Kano State Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, in this interview with Legal Editor JOHN AUSTIN UNACHUKWU, speaks on the administration of justice, law reforms, Kano’s multi-door courthouse and continuing legal education.
Last year, Kano State partnered the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) during its Annual General Conference. You had a full session. You also made a return this year. Why?
I do appreciate the work of the judiciary, for without it, democracy will not be complete. I think it is very important for us to note this and, therefore, strengthen the judiciary and other democratic institutions. The rule of law is a very important component of a vibrant democracy and good governance which we must abide by.
Why have you shown such interest in lawyers’conferences?
Lawyers contribute a lot to democracy by guiding the executive arm of government, making sure that human rights are respected, that governmental excesses are checkmated, and that individual liberties of citizens are secured and protected. All these form basic parts of good governance, and I am committed to ensure that the rule of law thrives in Kano State and that the judiciary functions optimally.
So, what have you done to improve and strengthen judicial institutions in Kano State?
As part of my contribution in building and strengthening the judicial institutions in Kano State, I make sure that lawyers from Kano State are assisted to grow; they all participate in conferences like this. I equally encourage them to take other Continuing Legal Education programmes to sharpen and enhance their capacity to perform within the industry.
In addition, we hope to get a very good number of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) from Kano State. Some of our lawyers will go to the Bench, while some will remain in private law practice. For now, we compete favourably in the federation; we have the highest population in the country and so, whatever profession you mention, we should strive to see that we are there in numbers and performance. That is the motivating factor behind my interest and participation in this conference. Kano State will not be left out in this effort at enhancing transition, transformation and sustainable institutions in the country.
How do you feel being part of this year’s conference?
The theme is apt, the timing is auspicious and I hope that the results and effects of the conference at the end of the day will be fantastic and advance our socio-economic and political development.
The NBA has been advocating the adoption of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015 by all the states. What is Kano’s position?
We don’t have any criminal justice law in Kano State but we set up a 16-member committee chaired by the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice to look at the existing Criminal Procedure Code in the state and the new ACJA provisions with the hope that we will have a better Criminal Procedure Law combining both the old and new innovations to have the best law in the country. That is we have done. The committee has concluded its work. We now have a draft law in our hands, which has just been validated by stakeholders. The Bill is now before the state House of Assembly for passage into law.
What is unique about the bill?
In fact, other states in the northern parts of the country have started requesting for a copy because our law will be applicable, not only at the High Courts, but also in Sharia and Magistrates Courts. So, it is applicable to all the courts. You don’t have to carry different procedure laws in your bag as a lawyer practicing in the state. It is unique, very transparent and all the new innovations provided for under the new ACJA are properly covered in our draft bill, including the issue of speedy trial, transparent trial, and investigation by the police, to make sure that the incidence of torture is eliminated in the process of investigation
Most modern commercial cities are strengthening Alternative Disputes Resolution (ADR) mechanism institutions to complement the courts in resolving commercial disputes. What is the position in Kano State?
Kano State is one of the first states to establish a Multi-Door Courthouse. The purpose is to enhance and ensure alternative disputes resolution. That is their main mandate. Under our rules of courts, there is a provision which empowers judges to refer a case filed before him to the Multi-door Courthouse for settlement. He has the right to give that order and that house can attempt to settle the parties. If they succeed, they will just send their settlement terms to the court and the court will adopt same as a consent judgment instead of the long and tortuous way of litigation. Kano is one of the first states to embrace ADR after Lagos State. Apart from that Multi-door Courthouse, which is an establishment of law, we also have the Citizens Rights Department under the Kano State Ministry of Justice where ADR is being applied and people are coming in daily to resolve their disputes.
How is the department doing?
That department is doing very well and we have another plan. I gave approval to create the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) in the state because it will help the public not only in ADR, but in defending them in courts. State counsel cannot defend somebody in court, but if you have to create an agency to do this independent of the Ministry of Justice, it will help greatly in delivering justice to the people. You can see that we have done a lot along that side and even beyond that we have developed our institutions to the extent that we have improved the ease of doing business in the state. All those institutions that are responsible for the commercial activities of the state are being developed to the extent that there is no time wasted. There is optimum utilisation of all infrastructural and human resources to put the state on a fast lane in terms of the ease of doing business. An example is the land issue which we have revolutionised.
What do you mean by this?
It doesn’t take time for anybody to get his or her Certificate of Occupancy (Cof O) to do his business in Kano. It doesn’t take time to get approval for your building plan. It doesn’t take time to process whatever you have to do with the government as far as business plans are concerned. Even the judiciary is doing its own, the anti-corruption agencies are doing their own. These are things that make people afraid to invest in any given place. You can see that we have scored high. We also give concessions to those who will like to invest in Kano. We give free land to those who would like to build industries, like those who produce solar energy, we gave them free land. We give compensation to those who work round the clock to see that things work well – those who produce electricity for Kano State. We have improved our markets. With high population density in Kano, we need extra markets. Therefore, we worked with private estate developers to build what we call Kano Economic City, in which they are spending over N65billion and work has started there along Zaria Road. Many people are being employed and they are working there to produce a complete economic city for the state. That is very important.
How can the anti-corruption fight and the whistle-blowing policy be strengthened?
The anti-corruption fight is the policy of the All Progressives Congress (APC) led by President Muhammadu Buhari. Kano as of today is leading in the fight against corruption. We have succeeded in establishing a very strong anti-corruption institution in the state headed by a very senior personality. We have succeeded in building offices in all the Local Government Areas of the state so that you do not need to come to the city before you lay your complaints. In these offices, we have installed some communication equipment for easy communication with the headquarters of the anti-corruption office. Also, we have a synergy with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) through which we trained 50 people in anti-corruption fight, as well as with the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), through which we trained 25. Our staff attend international conferences in anti-corruption because of the synergy we have with the anti-corruption agencies of the Federal Government. Some commissioners in the state lost their jobs because of corruption related practices. Some permanent secretaries lost their jobs because of corruption. So, you can see that we have done a lot in the area of anti-corruption crusade. Our anti-corruption agency is an independent body and it works closely with the Federal anti-corruption agencies. This is how far we have gone in order to make sure that the agencies are working.
What would you say have been your major challenges and achievements in Kano State?
Well, first of all I thank President Buhari for doing a lot to scale down the menace of Boko Haram insurgency. We have to thank him for that because we used to get a lion share of the calamity from Boko Haram, but now, I can say that we are free from that. We are working round the clock to address the challenges of cattle rustling in the state. I had to deal with it squarely. I also had to deal with the issue of kidnapping squarely. The issue of armed robbery in Kano, I had to also deal with it squarely. Kano is now peaceful and investment is now coming into the state. That is a tremendous achievement.
Another achievement is the in the area of infrastructure development, especially road infrastructure. Kano is a mega city and a mega city is not only a city with high population density, but a city where things are working. We have studied the transportation system of the state and we found out that a lot of traffic jam, snarls and ‘go slow’ are heavily experienced within the metropolitan Kano. So, I approved the redesigning of Kano Metropolitan City on which work is about to be completed and we have been getting reports from them. We have been using part of the recommendation to see how we can introduce more road infrastructure comparable to what is obtained in any civilised city in the world. And to that extent, we have built a number of flyovers, a number of interchanges that have greatly changed the face of metropolitan Kano of which we are very proud.
What about the health sector?
Health is very important. We have been able to introduce health infrastructure and health financing. So, apart from improving infrastructural facilities, building roads and bridges, we have built new health facilities and centres. We introduced the contributory health schem – health insurance scheme which has succeeded. I am happy to state that our civil servants don’t need to carry money to the hospitals again. That is an achievement. Also, in order to reduce health and medical tourism, we were able to develop two mega hospitals with high quality state-of-the-art equipment in synergy with some teaching hospitals who are bringing their own students to Kano. Many people who were going abroad for medical treatment now come to Kano instead and we are very happy for that. We also have what we call health trust fund where 10 per cent of our Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) go to. One percent of Local Government IGR goes into that. So, we have funds which we spend in our hospital consumables.
Another critical area we have done a lot is the area of education where we have benefited a lot from the counterpart funding of the Federal Government. We have built thousands of classroom blocks in order to reduce congestion in our secondary schools. We have provided them with high grade furniture to make teaching and learning easy for our students. Our student intake has improved greatly and now we are seeking to incorporate Koranic teaching into the modern system of education without destroying the curriculum of the Islamic education. We are doing this to reduce the menace of the Almajiris on the streets of Kano. These are some of the things we are proud of.
How has your background assisted you to improve the quality of education in Kano?
My next academic qualification after secondary school is the Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE), and then I went for Masters degree in Education and Psychology. Even my first degree was in science education and biology. So, you can see that I am familiar with what is happening in the education sector. In fact, education in Kano is no more business as usual. It is not every type of graduate that can now fit into the system. Like you know, the minimum qualification to teach even in primary school is the NCE Certificate. So, my concern is that education should be dominated by those who have certificate in education, which is why we undertook a survey in Kano State to see our teachers in the primary school which is the foundation.
What was the result?
We found that about 56 per cent of them were not qualified to teach. What we did, instead of relieving them of their job which would create a problem, was to discuss with the institutions of higher learning in the state to offer them certificate courses in education and we have succeeded in graduating about 2,000. In two months’ time we are going to graduate 25,000 of them. All of them will then be qualified and that is how we have decided to professionalise education in order to improve the quality of education in the state. We are also conscious of what happens when you have a lot of students in a classroom. They have to be decongested otherwise it negatively affects teaching and learning. It affects everything, including the concentration of the children. So, we succeeded in producing a new design especially in the cities. We have two blocks of classrooms because of the lack of space. Also, we train and retrain our teachers. We imported text books, note books. You know the feeding policy of the Federal Government, we also do our own feeding in Kano State. These are what we do to keep the children in school instead of wandering in the streets selling things in the city or in the rural areas. You can see that we have given education a lot of attention in state from our budget and we will continue to do that.
2019 is an election year. What is your advice to politicians?
What we should do as a developing country is to have political parties with ideology. Like the APC, when we started as a political party, it was an admixture of people from different groups – the good, the bad and the ugly. We actually started along that line, but now we have formed a government and the leader of our government is a person who is very honest, a person who is working very hard, who is committed to Nigeria, who loves Nigeria more than he loves himself, that is President Buhari. So, those who don’t actually belong to that line are falling out and that is good for the party.
You can see that in the long run, the APC is going to be a party with very progressive ideology and only those who think that they belong to that political inclination will remain in the party and that is good for the party. Those impurities who are not supposed to be there right from the beginning but were there because of convenience and now that they found out that the convenience is no longer there, they started to move out. I think that they have to gather in a party that has no coherent political ideology, let them be there. So, my advice to politicians is that you choose a party where you think your inclination belongs, otherwise we continue having a mixture and a political party cannot survive with a mixture. A political party will only survive when it is a compound, that is when all the elements are the same.