Mimiko’s three years of intimidating transformation

Tribune

22 January 2012

Mimiko’s three years of intimidating transformation

WITH lots of projects either completed or under construction simultaneously in both the rural areas and urban centres in Ondo State, Bola Olufemi reports that Governor Olusegun Mimiko had set a track record of exemplary performance which without doubt, surpassed those of successive administrations since the state was created in 1976.

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Apart from his magic wand in the city centres, Mimiko’s administration had also in the last three years, executed a number of projects chosen by the people in about 308 rural communities across the state.

It started with 80 Quick- Win priority projects in the first one year, and rose to 230 projects in 230 communities in the second year and to 308 projects, across 308 communities in less than three years.

The Quick-Win projects, otherwise known as Confidence - Building projects came on the platform of a 3i initiative , that is Infrastructure, Institution and Industry. The Infrastructural facilities provided in the 308 communities include basic health centre, town hall, block of classrooms, skill acquisition centre, solar powered borehole, mono pump, open market stalls, cassava processing industry, high court complex, rural electrification, rural feeder roads and culvert.

In the area of human capital development, Governor Olusegun Mimiko started by paying a whopping N1.4bn retirement benefits to scores of pensioners who had disengaged from service between 1999 and 2010 as either local government employees or as teachers.

The gesture was also extended to various organised market groups and traders associations when the state’s micro-credit agency gave out over N2bn as soft loans to hundreds of farmers, traders and artisans to support their businesses to make them financially independent.

Obviously disturbed by the embarrassing rates of graduates unemployment in the state, the Mimiko administration, also established very large modern farm villages in each of the three senatorial districts of the state. They are located in Auga-Akoko (Ondo North), Ore (Ondo South) and Epe (Ondo central).

Accommodation with necessary facilities was provided in each of the modern villages for all the graduate farmers who are expected to be trained in the modern technique of farming. Apart from the monthly stipend they were paid, proceeds from the farms of the young farmers would be bought at competitive market prices by the state government in order to encourage them after each harvest.

Worried by the declining standard of education in the country with Ondo state not an exemption, the governor established the Quality Assurance Agency. The agency was expected to standardise the quality of education, and rescue the system from total collapse.It will also reposition it for better service delivery by achieving qualitative and sustainable service delivery through the process of whole school evaluation.

The Mimiko administration, determined to tackle the disturbing maternal mortality rate in the country and Ondo state in particular, introduced the Abiye, a code name for an all round revolution in the health care delivery targeting mothers and babies.