The last time Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani made national headlines, it was not about himself. Well, it was but he could not preen because it was about someone else: his predecessor, Malam El Rufai. Now he can.
There is a reason. After a few episodes of public cacophony, the former Kaduna State leader is as quiet as an extinct volcano. His Napoleonic stature and hubris have, like the French general, been smarting from a Waterloo. He may be in his own version of Saint Helena. His past has bullied him into silence. Inquiries about his doings in office have cast a shadow over him, and he who often blasted any slight, minimised any threat, is now a mouse without a sound.
Governor Sani had decided to cry out. He had a debt burden. He could not heed the two labour leaders’ fulminations about wage increase and other allowances. The government was barely afloat. The waves were heady, tumbling and roaring. Drowning beckoned.
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But Governor Uba Sani has, in the past week, drawn attention. He acted, a performance as defiance against the odds of the past month and year. He was not in a joyful mood in the past drama. But this time, out of the slumber, it was defiance with a sunny face.
In spite of the debt agony, he has found a way forward. He is punching debt in the eye, presaging its death sentence. He is pursuing a financial reengineering. But that was not on the surface last week.
As other governors are planning their one-year anniversary, he is commissioning. Other than over 500 kilometres of 50 roads across the state, he set two important projects in motion. One was the Panteka Market. The other was a soya bean refining plant.
The story of Panteka is now a metaphor for the trajectory of Gov. Sani’s stewardship. A rise out of the ashes. He met the state in a state of burn. The finances had caught fire when he became governor. Because of his relationship with his predecessor, he did not want to show him up. He wanted silence and to gradually work things out. But fire cannot hide. To put it out, he had to speak out.
Ditto to Panteka Market, a popular place he commissioned. In January, it crackled and fell from flame to ashes. Last week, Governor Sani launched its first stage of restoration. After restoring, to refine it. After refining, to prosper.
So, for him, launching the market was saying goodbye to despair. As an activist, he knows a lot about moving forward. The market is about human development, as it is about an enabling environment to buy and sell. It is for the skills and the learner of skills. For the electrician, plumbers, masons, painters, mechanics and more. But he looks beyond that.
“It will be the biggest technology hub in northern Nigeria,” he exhaled. A humdinger of a claim.
This is good news away from want and fear, away from airport without access, of hoodlums tearing away at night with ingenues and virgins, of priests beheaded and villagers in flight, of airspace without flights, of schools as entrapment.
But this market is like the story of Prophet Joshua in Zechariah’s vision. The prophet, soaked in filth, is a metaphor of a path to reconditioning. But he is told that he is “a brand – or a piece of wood – plucked out of the fire.” That is Panteka Market. It is first a rescue and later a refinement. That is Sani’s vision. Out of the fire comes forth newness. As a market that started by fabricating metals, Panteka Market hopes to become like a metal chiseled out of a fire, like a gold bar.
Kaduna used to be the north. It was the city of power and glory, where the north went to think and counsel, where it nurtured prosperity. Adams Oshiomhole once told me about his time in Kaduna when textile boomed and the city was a mecca of talent and investors.
That is what Kaduna should be.
The Panteka Market is not just a market, but a way of prosperity. Economic theorist and anthropologist, Karl Polanyi argued in his opus, The Great Transformation, that markets are not meant to be contained in one place. Panteka is a free market but, by definition, free market is a contradiction. A market is less a place than a state. It is fluid, active, mercurial, a source of interaction and thought, a magnet of peoples far and near. Hence the governor made the claim that it is a hub of northern Nigeria. A market cannot, therefore, serve as just a self-contained entity or else it will challenge the social order. A modern market is witchcraft. It is here but it flies everywhere.
Panteka can occupy a real estate, but it is London, in Maiduguri, where persons may want to exchange goods and buy. It is in the buses and trucks on the highways and the computer, whirring from emails, WhatsApp and X, in boardroom brawls and debate and decisions.
The soya bean refining plant is less about the plant, although the plant is a very significant thing. It is bringing in a $50 million investment. It is tapping into an agricultural potential dormant for a long time. The CEO licked his chomps to be in Kaduna. I learned he had long wanted to launch the project in Kaduna and nowhere else. But he was looking for the right atmosphere. Sani offered, and he obliged.
It will bring jobs, but not just jobs. It will afford suppliers to the plant in markets near and far, not just about that. It is about a state regaining its pride and pride of place. Marxists say the material determines the immaterial. Sometimes and to some extent, of course. But in the final analysis, we don’t live for food and shelter. We live for pride, according to Athol Fugard, the playwright. Francis Fukuyama described it as prestige when he announced the death of communism in his book, The End of his History and the Last Man.
But when a person cannot eat, he knows no pride. He settles for his food. Hunger can be exaggerated, especially when it confronts sentiment. May our hunger not be tested, apologies to BRF. Since independence, hunger has yielded to tribe and faith, or group in elections. We have always voted for who we love or hate but not what we want.
Marrying Panteka with the Soya Bean refining plant shows an industrial vision of the new helmsman in Kaduna.
It is a testament to his optimism. As George Bernard Shaw says, “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.”
Sani sees the aeroplane, an irony for a state that airlines had abandoned. Now, the major airlines are planning to bubble through its clouds. It also shows the work the new chief of defence staff, Christopher Musa, is doing up north. Southern Kaduna, few have noticed, is getting safer. We hope it gets better.
While his predecessor is under probe, Governor Sani is an instance of manoeuvre in a time of financial headwinds. He has bought no new cars, not for himself or any in the state. After the sore experience of the past year, he is probably acting like Sir Andrew in the famous ballad: “I am struck and wounded/ I lay me down and rest awhile/ and I’ll rise and fight again.”
