Why I Settled for Gubernatorial Race--Oshiomhole.This leads us to this core question: if you become the governor of EdoState, what will be your immediate areas of attention?
The key issue is the elimination of poverty. To do that we need to invest in two broad areas, namely to ginger up the civil service, motivate them through further improvement of skills or retraining. The second is the public infrastructure - roads, both urban and rural roads, access to clean water. I believe if you make the right investment in those areas you will generate a number of economic activities, which will engage labour and create more employment. We have to address the issue of the economy of the state and broaden the productive base of the state such that the private sector can contribute to the creation of employment. To do that, we will find out exactly what the private sector wants. Unfortunately in Nigeria, government puts more obstacles in the way of business, rather than create more opportunities to attract business.

This is the only place where local councils compete to tax people for putting up signboards for their small-scale enterprises, or tax people for plying a particular road. In other parts of the world, when you talk about a federal state like Nigeria, governments are supposed to create incentives in order to affect the economies of industrial locations. A businessman, in choosing where to put in his money, is never really tribalistic. His tribe is profit. Why should he locate here rather than here? One of the most creative Nigerians who believes in the economy of the country, Aliko Dangote, for instance. Just look at his investment policies in terms of location. You will find that it is not influenced by any ethnic sentiments. He puts his business where there is access to raw materials, where he has access to the markets, he takes key economic issues into consideration. And so, he is in Lagos and Calabar where he will take advantage of port location. He is in Kogi and Benue whe re he can have access to solid minerals. We have to try and find out, what is in our state that given the right incentives, will attract business people? We have a lot of wood, solid minerals

We can attract furniture companies, cement companies, there are so many things we can do to bring in agro-allied business. My government will set up a fund and identify private business partners and see how we can work together. I do not believe that the role of government is just to sit down and wait, collect federal allocation and when it finishes you wait for the next sharing session. I believe that we can set up funds to boost industrial activities, though I also know that government ownership of business has not been particularly successful in Nigeria. I blame a lot of that on political leadership. If you have the discipline to appoint people on the basis of competence and the discipline not to interfere, and sufficient political will to punish where abuses occur, government enterprises can work even in Nigeria.

I have always said that the most efficient refinery in the world is in Singapore. And it is not owned by the private sector. Ideology has been sufficiently downplayed. Even China and Russia are now talking about profit-oriented private business. It is a matter of determining the level of government involvement. The best potential for creating maximum employment opportunities is when there is a compliment between the private and public sectors. There was a time in the UK that government decided, rather than pay so much money to the unemployed, it set aside some funds to support business without necessarily spoon feeding them. Business goes through cycles of boom and burst. What can you do to prevent the burst? Government gives private business a helping hand on the condition that they keep their work force rather than retrench. What we have is a situation whereby government wants to tax even before the wealth is created. I have travelled extensively, been to China, talked to b usinesses and unions. These so-called free trade zones emanate from the idea of government wanting to remove some of the burden of private business. You don't have to create free trade zones to do that. There are many things a state can do to make the environment investment-friendly.