The Chief Executive Officer of SAO Capital, Ayo Sotinrin in this interview with MARY NNAH speaks on how his organisation has been working with the current administration in Ondo State, while also revealing that based on the economic reformation and infrastructural development plan, tenacity of the current government as well as accelerated mode of economic growth in the state, he envisages an Ondo that will rapidly develop in all dimensionsI’m the Group CEO of SAO Group.
I moved back to Nigeria nine years ago when I was appointed Special Adviser on Environment to the Honourable Minister of State and FCT and one of the notable achievements then was the creation of a satellite and development agency, through executive order of President Jonathan. We are one of the leading development advisory firms within the Africa sphere, not just Nigeria. Part of SAO portfolio companies is also SAO agro. We do stuff in agro space. We are into investment in agrospace across the continents.
It’s been about four years, even though the government had not spent four years in office. The reason why I said its four years is because immediately the governor won his election, he called a few of us and we told him what we believed is the best way to achieve his goal for the state and after competitive bid, we were selected to be the sole investment financial adviser to the Ondo State government and we’ve not done badly so far.
So, after doing a diagnostic study to get the baseline of what is already on ground in terms of infrastructural development in terms of social amenities within the state, we came up with a wish list of projects and we did a prioritisation of those projects to select what we believe can be done short terms and also that we can do long term as well.
In the city, you have better roads than rural roads. However, the people in the city are mostly civil servants that work for the government and get paid by the government. The percentage of the people living in the urban area as compared to the rural dwellers, there’s a margin disparity like 70 per cent to 30 per cent ratio.
So, when the water tide rises at Ayetoro, it washes up to a quarter of the community in recent years and this year, we also experienced that where people that lived 30 meters from the sea had their houses washed away. So, we actually have many projects and this is the first of its kind in Ondo state.
When I say we raise money, raising money does not necessarily mean we raised money that attract interest rate alone; we applied what we call a blended financing method, where we make use of different financial capital where we talk about grant money from development financial institutions, if you can justify what you want to use the money for. A lot of philanthropic types of money as well.
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