The #EndBadGovernance protests had come and gone, but the consequence from the destruction of lives and properties in the North would take the region several years to recover from. In an interview aired on TVC and monitored by SANNI ONOGU, Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani speaks on several issues bothering on governance both at the federal and state levels. EXCERPTS
These have been some interesting times. Ahead of the protests, you were up and doing, can you walk us through what went on just before the protests?
Of course, in Kaduna and the country generally, we started in Kaduna before the protests, when the organizers of the protests sent a message that they were calling on the security agencies to give them permission to embark on a 10 day protests across the country. In Kaduna in particular, we first called a town hall meeting, where we called our stakeholders that include our youth, women leaders, religious leaders, community leaders, as well as organized labour and civil society organizations. So, we came together and discussed on how we can be able to put our heads together to avert any problem that we may have as a result of the protests knowing fully that in Kaduna we know history.
We have had several riots and protests that led to destruction of properties and loss of human lives in the state. To avert a similar recurrent, I quickly called a town hall meeting and I reminded the people the history of Kaduna. We are cosmopolitan because we realised that any demonstration in Kaduna could easily turn into a religious crisis. It could turn into an ethnic crisis. But after the town hall meeting, I must commend the non-indigenes, though in Kaduna, we have since abolished the dichotomy between the citizens and the non-indigenes, they did not come out at all. And of course, many people in Kaduna out of 23 local governments, it is only in about three local governments precisely that the so-called organizers of the protest who happened to be faceless at the same time who have to also be hiding in their own homes in the comfort of their air conditioners. Some were in the TV stations talking but we didn’t see them on the streets so it was a demonstration or a protest that happened without any leader.
So in northern part of Nigeria you cannot really say this is the leader of that protest. You can’t see who was leading the protest. There was nobody that really appeared and said, look, I’m leading this protest. Some of us were willing to address them, but you cannot address a group that has no leader. So, that was what happened. Eventually, if you could recall in Kaduna, we were able to address the situation, and of course, nothing happened seriously. It was only after few days that the so-called sponsors, because I can tell you we had some level of investigation and we later realized that some prominent politicians in this country were responsible for mobilizing, misinforming, misguiding the vulnerable youths within our society. Most of them were underage. Some of them were as young as five years, six years, seven years. If you ask them, you cannot see any defined banner there. They don’t even know what they were talking about. So, but you see, the sad aspect of the whole protest I can tell you is that those people that mobilized those children used their own psychology. So because of that, they reminded them of what happened in Niger, what happened in Burkina Faso and what happened in Mali. So they made them understand, come out, raise the flag of Russia, and also go out to vandalize shops, do some businesses, and create chaos and certainly there will be change of government in Nigeria. So for me, people planned, organized, with a lot of resources to cause anarchy in the country and attack democracy.
As student union leaders, myself and the Senator Shehu Sani brought more than 10,000 students and youths demanding that the governor then reposition the scholarship of Kaduna state, where students that were vulnerable or poor could benefit. I can tell you, it was a two-day protest in Kaduna and nothing was vandalized, nothing was looted. It was a peaceful protest, but eventually, after two days, we went back to the table with the governor and within 48 hours, the governor addressed all our demands. So, that was what was called protest, because there was leadership. We led it, and that was the reason why we sat down with the governor then. It was then General Ibrahim Babangida’s regime but the governor was a civilian governor, late Governor Dabo Lere. After that, we also led series of protests and demonstrations fighting for the enthronement of democracy, defending and insisting that June 12 elections be validated. But that was protest because we knew our demands; we knew the leaders who were leading it. Of course, along the line the SSS detained us. The police detained us under Decree 2, that is detention without trial.
Over a week ago, I had said that from our little investigation in Kaduna, we were able to identify some politicians who were involved by giving those children money, because they confessed eventually to the security agencies. You must a report from the National Security Adviser that says that over N60 billion was spent to truncate this democracy.
Over N60 billion?
Yes, over N60billion. Of course, even from the report of the NSA close to $36million has now been frozen in crypto currency. So that is what is happening at the moment. As at today, that is a fact and whether we like it or not, you don’t have to be the government or in the government or with the ruling party or the opposition party as long as you believe in democracy, we must fight for democracy.
So these individuals who are behind this N60 billion and this $36 billion in Crypto that has been frozen, what do you expect to happen to them?
At the Council of State meeting, the National Security Adviser made it clear that investigation is ongoing. Both the NSA and the government now know the identities of most of them, and of course there’s also involvement of some foreign countries.
What foreign countries?
I will not mention that for now because the NSA will be the one to say that but I can tell you he made it clear to all of us. We may not mention all of them because there may be more as we are sitting here because investigations are ongoing. But it’s sad. It’s sad because the impression given to everyone is that the protest was about hunger. Everyone that lives in this country knows we are facing a lot of economic crisis in this country. Certainly, Nigeria is not immune to that crisis because it is a global economic crisis. It happened in the UK. In America it is the same. We have seen in virtually every country around the world. We see it every day. But you see, there’s a way to handle this issue and I agree that all of us in government, even those outside the government, within the business community, we must come together to address this problem because most of us that are now in government only about 14 months as a governor and the President is just 14 months. We inherited a very bad economy. You don’t need to go to school to know the economy was really bad.
It was on the brink. I mean, he said 97% of the revenue was going to debt. So we only had 3% to do what?
And you know, you were in this country and you know, through the Ways and Means Advances by the CBN to the Federal Government under Buhari, over N20 trillion was printed….
And with interest it was N30 trillion?
Yes. And when you look at it clearly, that means what happened in the last few years was what contributed to the problem of inflation in this country. Now that the inflation is rising, people do not know why it is rising. When you print almost N30 trillion with interest, it is just printed money. You don’t need to go to school, you don’t need to be an economist to know that we are destroying our economy. So, everybody knows, even those who are attacking the government don’t want to be sincere. They know they are only misinforming the gullible Nigerians. They don’t want to be sincere. For me, politics is politics. But sometimes in the interest of our own country, for once, let’s be sincere because it’s our country. We cannot destroy our country because of politics. That’s my position.
Though the narrative in public domain is that the protest was against hunge. It’s very important that we put this in context. When we saw those children, many of them are almajiris. Like I tried to suggest in my column, that these children who were protesting, they couldn’t have been protesting against hunger because the hunger didn’t start today.
Fantastic! You see, it’s a good question because that was the reason why some of us first look at the protests from two perspectives. Number one, if you look at the entire protest, you will realize that it was more serious in Northern Nigeria and the reason is simply because of the development indices in Northern Nigeria. Poverty is on the rise. The issue of out of school children is unprecedented in the region and when you look at the people who are financially excluded in Northern Nigeria, you’ll agree with me that it is criminal and unacceptable to have almost 70% of our adult population completely financially excluded. If you look at our poverty index, even eight years ago, compared to what is happening, you’ll see the alarming rate and this is worrisome.
Let me use Kaduna as an example. Kaduna situation is similar to what we have in other states in Northern Nigeria. As far back as 2014 in Kaduna, you can fact check, we have 22 local governments. 35 to 40% average population was living below the poverty line in about 20 local governments, particularly around those rural areas. We did a survey and the numbers were really alarming. Last October, the average we found after the survey, was about 70% or 80% in some local governments. In few local governments, you can see 60% but the average was about 68%. This means that from the 35% of the people living below the poverty line in 2014, the numbers are now about 68%. What happened within those years? Number one, we had opportunities. Of course, we really would have started to address the problem. Nobody did that. That was the reason why I always come out to say, look, we have to stop this blame game. We need to quickly put our heads together. Only last week, Vice President Kassim Shetimma, charged leaders in the region to rise to the occasion.
Precisely, 20 years ago, late Maitama Sule raised the alarm over the educational gap between the North and the South. He said, even if we keep investing in education, there will be 30 years gap between the North and the South and that’s what’s playing out. So, you see that UNICEF now reports about out of school children in Nigeria. You will agree with me that out of the 18.3 million out of school children, 14 million are domiciled in Northern Nigeria. So, for me, we need to go to the drawing board.
I also had consultation with some of the businessmen in Northern Nigeria and I made it clear to them that government alone cannot solve the problem. Can we for once stop wasting our time blaming President Bola Ahmed Tinubu? In fact, I was very sincere. Here in Nigeria today, what is our problem? If you look at the North, when you mention one area where we need to focus on apart from education, it is agriculture, where we can be able to increase our level of productivity, create jobs and reduce poverty. For example, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appointed a northerner as the minister of health. We have a lot of problems in healthcare, particularly when we look at child and mortality rate we have. The incumbent Minister of Health, is a northerner. Another problem is insecurity. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has appointed a northerner as the Minister of Defence. What do we need to do? We should sit down. It’s still not late. We can salvage the situation. But the only way to salvage the situation is for us to collectively accept the fact that we must address this issue. The blame game has to stop.
Now, it is also significant to talk about the North in terms of this vision that you will need going forward. What kind of conversation in the aftermath of all of these are the Northern Governors having about moving forward?
I am glad to inform you that just before this interview, a smaller group of Northern Governors collectively agreed that we need to quickly sit down and invite not only the people in the government, but even the people outside the government. Like I said, everyone who held a political office, in my interview two weeks ago, in the last 15 years, even back to 20 years, know the problem. In the next couple of weeks, we will summon that meeting and that meeting will involve even our experts we have within Northern Nigeria in terms of people who are experts in economy, health, agriculture, education, etc. We have to bring everyone together. Most importantly, we also have to bring our business people, those who are in the business community. If you look at the Northern Nigeria today, or Nigeria generally, you want to mention the 10 richest people in Nigeria, you will agree with me that out of the 10, five will be from North.
Somebody said…I think Reno Omokri, in one of his writings said that the wealthy in Northern Nigeria don’t want to invest in Northern Nigeria. One of the reasons was what happened. If for instance, Dangote had brought his refinery to the north, they would have gone there and destroyed it.
Oh, no, I disagree with him. Do you know why I said I disagree with him? It is that if all our business people will come to Northern Nigeria and invest, there will be jobs and all those children will not be in the street. They will have jobs. They will be creative because when you look at it, we are not talking about degrees, masters, PhDs. The world is turning into skills. That’s it. You might not necessarily want to have a degree or masters’, but as long as you can teach them skills, they will have something to do. There are many countries around the world that are investing more on skills than everything else. When you go to developed countries, many of these people are getting those that are focusing on these skills like the electricians, plumbers, tilers, etc. That’s why in Kaduna as we speak, we are building three skills acquired cities. We are partnering with an institution in Morocco, as well as NBTE, the National Board of Technical Education that is now in Kaduna, and by the time we finish in the next two months, we will be training at least 6,000 youths that will be gainfully employed because we realized that there is deficit in skills not only in Kaduna state but in Nigeria generally. Potato market is leading not only in Nigeria, in terms of artisanship but in the whole of Africa. Today, we have 38,000 artisans there on a daily basis.
And the lithium business…?
We are also trying as much as possible to create an opportunity for our people in terms of job creation, as well as driving investment to our state. If you look at solid minerals, we have gone far because we have a Chinese company, Nexin Limited that partners with Kaduna and our partnership is the best, because it’s 70-30. I realize that in many of others states, it’s 90-10 ration, but we insisted on 70-30 and as we are speaking, they have already started working, and they have employed over 7,000 of our youths. They have started the processing of the lithium and of course, that is also an avenue to generate more resources for the state and create jobs for our people.
Speaking about Kaduna, we have this issue about the finances that got into rough waters because of what you inherited in government. The debts are high and over N400billion. How are you re-engineering the finances to get all these jobs going because I have seen that you’ve done some work in rural roads and schools and so on?
You see, when you find yourself in a situation like ours, you need to sit down and plan. But the most important plan is you have to look at the way you are going to cut the cost of governance because for me that is key, because you have to look at the situation. For instance, today, if you talk in terms of finances, people are surprised that we are doing a lot of projects in Kaduna. This is simply because we’ve cut the cost of governance. How did we do it? Number one, when we came on board, we sat down because we wanted to be realistic, we wanted to be frank to each other. Not only we at the executive arm, even the members of the State Assembly who are a different arm of government and the judiciary, all of us sat together with the chief executive of the Kaduna, with the Speaker of the House of Assembly because one of our agenda is to work together for the betterment of Kaduna State. We all accepted the reality that we didn’t have money. So until this moment, I have not bought a single vehicle for any government official from myself down to commissioners, down to advisers, down to everyone. I have not bought a single vehicle because we know we cannot afford it.
The members of the State Assembly know that whenever they have a new State Assembly…when I was in the Senate that is the first thing. The first thing we had to have a very good one. Yes. But the State Assembly of Kaduna, because we take the budget to them for passage, they investigated the past administration. So they know as much as we know. I told them this is what we have, can you be patient? And thankfully, they showed that understanding. It is as bad as our Speaker not having an official car. But, we have all agreed to take on this after two years of our inauguration. Two years are going to be difficult but things will improve. Then again, even the performance bonuses that I inherited that the members of the State Assembly used to get and commissioners, we sat down with them and I said, gentlemen, we have not done much to earn any performance bonus yet. How can you get performance bonus when you are less than one year in office? Let our people tell us you have performed the performance bonuses will start coming. They all agreed and I have to thank my commissioners.
Again, we have to choose our projects. I can’t come as the governor of Kaduna state today and begin to think of building a flyover. I will never do that. The reason why I cannot build a flyover in Kaduna is because of what it would cost me to build a flyover in Kaduna is the same money I can use to construct about 20 rural roads where I’m going to link markets and farms. So that is the reason why we embarked on 69 roads in the rural areas, most of them are ongoing and most of them have been completed. You know why? People don’t know. That could be the amount of money we used to build two flyovers, but we cannot do that. It’s better for me rather not to build a flyover in the city but take that money to the 23 local governments, particularly 18 local governments in the rural areas to go and construct roads for them, remodel and reconstruct our general hospitals and we have done about nine already.
have been to all the three senatorial zones and distributed seedlings and agro-chemicals to our small holder farmers. I told them go to the farm. If you go to the farm and I go round and see the level of efforts, I promise you, I will distribute fertilizers, the quantity that has never been seen before in Kaduna state. It was a promise and I went around and I realized that our farmers have gone to farms. Don’t forget that in Kaduna we are the leading producers of ginger in the whole of Nigeria. We are contributing about 76.4% of the national yield in ginger production in Nigeria. In southern Kaduna we are number one in maize production. We are contributing about 7.9% to the total yield of Nigeria but still, we are leading. In soya beans we are number two. For tomatoes, if not because of the problems we are having because of post-harvest losses, now we are addressing that because we are constructing roads linking the farms. So we may reduce the post-harvest losses in tomatoes production.
What about silos?
We have a lot of silos and we have our warehouses. Even only two months ago, we entered into partnership with a company, Hadnestad from India, where they have taken over most of our warehouses. We needed to partner with them because that will help us to create jobs to make use of all of them. And today, because of their partnership, Hadnestad is investing about $100 million in the next four years. That will create jobs; that will revitalize and also economically boost the people around the area.
Only last month, I went to China and signed an agreement with the Hebei Province in China. Hebei Province in China has a population of over 70 million people. They are extremely leading in China in the area of agriculture, transportation and infrastructure. The deputy governor came to Kaduna and we signed the initial agreement, I followed them up and that is an investment of over $250 million. We are building, as we are speaking now, a Hebei Park, and also a park in Kaduna. And they are now going to work, closely with all the different investors in Nigeria that are from China and some that are coming from other places to now partner with them in Hebei, industrial park.
After that, we decided to choose Kaduna as a state where they’re going to do African quality center. That African quality center is so rare. Most of our farmers will now go there when they farm for inspection and for exportation. We are going to do the ground breaking by the grace of God in the next one month and that will be the only place where people in Northern Nigeria, even outside Northern Nigeria, and some countries, will come to Kaduna for their exports. So that is what we are doing. So this is also in the area of agriculture because like I said, agriculture contributes about 42.8% of our GDP. That was the reason why when I distributed 500 trucks of fertilizer, people were surprised.
Food has no political party….
You know, this hunger has no political party. So, there is no political affiliation. Farmers are farmers. Let’s support all of them. Whether they are going to support us or not, it doesn’t matter. They are from Kaduna. So that’s what we did.
Now, I think some of this is the activist in you that is coming out I presume. One can also muse that you and the President are the two top tier personalities in governance today who were in the struggle for democracy in the country. How do you guys relate at that level?
Yeah, so thank you very much. Like I said, when we started this issue, a lot of people were wondering, why is it that I have so much belief in the government of President Tinubu. I made it clear to them that President Tinubu and I were among the few that fought for democracy in this country. And of course, I know what the President would do and I know there is no way someone who sacrificed a lot for democracy, someone who sponsored most of us who were in the civil rights movement together with him, the likes of Femi Falana, Olisa Agbakoba, Shehu Sani, the likes of Mike Ozokhome, the likes of Olu Adegboruwa, etc, all of them like I mentioned, not to talk about people like G.T. Ogunye, all of them will agree with me that in the era of the struggle, this President sponsored us. He supported the struggle. He made a sacrifice. He even abandoned his lucrative job to join the struggle with us and eventually he left the country on exile, fighting for democracy. He was having a nice job. But then we were in the trenches with the likes of Beko Ransome Kuti and Gani Fawehinmi leading us. And because we have this history, that he decided to abandon a lucrative job to fight for democracy in Nigeria, that was the reason why when he came out, some of us said, look, it’s better to identify with someone who fought for democracy than to identify with a military apologists because look. Some of us allowed what happened to happen, and what happened to us, we ended up in detention on Decree 2. Nobody challenges that. Today, for the first time, one of us is now having the opportunity to rule this country. We believe at least, we know the language we can speak to him. He is someone who did not only fought for democracy, but he spent many years as the Governor of Lagos state to entrench democracy.
Even outside the state…
That is the issue. So when he left, as governor, he kept fighting to entrench democracy. People forgot that. And I can give you one example. It’s not like some of us have been with Asiwaju all the time. When I was working with Obasanjo, there was a problem between President Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Atiku defected to ACN. Asiwaju gave him the ticket to contest presidential election in 2007. It was the same me that went to declare his seat vacant because I was working with Obasanjo. We went to the Supreme Court, and it was not like I didn’t know what I was doing because it was the constitutional lacuna. We went to the court. Even the Court of Appeal gave judgement in our favour. It was the Supreme Court that finally decided that even on a split judgment.
So for me, we had history. People forget history easily. And the same Asiwaju, at that time, we disagreed. What did he do? He supported Atiku, but we were against him. And again, he was the one who went to the court with Atiku until they got the judgment at the Supreme Court.
Now, come to challenge Tinubu, I tell them look don’t be short-sighted because this is the history. And once people in the North are talking about it, they said, President Tinubu in 2007, supported Atiku. He supported Mallam Nuhu Ribadu 2011. He could have contested if he wanted to contest. What is the big deal about it? He didn’t. In 2015, he supported Buhari and in 2019, he supported President Buhari. So if someone tells me, that’s why I’m telling people, there is no way you can convince any northerner that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu actually was our enemy. You see, and that was the reason why I was telling a lot of people that protest in northern Nigeria wasn’t against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It is, for me, a clarion call for some of us who are leaders in northern Nigeria to go back to the drawing board. When people misunderstood that as an opposition to the government, they might be wrong. That’s why I want us to address it quickly, because we can’t continue deceiving ourselves. These issues, no government, let me say it today, can address these crises even in the next 20 years.
