He describes his recent ordeal in the hands of kidnappers as “a nightmarish experience. I’m still trying to heal myself and would rather not discuss it.”
You are in the second year of your second term in office, when you look at what you have done, do you think you could have done more?
Bamigebetan: If you look at what it took for us to get this far, you will realize that we have actually overstretched ourselves. The four roads that we are building right now, for example, we had to get a loan to do them, and for us to get the loan, it took us over a whole year for negotiations. That means of course that money is an issue here. We would love to do so many things, we have so many plans. We have around 36 roads that are priority that we believe needs to be done. But you can see that so far now we have taken only about five of the roads as a local government. So in terms of resource availability, we don’t have enough. If we have more than this, I’m quite sure that we could do much much better than what we are doing, and that’s basically why we are trying to now encourage the residents to pay what they ought to pay to the council. There are laws that say you need to pay a Development Levy if you are above 18. If you are running a canteen you need to pay food and premises levy, if you are running a bar, you need to pay for your licence, all these have been neglected over the years, and now we are going house to house talking to people of the importance of…. If you don’t pay how do you want the local government to be able to provide services to you? Because, note also that the local government does not have direct access to federal funding, it is an LCDA that relies on subvention from the Oshodi-Isolo local government. So that in effect means that our money cannot be as much as Oshodi local government. That is why I say that many Lagosians who are bothered about performance of local governments should actually support us by insisting that we should be given LGA status, so that we can have direct access to federal funding. That would dramatically improve our capacity to deliver on many of the complaints that they are having against the local government system. So I think that if I had more resources, I will definitely be able to do more than this because we are not talking of lack of ideas now, or lack of plans but the money to make those plans a reality.
You’ve talked about the issue of taxes and development levies, and residents have always complained of multiple and over taxation. How have you been able to address this issue?
Bamigbetan: Many of them have not bothered to look at what the law says. The government operates at three tiers…because before the taxes were designed, there was a national constitutional conference where they called all of us, everybody came together and said “how do we fund our local government system?” Our people must pay so-so number of taxes. How do we fund our state government? So it has been agreed and it is what is in the constitution that is being implemented. So what they call multiple taxation, somebody has said that once he has paid his tax to the state, he will not pay to the local government…
The same tax?
Bamigbetan: It won’t be the same tax. I’ll give you an example, income tax, no local government charges income tax. If you have a company, the company tax that allows your company to stay, you pay it to the federal government. For us, tenement rate is our own. In other words, you have built your house on a land, the land belongs to the state, but what you put on it is the local government responsibility because we are the ones who will maintain it for you. So a tenement rate therefore is not duplicated at any other level. In Lagos State we made it easier because of each local government having to call you, we now said all the local governments let us appoint a company that can collect it for us, that is what is called land use charge. So once you pay land use charge in respect of your house, for a year, no local government can come and ask you for that thing again.
So most of what the people call multiple taxation is not multiple taxation. They are taxation at various levels of government which you are supposed to pay. But people need to be sensitized; I think it’s a matter of communication and awareness. People need to be sensitized that I have to pay different kinds of taxes to the state, to local government, to the federal for me to play my role as a citizen. It’s not multiple taxation.
How much is the development levy?
Bamigbetan: Levy here is N300. So we have just gone around 74 CDAs campaigning that if you are in your house, you are a father, you have about four children above 18, you pay N1,200 and collect receipt for them, every year.
But for people who feel that the government has not done anything for them, how do you convince them to pay? How do you convince someone who feels that government has not done anything for his kids to pay?
Bamigbetan: It’s a case of the chicken and the head, who comes first? If the chicken does not lay the egg, how will you be able to eat it? You came into this state, you were not forced to come into the environment to take possession of a property. You voluntarily did, and so when you do so you also exercise your contractual obligation. You cannot blame a law that has been existing before you get here, you are supposed to comply so that you can get the best benefits of your civic duty. By not paying its rebellion against the state, because you knew the terms before you entered into it. When you take possession of your land, you passed a road to get there, you didn’t create that road. Somebody has to maintain that road and that’s why you need to pay. When you discharge your waste, somebody is going to pick it up at the end of the day, you need to pay for your waste. These are things that for your own convenience, you need to pay.
Do you thing Ejigbo LCDA is being marginalized by the state?
Bamigbetan: Our position is…I’m a Political Scientist, I’m a Journalist, and I know that politics all over the world is a struggle of various communities to have access to public resources. In that struggle, depending on how effective your team is would determine how much you get from it. So it’s not a matter of blaming any state, it’s a matter of looking inwards and saying ‘Do I have enough team to push my case at the state level?’ I know that in Ejigbo we do not have enough team, and I will give you an example of what I’m talking about: In Ejigbo here for example, after the chairman, as a public officer, you do not have any other person. In Isolo, you have the House of Assembly member, you have the House of Reps member, you have the party chairman of the ruling party, you have their own chairman too, you have the special adviser to the governor on Works. Now if the five of them are struggling for the same thing with me, who will win?
But why would you struggle? Are you not supposed to work hand in hand with them because it’s actually one LGA?
Bamigbetan: That’s the nature of politics all over the world. At the end of the day it will be a struggle for resources because all these people live in a particular area, live in a territory. Certainly if there is money for a road, they will want that road to pass through their place. Not because they hate me. Maybe after they have done their own, they will now say ‘let us get this people involved.’ But at the end of the day, if I give you a hoe, you will drag the soil to yourself first before you give it to somebody else. Politics is a struggle.
Is there something being done to address this anomaly?
Bamigbetan: We are working on it. What I’m just saying now is part of our agitation. We are letting the world be aware. We are letting those who are in position to be aware that we also need to increase our team so that those who can push for policies for resources here would be more. In the last four, five years we have done much better than we ever did. We now have a major project at the Ejigbo-Ajao estate link bridge is coming, the NNPC road is done…. All these happened in the last four years. It shows that we are making progress in terms of attracting resources for our environment but we could do much better with more presence and more commitment.
You have been getting employment for about 100 people every year. How long have you been doing that?
Bamigbetan: Since 2012.
How many people have been employed so far?
Bamigbetan: Before I travelled recently, there were 156. I’ve just been told now that 18 more have been employed in the last weeks.
Where do they employ these people?
Bamigbetan: Private sector. We know that our own local government cannot absorb, so we partner with private sectors, we go to them, we make a case, that at the local government we have youths, and that we would guarantee these youths, we will be their referees eventually so that in case they do anything, we would be held responsible for them. That makes the companies feel more comfortable, dealing with us than dealing with private individuals that they know nothing about. And that has encouraged many private companies to partner with us to employ our youths. And they still pass through the interviews but they are able to come out best. And we believe that it’s gonna help us because when these people collect their salaries at the end of the month, they are gonna spend it in our markets, and the economy of Ejigbo will grow higher.
Who is eligible for the employment?
Bamigbetan: Mainly graduates. They must live here (in Ejigbo LCDA).
What happened to paper, The Country, that you were publishing sometime ago?
Bamigbetan: I was editor of The Country. When the owner, Chief Ikechi Emenike, who also is a journalist, went to run for Senate in Abia, by the time he came back he didn’t have enough funds to continue so he had to suspend publication. That was what led to the suspension of The Country. In 2002.
While at The Punch, you ran into trouble after you reported that Harry Akande was the richest man in the world. What actually happened?
Bamigbetan: The Punch experience was very interesting because it’s one of the reasons why we journalists have to be very careful with our sources of information. In that instance, a fellow journalist sent me a story about the richest man, who had just been declared the richest Nigerian, and that that person was Harry Akande. That a Nigerian is one of the 10 Richest Persons in the world. And I was on my way home, normally I would check my mail before I go home, and I saw this and I took it to the news editor then. The news editor looked at it and took it up to the editor in chief because the editor was not around. He was asked to go ahead and use it. This was around year 2000. The editor came back and said that I should rewrite the story. I trained as a sub editor, so I rewrote it and they put my by-line there. And the next day, we ran the lead story and the publisher requested to know more of the details of how this thing came about. And we discovered that that story wasn’t true at the end of the day. The guy who sent the story couldn’t source the thing.
But the point I was making was that even before that time I had this premonition that something unusual was going to happen, and I had asked for a leave of one month because I needed to get out of the state, and this thing met me there and it started a crisis in which I had to resign.
You resigned or you were forced to resign?
Bamigbetan: I had to resign. Because my track record in that place don’t justify being fired. So the best the editors could do was to say I should resign. I think it was after I left there that I became the editor of The Country newspaper. Even after I left Punch, Thisday offered me to come and become Political Editor of Thisday, I said I was not in the mood. Because I have been Political Editor of The Concord, I have been head of Politics Desk of The Punch, I said I would be repeating the same thing if I went to Thisday as the head of Politics again. I wanted something more challenging. At that period I was doing research for books until the The Country idea came up.
After your tenure as chairman, are you going back to journalism full time or staying in politics?
Bamigbetan: I’m still in the media. The only newspaper that is circulated in Lagos secondary schools is published by the company that I started, Echo News. So I’m still in the media.
I meant, do you hope to contest of the House of Assembly or any other higher office?
Bamigbetan: The constitution gives the party the power to present candidates, there is no independent candidature in our constitution here….
But do you have the intention of presenting yourself to the party for selection?
Bamigbetan: I would not. I believe that by now I’ve shown the party what I can do. I feel the party is in the best state to appreciate my capacity to deliver and where they think I can play a role. The party is like a coach and all of us are players. The party will decide, based on what they think it’s your capacity to do.
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