou through Badagry. You know why? The demand for coconut cannot even be met if you multiply the current world production by 10. You will not meet the world demand. From the confectionary industry being use for food, the pharmaceutical industry, the cosmetic industry, beverages just name it. Today coconut water is the most expensive beverage; non alcoholic beverage, coconut water and you know the beauty of it, I told you N200 per fruit, that is when you are using it in the most effective way which is just to eat it, if you add value you get N750 per fruit. What stops me from planting 1million coconut trees annually for four years? The first two years you are just planting you are not getting anything. By the second year, the first year own will start producing. If you are going to get N20,000 per stand and you will have I million fruits, how much are you going to get? It’s N20 billion, if you have 5million trees, it’s a N100 billion. Divide N100 billion by 12, it’s close to 8billlion. Benue does not make half of that annually from the federation account and the oil is going down which means that if I have low oil and I have 5million coconut trees I will be sufficient, you are putting the money to the economy in the hands of people because guess what? We are still looking at it at N200 per fruit, we have not done the value addition. If you do the value addition, it will be N750 billion after five years but you have to plan. This is not something that works and the work is easy. I know where I can get money to plant coconut trees, to do agricultural development. You have a river, why should you not be supplying fish to the entire North-central, at least? The Jukuns, their fish, do they drop from the moon? They learn it and they are even inefficient. Why can’t we go and find out the best people that know about fishing and bring them with technology and use our river to produce fish? You and I sit here in Makurdi and the fish we eat as pepper soup and roasted fish is gotten from Ibadan, Enugu and other places. It’s ridiculous. When you pay for that fish you are funding somebody from Ibadan and not somebody from here. You and I seat here and then the chickens you eat, the eggs you eat have to come from Jos, why? Mere eggs we can’t produce eggs? Somebody is sleeping somewhere. Governance is not just about riding official cars all over the place making fanciful speeches. It’s hard work! You need to work, you need to plan, and you need to build an economy. I give you an example with Zaki Biam, Benue is the largest producer of yam anywhere in this country, Nigeria is the biggest producer of yam in Africa which means that Benue is the biggest producer of yam anywhere on this planet and Zaki Biam is the biggest yam market on the planet. Why is this not so stated? Why is it not promoted as a tourist attraction? If you promoted it as a tourist attraction it means that, the whole of Zaki Biam market will be properly fenced, there will be an hotel, police station and there will be banks there. By the time you do all these, the insecurities you are talking about will go and you will make it an e-market. It is simple, let everybody there have an e- account and a card and so nobody pays with cash. All the Igbos, Hausas and the Yorubas that come will just transfer monies into the account of those people they are buying from and they all have a phone to receive alerts and you move on. So it is the thinking and the infrastructure that is lacking as far as I am concerned. Sometimes we need to put these things down and say look do we really want to do it. I will come to the crops that we do. I have been a trader in fertilizer, farm chemicals and tractors. I was the National Secretary of the Agro Dealers Association, the only one recognized by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and in that privileged position I know exactly what the problem is. You are planting grains, the farmers we have in this country and in our state are planting grains. The grains are meant to be just mere food. If you plant a grain here, you plant an improved seed here, improved seed will give you between five to eight times more yield than the ordinary grains. Even if you put fertilizer on that grain, there is a limit, it cannot go. Now why doesn’t everybody use improved seeds? The cost, it is too prohibitive. The farmers can’t afford it, but there is a community based way of producing good seeds and at no cost. You can make the farmers in a particular area grow their own. It is not produced in a factory, it is grown and the technology is simple. You don’t need any serious education once you have good extension officers like soya beans that is planted here, the community understand the technology and can produce their own seeds. They will use their practice so that their own seed will come out pure and give them good harvest for the following year. You don’t even have an extension department in the Ministry of Agriculture in the 21st century and you say you are serious about agriculture. Agriculture is not distribution of fertilizer. When you hear people talk about promoting agriculture, it is to bring fertilizer in few bags and it doesn’t even get down to the real farmers and we say we are promoting agriculture. I come from a private sector and banking background where you are result oriented, when you set out to do a thing, when you come to give your report, you say I was asked to do this and I succeeded or I was asked to do this and I failed. We don’t just say I went to the place, the community was informed, we sensitized the people and the effort was made, the world does not reward efforts, it is results. We want to see results and I think if this is what is lacking, we need to have leadership that is results oriented, that is focused and really looking forward; leadership that has the guts to take on big ideas and put them into practice.

Insecurity has been a major challenge in the state hindering every sector of the economy especially agric sector. When you become the Governor of the state, how would you tackle this issue of herdsmen attacks and our people still staying in the IDP camps?

I must start by commending you His Excellency, Benue state Governor Samuel Ortom, he has done quite a lot sensitizing the entire world not just Nigeria on the problems of herdsmen attacks on the Benue people. If it has not been for him you would have wondered if we will still be here at all. It is very true that is affecting agriculture but what is also true is that that problem cannot be solved by the state alone. You have to sit down with the Federal Government, sit down with all the other stakeholders to solve this problem. Like I was telling you before, if we moved beyond just annual crop and try to find ways by which our people can earn money from things that may not necessary be affected by this kind of things, that would be a first step and all other things will fall in place. Everybody in the country is calling out to people to take up arms in self defence. I will be honest with you, if I came into your house now, hit your door open take your property and want to leave what will you do? Won’t you try to stop me, at least, by holding unto your property? It’s called self-defence. There is nowhere in the laws of this country that self-defence is criminalized. In fact, let me tell you the position of the law, if somebody comes to kill me and I kill the person, I will go scott free before the law because I did it in self-defence. First and foremost, you must have a mechanism for self-defence and I think Governor Ortom is working towards that, some of the community based initiative that he is putting in place is all built towards that self-defence but again, we have to strengthen those community based efforts whether it is vigilante or forest guards.Whatever name you call it we can’t go to sleep any more. There has to be a 24/7 surveillance over each community in the state, when half the people are going to sleep, the other half should be out there in the field going to work and we have to be proactive. We don’t wait until there are attacks on us then we begin to complain. We have to move ahead. One thing which must be done is that we need to get a hold of herdsmen attacks on this state. If you notice, the attacks are always on the border of this state. It is not possible for those people to leave and go to Gboko. Have you ever heard of attacks in Gboko? It’ s not possible, it is only in the border communities. On the other side of Cameroon, they come in so we know where the problem is coming from. Now from Agatu all the way to Guma and leading up to Buruku areas, they use the river; 90 percent of the attacks come through the river and there is no surveillance of the River Benue waters up till now. What are we doing? Why can’t we put surveillance both the police, the Navy and the local people to be surveying this place, at some point build observation towers along the river since that is where they use, when you shut them out of the waters, you are keeping the community safe. There is work to be done and most of that works is mental, we have to be proactive. I have been talking to the Navy as a private individual and I told them you guys have the answer to the problem of security in Benue. If they settle down they will make meaningful progress in curtailing herdsmen attacks in Benue.

Recently, when the state government put up some state owned companies for sale, there were a lot of arguments and criticisms. Do you think the government was right and if not, what do you think should be done?

I will talk as a business man first and foremost. When it comes to this kind of issue. I am a business man and I don’t believe that government has any business in doing businesses. The government is a very poor business person, the government has not succeed in doing business successfully in anywhere in the country that I know; been it state, local or federal. I do not believe in government doing business but the vision that governor Aper Aku had at that time was fantastic but people also didn’t have capital. People do not have futuristic thinking and not just in this state, even elsewhere. So the state needed to take initiative to bring those laudable programmes into being so they came into being and they were successful for a larger part but that time has moved on. Most of these companies now are moribund. Now what do you do? Privatization, commercialization or outright sale or whatever name you call it, absolutely but been that they are, state government properties, legacy properties, there should be a proper modality for doing that. I am told that there is a law in place, I don’t know exact content of that law so I cannot judge that but if there is a law in place that is guiding and it has been there for some time, fine, let’s look at it. If there are concerns by the larger members of the Benue society, whatever their concerns are let’s address these concerns. The most important thing is let there be sincerity of purpose and objectivity in what we do. Whether we are selling the industries or we are keeping the industries is not exactly the issue. The objectivity of purpose should be the guiding principle. It might be advisable to sell these industries to people who would make them functional, create employment and generate income for the society. But who are those people who are buying these industries? Are they competent or are they just going to find people who are just around? Let’s find people who competent in every industry. There are people who are frontliners in this and paterner with them. More importantly, let there be objectivity in what we do and sincerity of purpose. Whether we are selling the industries or we are keeping the industries is not the issue but sincerity of purpose should be our guiding principle.

If you look at the 2023 election, both the people of Zone A; Jechira and Kwande and Zone C are agitating for the Number One seat in the state, should this seat be given on the basis of competence or zoning?

First and foremost, I come from the private sector. In the private sector, we don’t take sentiments into considerations. We deal purely on your competence, what you can do is first but in the political space, you meet a different thing. Nigeria as a country, for instance, has over 300 different languages some say 320 languages, tribes and nationalities. So, if you say competence alone at the time of Ahmadu Bello when the independence was gotten, competence was only in the East and then the West and there was no real competence in the North. So to allow them to be carried along and have them agree to independence, they allowed them to allocate so that only one area is not allowed to dominate. But even then, independence has to be shifted forward by one year or two. That legacy has been carried over the years in the sharing of things. Now, we brought it down to the state. so, for me, competence first but because of the multilateral nature of our society, we need to combine competence and zoning together. In those days, sometimes when they zone something to a particular place, you may not find any competent person there but today we have gotten to a level of education where if you zone something to anywhere you are likely going to find a competent person there. I agree to competence but in order to account for the kind of complex society that we have, we can do zoning with emphasis on competence. Wherever a thing is zoned to, let the best person come forward. Don’t zone a thing to a place and bring a slacker but the best should do the job because this is about the future of the people, the survival of the people. In my private business, I don’t care where people come from. I employ you to do a job, I don’t care whether you are tall or short, fair or dark. Just do the job. That is the way I operate and that is how it should be in every other thing. For instance, if you are sick and they say a particular doctor is the only one to cure you. When you get there will you be asking him whether he is a Yoruba man, Igbo or Hausa man? If it is in this state, are you going to ask if the man is a Tiv man, Idoma or Igede? You will just say Doctor help me and you will be happy if he cures you and wherever he comes from, you will call him my brother. As I speak, I’m a Tiv man but my doctor is Idoma, my electrician is Tiv, my plumber Idoma. I don’t care. I just want to see competence.