One year on the saddle, Governor Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo of Gombe State has effected significant changes in the developmental trajectory of his state. In this interview with journalists, includingLEADERSHIP SUNDAY’s Yobe State correspondent HUSSAINI JIRGI, he speaks on various topical issues, including his stewardship.
Why did you leave your job as Accountant General of the Federation to venture into politics? What was the motivation?
Well, a governor too is a professional. Politicians too are professionals. So, I am still on the same line of professionalism.
But what was it that motivated you?
The motivation, like I have been saying, is an opportunity to serve. When I was serving as Accountant General, I was serving Nigeria. I was serving in that capacity also as a civil servant who takes instructions. Like I always say, the Accountant General doesn’t initiate, apart from financial reforms.
But as a governor I have the opportunity and privilege to start projects that can impact my people; that can add value to my people and I can contribute to the development of my people. When I was Accountant General, I was privileged to be part of governance in Gombe, not directly but in terms of contributions towards assisting the former governor.
I must say that the two governors have done very well in running the affairs of Gombe in terms of bringing infrastructural development, in terms of bringing stability, though there may be one or two issues, of course yes as human beings.
But we felt that for the tempo of development to continue we needed somebody to carry the torchlight to the next stage of development. I felt that position will be a position that can best suit me to take up the torch from those people who have done wonderfully well.
That is why I felt I should make all the sacrifice I needed to make for Gombe; to come and pay Gombe what Gombe deserved. I am paying Gombe; Gombe trained me as a kid from primary school to the university; to chains of degrees that I have today, to the chains of experiences and qualifications, and there is no amount of money that I can bring to Gombe that can pay Gombe.
But I can bring all these chains of degrees I have and chains of experiences I have to Gombe to enable or to help in facilitating in moving Gombe to one of the fastest growing states in Nigeria as we are witnessing today.
A lot of work is going on around Gombe State to overhaul infrastructure in the education sector. What exactly is government’s agenda in the sector?
Initially when I came – like I always say – governance everywhere is about continuity. For continuity to happen there must be continuity documented not continuity of expectation from somebody’s thinking. What I mean is that there must be the resolve of the people to continuity; that if we want to continue, in what direction do we continue? If we want to continue in education, what is the educational policy of the state so that I will start it; another person will continue from where I stop.
The next person will continue from where the other stops and that was the reason why I set up sectoral committees when I came in – 11 committees.
Out of those 11 committees, one of such was that on education and from the revelations of the education committee I found out that education in Gombe, like in some other states in the North requires an emergency intervention in the sense that we have a lot of our kids that are outside school. We have a lot of our kids that have left school and school has not passed through them.
We have a lot of challenges as was enumerated by the committee. That was why first and foremost we said we must give priority to education; priority to education number one, priority to education number two, priority to education number three, then any other area. What we did is exactly what we are doing now.
Secondly too, we found out that without education any other sector of the economy will not go well as you are expecting it to go. It is only through a sound education system that you can produce good entrepreneurs, very nice engineers, doctors and on and on. All other sectors depend on education as bedrock for development.
That is why we are giving it the much needed push that we need to do to push education forward so that the other sectors of the economy of Gombe State or nation will be sustained.
The same tempo of development and activity can be seen around on the development of road infrastructure. Is it also in line with the overall objective?
Roads infrastructure development is number four priority after education. We don’t call it road, we call it infrastructure. Infrastructure in the sense that Gombe is an agrarian state.
Where you have an agrarian state, most of our farmers are located in the rural areas, and the most important thing to a farmer is not to give him only fertiliser and good seeds, but also the availability of a wonderful market for him to be able to break even and also add value to the farming business he has done.
Without roads or infrastructures to evacuate the produce from these farms located in rural areas to the markets in urban areas or to the location where the market is, then the farming or the agricultural activity will not be boosted as it should be.
That was why we placed a lot of emphasis in opening up all the rural areas and also doing a lot of intervention in the urban areas so that the economy will be boosted, activities will be developed, markets will be opened, accessibility can be easy, security can be improved and so many other chains of multiplier effect of adding infrastructure to the economy of the state.
Most states constantly cry about insufficient allocation from the federation account or dwindling internally generated revenues. How does that affect you here in view of the fact that a lot of work is going on in your state?
Gombe State gets the least from the federation account; maybe because of the fundamentals that are enshrined in the constitution, the size, population and all that.
But I want to say that the allocation is sufficient if a leader is serious to add to the value of what our people are expecting. It doesn’t matter how much you get from the federal allocation. What matters is the sincerity of the leadership to be able to judiciously use the resources that are available to the state, and that is exactly the magic which people talk about that we are doing.
We have been very realistic in our estimations and budgetary behaviour and all that we have achieved in less than one year followed that realistic and sincere path. Everything is in the budget and we are not doing any magic outside the good management of the budgetary system.
As you can see in this tabulation before me, every day I get a report like this one (brandishing a paper) of all the projects, from all the ministries concerned.
These include the stage of their completion, where they are, the funding requirement etc, etc. All these details I get sector by sector for monitoring and for intervention where necessary, and as you can see within one year we have so many of them that are 100% percent completed, some are 84, some 75% completed.
The secret is that we try to be very sincere and straight forward in all we do. So, the issue of revenue allocation I can tell you I am challenging the top ten highest revenue collectors of Nigeria to do a peer review mechanism to measure the prudent utilisation of what we have and see how everybody is managing his resources. I stand to be challenged anytime, by any body, at any point.
With all these investments and expenditure, are you not bothered about developing the capacity for maintenance in view of our poor record at it?
Deliberately, we have established the State Infrastructure Maintenance Agency and the state Assembly is setting up the vehicle that will run the Agency. Essentially, the vehicle will be in charge of maintenance in terms of electrical, roads, plumbing, etc, etc.
We have also found out that we have a lot of youth that we can use to safeguard some of these facilities that are there and in view of that we are doing a lot of vocational training and providing a lot of vocational skills where some minor maintenance equipment can be fabricated locally.
As you have suggested, we are a state that is poorly funded. For this reason we will have to find other means to solve our problems. One of those means is to engage some of our youth in training, how to fabricate a lot of things that we will use to maintain the facilities that we have on the ground and essentially to safeguard them so that they don’t deteriorate.
In this connection, we’ll ensure that all the roads are swept, the environment is cleaned, the gutters are cleaned, the security of the facilities is also ensured. So, with all these packages and so many other things, I am sure we will not have a lot of issues of maintenance of these facilities.
You have done this much under one year – that is in the short term. What is the scope in the long term?
We are taking issues of development, like they say, with anger. We are getting angry that some other states are moving faster than ordinarily we should be chasing; that we were living so far aback.
We are taking the developmental issues with anger and if we kept all the variables that we have met constant I assure you we will be one of the top five states in Nigeria in terms of all variables of developmental indicators as can be measured anywhere in Nigeria. So, in the next few years, come and see a wonderful state that can replicate any of our top five cities in Nigeria.
I know that the issue of security has been very topical in Gombe State, particularly with the violent conduct of the so-called Kalare anti-social menace…
When I came into office last year, Gombe was listed as one of the two or three most dangerous cities in Nigeria. But thank God, Gombe is today one of the safest in the North. Let me say the North because of some common security challenge that is in the North.
Fundamentally or essentially was the problem of the youth who were engaged or who were misguided by some politicians to be involved in drugs and a lot of anti-social activities.
The challenge then was to try as much as possible to take census of some of these youth including the ones that are not even involved in drugs and to categorise them into the areas they desire to be if given the opportunity, and we were able to segregate them into those that want to go to school, those that want to be involved in trade, business of professions and those that want to be engaged or those who wish to start working in forms of provision of capital or in terms of getting employment.
There are also a category of people, children or youth that cannot do anything because you have to reform them, because some of the influence of drugs and other anti-social activities have been so deep they require reform. You have to rehabilitate them so that you will bring them back to life before they are able to determine what they need.
Those who want to go to school we have done a lot of programmes – one thousand people are undergoing remedial studies in collaboration with the University of Maiduguri, school of remedial studies has also been established in Kumo and Dukku; the Kumo one has started.
Dukku will start sometime at the end of last quarter of this year, all with a view to remediating the bad educational legacy system that we inherited, that we want as a future for our children.
For the ones that want to go into business, we have partnered with the Bank of Industry in a N1billion naira facility for which already N500million naira has been disbursed So, all of them have been busy in the markets selling one thing or the other.
In vocations, we are also partnering with some other agencies to provide facilities and training for our people to access their facilities that are available to fund the activity they want to go into.
Fundamentally, for those to be reformed and rehabilitated, we have taken 1500 of them and put them in an orientation camp to reorient them in the form or in a replica of the amnesty system of the federal government.
This is because these are youth who used to carry a lot of dangerous weapons including guns, on a condition also that they surrender the weapons, and we train them, we engage them.These are the ones you see in Gombe today as our road marshals, health marshals and our security marshals who are gainfully employed.
We are also going a little further to take about 330 of those youth who would guide them and we have taken them to Shere Hills to develop their training leadership potentials so that they will come and man these people.
The next stage we are taking for the youth is the Talba Farms – this is what we call them in Gombe; taking farmers in each of our wards in the state – one hundred and fourteen that we will engage our youth in the development of agriculture and for them to develop interest in farming. We have ordered for 330 tractors so that in each of those units, we will have at least two tractors.
We have also gone into agreement with AFCOT, it is a fertilizer company that will support the programme with fertilizer and a Seedling Company that will supply the seeds. Very soon, we will engage about 5000 youth in farming activities.
A lot of other youth too will be engaged in commerce like I said, in trade, in business and vocation. The women programmes too are going because the youth include men and women. The women programmes are going on. A lot of them have been trained into various vocational skills and last time about 280 of them were graduated and they were given capital and equipment to go and set up their own businesses.
Apart from the women and the youth, there are also the elderly people in our society who are always begging. From July, we are introducing the conditional Cash Transfer Scheme.
The condition is that if you have a dependant that doesn’t go to school or doesn’t get involved in a trade or any business, we would deliberately save for him for six months, while we pay you an allowance of a token amount that will keep you.
At the end of six months if you meet our conditions that the child goes to school or has learnt a trade, then the amount of saving we have done we will give the child to go and start a trade or a business or a vocation to support the family, while the elderly or the aged person continue to enjoy our support.
This is a programme that is a new initiative in Gombe State and we intend to enrol 5000, all of them are poor. When I say poor, these are people who beg, people who are dilapidated and people who cannot even afford to send their children to school.
So, send your child to school, we give you a token amount of money and on and on and on until we have an economically sustainable and vibrant society in Gombe.
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