My vision is to drive a new Bayelsa through information management –Iworiso-Markson

Mr. Daniel Iworiso-Markson is the immediate past Chief Press Secretary to Governor Henry Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State. In a recent minor cabinet reshuffle, the Public Relation expert was assigned to man the Ministry of Information and Orientation as the Commissioner. In this interview with selected journalists, the Commissioner bared his mind on the changes he would bring to bear in managing information in the state. He also gave insight into the Public Sector Reforms going on in the state. CHRIS EZE reports.

Your appointment as the new Information Commissioner attracted unusual solidarity from journalists across the state. What do you think informed such development?
First and foremost, I feel very humbled. I am grateful to God; I am grateful to His Excellency for finding me worthy to be so elevated.

The loud support my appointment received goes to show that I may have done something right in the cause of my work in government.

And if that is the case, I have my colleagues in the media to thank for their support and collaboration, without which all my efforts would be a nullity.

So my response would be – I am humbled, I am grateful to everyone who supported my growth and my work in Bayelsa State, and I remain eternally grateful.

Your appointment came at the last lap of the Restoration Government. What should Bayelsans expect from the Commissioner who received the loudest ovation on appointment?
I am coming in at a time when, the state, especially His Excellency, leading this restoration team, has done so much to transform the state and impact on the lives of the people.

And therefore my role, essentially, is to communicate effectively all of these good and wonderful policies and programmes of government that His Excellency has put out there to transform the state and impact the lives of the people.

Like I said in my interview shortly after I was sworn-in, I said that we will take the message to the grassroots, to the people in the hinterland, because sometimes we get carried away thinking that information dissemination should just be within Yenagoa or when we do it we assume that it will get to everyone.

But like I said some time ago, I got a call from a teacher in Southern Ijaw, precisely from Koloama, and he said to me that I should do everything within my powers to boost the capacity of our radio station

so that he can receive the broadcast signals where they are because where they are they don’t get the broadcast signals of our local stations, Radio Bayelsa. So the only station they listen to is Radio Gabon.

There and then I realised that, what that simply means is that all the wonderful things we are doing in Government, some of our people who live in far flung areas like Southern Ijaw, Agge, Brass, are sometimes cut off because information does not get to them.

So I made up my mind that that is what we are going to do as a government, as a ministry, to take information about the good things this government has done to them.

How do you intend to achieve this laudable objective? Would you consider reintroducing the posting of Information Officers to the local government areas?
Yes we will do that and much more. One of the things we have already put forward as proposal before Exco and I’m glad to say that His Excellency has graciously approved that proposal.

It’s the establishment of Community Radio that will broadcast in indigenous languages of our people.

The Community radio will be established in each Senatorial zone. Each Senatorial zone will have a radio that will broadcast in indigenous languages of our people.

The other way to do it is to empower Information Officers in our ministry and have them stationed in each of our local governments, where they can have access to the communities and help in the dissemination of government information down the ladder.

So we will do that, and that is why one of the things I quickly did was to organize a two day workshop for information managers in the ministry so we can have the capacity to deliver right to the grassroots.

It’s going to be a two way thing in information dissemination, but we also need a feedback from the people, and to ensure that our Information Officers that will be working in our local government areas and our communities will be able to take feedback from our communities to us,

because we need the feedback more than anything else, because that is essentially what government is all about, to serve our people, and what better way to serve them than to get feedback from them regarding what we are doing. We will do a lot of reorientation as well.

This government, when it came into power in 2012, the governor was very specific as part of one of his major mandate, to change the paradigm shift of governance and a lot of that also requires some of the things we are doing now-public sector reforms.

What we need to do as a ministry, we have identified, is to carry out the message of this public reform to every nook and cranny of our state, and a lot of them would require orientation.

This ministry is the Ministry of Information and Orientation; we will have the need to do a lot of orientation. Our people need to be reoriented, the need for them to go to work and earn their salaries.

Not that they will go to work one day and go home and sleep and wait till when they want to pay salaries they will go and collect their salaries;

the need for teachers to go to classroom every day to teach, the need for Nurses and Doctors who are posted to our communities to serve in our referral hospitals and even our Local Government Clinics to be there in their duty posts not for them to stay in Yenagoa and go to work once a week.

There is a whole lot of orientation that will be done. So we are strengthening the capacity of our Public Enlightenment Directorate.

We are going to equip them with vehicles, operational vehicles, and they will be touring our communities.

There will be lots of town hall meetings across all our communities where we will also have that opportunity to disseminate government information and government policies and programs.

So these are some of the ways and means we are going to reach out to our people with the much needed information on what we are doing for them.

You were the Deputy Chairman of Government Media Team. Now that you are the Chairman what new innovations do you intend to bring to bear on the job?
I have already mentioned the new changes I hope to make in disseminating Government Information. However I want to add that this government has been very magnanimous in appointing very qualified people to man Government Information.

I am lucky to have a team of experts, and together with my team we meet every week, every Tuesday.

The information management team of the government meets and what we do is to review the strategies and look at what we need to do to respond to issues and developments happening in the state.

That, we will continue to do because no one person knows it all. When we work as a team we are effective, even the governor is a team player.

He has set up several teams, the media team is one of them, we have the health team , the finance team, the tourism team, education team, and that is a model that we are also looking at, to work as a team.

We are also to work with the various media organisations in the state. They are also incorporated as part of our larger team. They are also part of the larger media team, and what we have done, I have received in audience the NUJ courtesy call, I have also received the BAFEMPA.

We will be receiving very soon members of the Federated. And we are hosting a two days workshop to train them as well. The truth is that a number of our journalists need to be trained.

You cannot over emphasise the need for constant training and retraining. So for us in the Ministry we want to Champion that, because we need Journalists in the state to be on the same page with us regarding what we are doing in government.

Once you are on the same page with us, it makes things easy for us to work together. So these are some of the things we are doing to change the face of communication in the state.

Our whole efforts and drive is to change the narrative. We want Bayelsa to be perceived as a place where things work. We have a government in place that is ready to make things work.

And we would like to say that six years into the life of this administration a lot has changed. Bayelsans appreciate the work this government has done to transform our lives and the state. Look around you, the developments that have taken place.

For the first time we have compulsory boarding schools that have admitted our young children. Over a thousand of them are in Ijaw National Academy being trained free.

Free feeding, free cloths, free books. I don’t think there is any state in this country that is doing that.

And the whole idea is, look, we have to begin a new generation of new leaders that will take our state to a new level.

We are talking about knowledge driven economy, we want to be at the fore front, and our investment in education is paying off.

And we are so happy; we used to be at rock bottom in the ranking, now we are at the top. Bayelsa is top in WAEC, we are the top three in NECO. Our students are winning laurels all over the country.

Even just recently, one of our scholars, Preye, came out tops as the best graduating student in Lincoln University.

We are doing a lot, we are achieving great things. That is the cause of commitment of this government to completely change and transform the state the way he is doing.

So, we are getting things right in all sectors. Look at the huge investment in infrastructure.

For the first time, we are seeing roads and bridges and even some communities that were hitherto cut off from civilization, if you like, now for the first time you can see cars drive to their communities.

The governor under took a historic drive to Alaibiri the other day. That itself is something we are all proud of.

So, our state is changing. All we ask from the people is support for this government.

Now for the first time we are seeing roads and bridges. And so we will ensure that we spend the rest two years of our administration to complete ongoing projects.

The alleged intended sacking of workers is generating tension in the state, and this seems to have affected the morale and out put of workers, what is your reaction sir?
That is a misconception. There is no sack anywhere. What we have simply done is to say that, we need to clean up the system and this has been our drive from the word go, when we came into government in 2012, we met a wage bill of N6.7billion for a small state like Baylsa.

We thought that was a bit out of place, so we decided that, look, we must address the issue. So His Excellency set up various committees which have been working since 2012. It’s very comprehensive.

So from N6.7 billion in 2012 brought it down to N3.7 billion. That is huge, but we felt that was not good enough and there is still a lot we need to do, and that is what we are doing.

The far reaching reforms we have introduced in the public sector is aimed at ensuring that we get it right with the public sector. And so, a lot of ghost names in our payroll have to go.

There are so many inappropriate issues surrounding the Civil Service, and even the public service as a whole where in some cases we have more non academic staff in our schools than the real teachers themselves.

That is not proper, and a lot of people who have no business being in our payroll are there. People, for instance who are supposed to retire, go and swear an affidavit and reduce their ages so that they can extend their retirement dates.

That is not proper. People are using fake certificates and they give themselves arbitrary promotions. For instance, we have situation where some one in 2011 was on grade four, only for him to have himself promoted to grade fourteen in 2012.

You have several cases like that. This is as a result of the painstaking efforts to try to clean up the system.

And when we do that, and because there is a syndicate group behind all of these, they are the ones fighting back and spreading all kinds of information all aimed at discrediting the government and saying that we are sacking 6000.

The governor has not said he would sack any one. We are only saying that once we discover that your name appears in several places and you are drawing salary from several’ places, we will stop your salary and put it in an unpaid salary account.

We have already set up a judicial panel of enquiry that will be sitting soon at the multi-door Court House and will be headed by Justice Doris Adokeme.

Those of them affected, once your salary have been stopped you have to appear before the panel with all your document. Once you appear before the panel and your documents are genuine you will be cleared and pick up your salary.

It is not a witch- hunt. The process is very transparent. But if you have issues, you have the law courts to deal with, because right in that panel are representatives of the Police,

the State Security Service and they will prosecute you because we have to put a stop to what is going on in our state. We cannot continue to carry this baggage and hand it over to the next government.

So it takes a determined Governor Dickson who is willing to sacrifice his Political Capital so that we can get it right because we have been playing politics with these issues for a long time, and it is the reason why we are where we are today.

A lot of our youths are roaming the streets for employment when you have people who suppose to retire still in the system.

So, we have to clean the entire system, otherwise we will mortgage the future of our state, and in the future to come you may no longer see a state call Bayelsa.

We need our people to understand that what we are doing is in their best interest and to save our state from imminent collapse; because we don’t have the resources we used to have five or Six years ago.

Everywhere in the world there is scarce resources, and so if we don’t get it right then we will continue to deal with the issues that has continued to hold us back as a state and we don’t want that to happen.

What should journalists expect from the brand new Information Commissioner?
Journalists should expect more collaboration, more partnership. This government is open to journalists in the state. This is a media friendly government.

His Excellency has never forgotten the fact that he is been a friend of journalists in the state long before now and it’s that gesture that he is extending to journalists in the state.

So I am carrying on with what he has already started, to strengthen the bond between journalists and the government, and that is why you see the ministry is involved in training and a lot of collaboration with journalists in the state because we are partners in progress.

We want to be accountable to the people and journalists have that role constitutionally provided to hold government accountable.

So we are partners in progress for the overall development of our state. So expect more collaboration, expect more partnership, and going forward, my role is to strengthen that.

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This government, when it came into power in 2012, the governor was very specific as part of one of his major mandate, to change the paradigm shift of governance and a lot of that also requires some of the things we are doing now-public sector reforms. What we need to do as a ministry, we have identified, is to carry out the message of this public reform to every nook and cranny of our state, and a lot of them would require orientation. This ministry is the Ministry of Information and Orientation; we will have the need to do a lot of orientation.