By Adamu Lawal Toro
Ask a Nigerian governor what he has done, and he will usually point at a road.
Roads photograph well. They can be commissioned with a ribbon and a crowd. They are easy to count and easy to show on television. That is why, in state after state, the flagship of an administration is often a stretch of asphalt, while the clinic down the road has no drugs and the school beside it has no roof.
Kaduna under Governor Uba Sani tells a different story. Roads are there, 1, 450km in total and plenty of them. But they are one entry in a much longer ledger that runs through hospitals, classrooms, farms, water works and social protection, across all 23 local government areas and the three senatorial zones.
Start with the farm, because that is where most Kaduna people earn their living. For the 2025 farming season, more than 900 trucks of fertilizer have been distributed statewide. Two hundred tractors, 500 power tillers and 10,000 water pumps have gone to farmers. Some 69,000 smallholder farmers have been supported under the Tallafin Noma programme, and 100,000 were enrolled in the 2025 wet season crop insurance scheme worth over ₦200 million.
Crop insurance deserves a pause. For a farmer in Lere or Ikara, one failed season can wipe out years of savings. Insurance turns a catastrophe into a setback. It is exactly the kind of policy that changes lives quietly.
The government has gone beyond inputs. It has set up a Farmer Field School in each senatorial zone, an Agricultural Intelligence Unit, a Special Agro-Processing Zone in Chikun and an Agricultural Quality Assurance Centre with the support of Afreximbank. It has adopted a Contract Farming Policy and finalised a 2025 to 2030 Agricultural Investment Plan. Grains markets have gone up in Anchau and Giwa. Milking sheds have been built at Tohu Rinji, Ikara and Babban Ruga. Zaria’s abattoir has been rehabilitated, slaughter slabs commissioned in Danmagaji and Makarfi, and an artificial insemination centre established at Magajin Gari to improve livestock breeds.
This is not distribution for the cameras. It is the architecture of an agricultural economy.
Then there is health. The general hospitals at Maigana, Saminaka, Makarfi, Ikara, Giwa, Birnin Gwari, Rigasa, Kawo, Sabon Tasha, Limi and Yusuf Dantsoho have been remodelled, upgraded and equipped. Primary health care centres have been revitalised across the state, and the Kaduna State Contributory Health Management Authority has opened a zonal office in Zaria to bring health insurance closer to the people of the north.
A general hospital in a local government headquarters is often the only serious medical facility for hundreds of thousands of people. When it works, a pregnant woman in Birnin Gwari does not have to travel to the state capital to deliver safely. That is what upgrading eleven of them means in practice.
Education tells a similar story. Across the state, new junior and senior secondary schools are being built, from Bele in Soba to Damari in Birnin Gwari, from Rimin Doko in Zaria to Millennium City in Chikun. Classrooms are being rehabilitated, furniture supplied and WASH facilities installed. There are scholarships for girls, digital literacy programmes and life-skills training.
The figures from the schools themselves show the scale of demand. Queen Amina College, Kakuri, recorded 2,580 girls in the third term. Barewa College recorded 2,200 boys. These schools are full.
Water is rarely celebrated in Nigerian politics. Kaduna is taking it seriously. The Zaria water works, with capacities of 150, 50 and 10 million litres per day, are being rehabilitated. So are the Kaduna North works at 150 and 90 million litres, the Kaduna South 27 million-litre works and the Kakuri treatment plant. In rural areas, solar-powered boreholes are going up at schools, clinics and villages across Soba, Kubau, Makarfi, Chikun and Igabi. Several local governments have attained open defecation free plus status.
Clean water is health policy. It is education policy. It is women’s policy, because it is women and girls who walk to fetch it. A government that fixes water fixes many other things at once.
None of this means the roads have been neglected. The 31km Ikara to Saya Saya to Palla road, the 35km Gadan Gayan to Kujama road, the 35.5km Bagoma to Gagumi road through Birnin Gwari and the 21.85km Pambeguwa to Kauru road are opening up farming communities. A 105-metre span bridge is going up on the Dogon Bauchi corridor, and the Kabala Costain to Barnawa dual carriageway, with its dual bridge, is easing movement in the metropolis. Feeder roads in Soba, Kubau, Lere and Makarfi are linking farms to markets.
But in Kaduna, the road leads somewhere. It leads to a grains market, a rehabilitated hospital, a new school, a working borehole. That is the difference between building infrastructure and building a state.
There is still work ahead. Many of these projects are ongoing, and their true test will be maintenance, staffing and whether the services they promise actually reach the people. A promise is not fully kept until the hospital has doctors, the school has teachers and the tap runs every day.
Still, what is already on the ground deserves recognition. Kaduna has shown that a government can spread development across sectors and across zones, rather than concentrating it in one visible showpiece.
The farmer in Kubau with insured crops, the mother in Saminaka delivering in an upgraded hospital and the girl in Kakuri sitting in a full classroom are the real measure of governance. In Kaduna, they are beginning to see promises turn into results.
