We’ve seen so many projects by your administration. How are you able to fund them?
When we came in May 2015, we all knew how the general economic situation of the country was, states and to some extent even the federal government was struggling to pay wages.
Here in Sokoto, we don’t owe any worker any salary to the best of my knowledge. We pay our salaries as and when due and we pay our pensioners, we managed to stagger payments of even gratuities. We set aside every month either 100 million or 50million to attend to gratuities that’s apart from salaries and pensions of retired workers, we make that a priority.
So it is all about planning and financial management, fiscal responsibility. We don’t waste money on frivolities, on things that are not necessary, that will not bring about any impact on the lives of the people.
We have very robust social schemes in the country, and we still pay monthly stipends to a number of indigent people in Sokoto state, education is free whether you are from any part of Nigeria once you attend public school in Sokoto the books, either exercise books or reading books are free.
Added to that, as we pay for WAEC to indigenes of Sokoto and NECO, we also pay for all of other students of Nigeria that are in our public schools. We don’t discriminate against any of them.
So you can see that we carry all of these burdens, but we’re still moving ahead. So it’s about strategic expenditure planning.
We took some loans that are targeted at projects and loans that are for capital expenditure. We don’t take loans for recurrent and we apply them us agreed in terms of conditions of obtaining those funds from either the banks or bond.
SIFTAN a World Bank programme, last year, score Sokoto as number one state in terms of fiscal transparency. Its a World Bank assessment programme, guided by the federal government and we are an opposition state and we came first in terms of fiscal transparency.
So it’s all about managing scarce resources and being disciplined and knowing your areas of priority.
The country’s talking about Nigeria getting ready for the non-oil economy. How ready is Sokoto state?
Sokoto is largely an agrarian state, 80 to 85% of our populace are farmers and we do everything to support them. In the areas of extension services, we employed more extension workers that are helping them with skills and knowledge and they also help them in terms of guiding them on the right seeds to use on their farmland.
We have graduates that are coming out in thousands without jobs and that is why we’re promoting agribusiness, if we’re interested, we’ll give you land, we don’t have to charge you for it, to some extent we’ll give you some support as a start up pack, and you go and start your agribusiness.
So we’re moving them from where they were to a knowledge based agric business and we support them with fertilizers and insecticide. In terms of subsidies Sokoto beats any other state, we have the figures in terms of giving farmer subsidies on farm implements, like handheld tractors free of charge and to some extent, even procurement of fertilizer during the dry season farming and the normal wet season farming. We give them some free, some of the seedlings in most cases and some of the inputs, at heavily subsidized rate, and I don’t think that there is any state that has done as much in terms of support to farmers.
When we ventured into anchor borrower scheme, we had to open accounts for farmers at the expense of the state government, because of the low level of income of the farmers they could not even afford the basic requirements of money for opening of accounts, we had to as government open those accounts for them.
So we heavily support our farmers by giving them modern technology, modern knowledge, skills, supporting them with knowledge and experience and all of that through the extension workers and subsidies.
So, that has also motivated them to be more on their farms, that has also given them more encouragement and with the guidance of extension workers, their knowledge and skills and the seedlings and their output has increased.
Siseme is one of the products they do, wheat, rice, tomato, onion is just one of them. And then I’m sure you’ve heard from the commissioner for commerce that we have done some trials and realised that between 250 to 300 billion worth of onions goes out of Sokoto annually and that’s just onion.
What motivated your massive investment in the education sector?
When we came in, I commissioned some of our experts, both local and a very few that are outside Sokoto to understudy our health sector, our education sector, and agric sector, to advise the government because I have identified this three as my priority.
So we deliberately set out to really change the narratives in education because whenever you’re counting states, that are backward in western education, you will count Sokoto.
It is about getting the right infrastructure, getting the right instructional materials, and getting the right teachers and personnel. So we, commissioned the study on the needs assessment of the education sector of Sokoto state. Based on the report, we began to work towards implementation and ensuring that we improve education sector of the state, because if you educate these young men and girls, and prepare them for the future, what else are you looking for as a father. The desire of any father is to see his child educated.
Now, you can see for example, the bandits that we have in Northwest, the insurgents in the Northeast, when you check it out, these are young people who are not educated either in the Western education or even in a religious sense.
So education is key to addressing all of those challenges of insecurity or poverty and raising the standard of living of the people.
And about the girl education, the figure has not been good and if you want to address the issue of a girl wanting to go to school; but there is a problem back home because she wanted to hawk for her mother, you must find something that will support that concern.
So we began a programme that has to do with conditional cash transfer. If a mother agrees to send her daughter to school, instead of her to be hawking you give her N5,000; if she has two daughters N10,000, three daughters that is N15,000, we sustained it up to today and improved on it.
And we’ve been very deliberate by creating an agency mandated to take charge of girl child education in addition to the law we passed in the state for compulsory education, which are the first of its kind in Nigeria.
So all of these go to show that we have identified the gaps, we have identified the problems and the issues and then we decided to be deliberate in seeing how best we can now change the narrative positively and have these children can be educated, and then reduce the number of out of school children.
How are you talking the Almajiri children in the state.
There is a misconception about almajiri. Almajir is not these people that you see, that are roaming about, it is a system of education itself but not the way it has been implemented. We said that there are countries that are largely Islamic in terms of population and their religious practices, and one of them is Indonesia not even Saudi Arabia.
I personally led a delegation to Indonesia, we understudied their system of Islamic education and that’s what we’re using now to reposition the almajiri system of education, it’s not something that you just throw away because it’s been practiced for hundreds of years and you cannot just say one day, you are now going to disruptively cancel it or ban it without providing an alternative and that’s what we’re doing in Sokoto.
Sokoto Teaching Hospital and Diagnostic Center is one project that stands out in the country. What is the situation of healthcare system in Sokoto.
We have over 800 Primary Healthcare, dispensaries facilities across the state and then, of course, the general hospitals.
When we came in, about two or three local government’s headquarters, don’t even have the general hospitals, some are under construction, some have been built up.
So we ensured that we have all of our local governments now having functional general hospitals. We provide drugs free to mothers and children, we provide free malaria drugs in the state and we set up a malaria agency, the first of its kind that has been mandated to take care of issues about malaria campaigns and all of that, and even supplying and giving drugs free to our students.
Outside the local government headquarters, there are bigger settlements that have a large population of people. So we have now identified about four of those arras and we are providing them with general hospitals, upgrading their primary health centre facilities to general hospitals.
When we looked at the general tertiary medical situation of the state, we decided to come up with an idea of premier hospital that is slightly higher than the general hospitals but not up to a teaching hospital.
So we identified the need for that and said, let’s have three of them, one in each of the senatorial districts, 150 bed capacities and the apex should be the State University Teaching Hospital.
And we felt we should do what they call telemedicine, we connect these three premier hospitals with the teaching hospital. If a patient is been referred to any of the premier hospitals, by the time he gets to the teaching hospital, his record is already there because that is telemedicine. The moment they punch the system his history will come up; it will save the doctors some time especially if the condition of the patient is critical.
This is what we’re doing, one address the gaps in terms of providing the facilities, two developing the manpower, capital development because we have shortages of doctors and medical personnel in the state.
So if you have your own teaching hospital, you have schools of nursing, and health technology; they will all be training and retraining your medical workers and medical force. That is part of reason why we now decided to have all of these in a place.
And the third one is to address the issue of medical tourism and that’s why we partly came up with the idea of diagnostic centre, advanced diagnostics centre, which is second to none around here in the whole of Northwestern State.
I don’t want to say the whole of northern Nigeria, but I am sure, I don’t think there’s any other one even in Abuja, that is up to this one stop shop we are building, every test is being carried out in one place; you can check it out.
So the whole idea is that we can attract medical tourism. Nigeria is losing billions and billions of dollars to the outside world because of medical tourism, people are going out for medical attention, if we can have these facilities here, not only will the neighbouring states be using it, we will generate more income for the state and for the country, and save forex. So that’s why we embarked on all of these kind of revolutionary effort, aimed at repositioning healthcare services in Sokoto state.
So that’s what we’ve done in these areas and I believe that so far, so good. But the key and fundamental thing for me is that we empower the people, we develop human capital of the people of Sokoto state.
Do you nurse any fear of the possibility of maybe one or two of these projects not being completed?
Well, we have taken virtually all of that into consideration before we embarked on those project and we’ve done the financial planning, the outlay, and all of that. I believe that by the grace of God we should be able to complete all of the projects that we are carrying out in a matter of few months.
What informed the new Sokoto city legacy project?
Sokoto is getting congested and we don’t want what has befalling some major cities in Nigeria to befall Sokoto. Sokoto is well planned, if you go around you will see it.
As far back as 1975 Sokoto master plan was developed since then there was no second master plan. So that’s why this administration decided to do another master plan, identify a new city, with a new master plan that will now decongest the main city, and then provide also some kinds of new structures that will benefit the people of the state.
Globally, major cities are doing that, government, private sectors are doing that. You will find in some countries like Dubai, UAE, private individuals developing huge infrastructure and housing and social amenities on their own.
So that’s why we came up with this, the master plan, provide the land, provide the infrastructure and give the land to people to develop.
Is there any division in the PDP governors’ forum over zoning?
No.
You began a consultation recently on your 2023 Presidential ambition, how far has the consultation gone?
Well, it is going on well, we’re still doing that and when we conclude, when we finish going round, we will sit down and appraise it and then come back with a position on the result of the consultation.
Now that INEC has rolled out the timetable, what it the next move now?
I am still consulting.
Do you think your party stands a chance with the electoral act?
Are you talking about PDP, PDP is the party to beat.
