ABDULRAHMAN ABDULRHAZAQ: Why women deserve more from us

Forum 1 year ago

ABDULRAHMAN ABDULRHAZAQ: Why women deserve more from us

Without preparing any note, the uncommon brilliance with which Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara state knowledgeably navigated through the key arts of governance when Vanguard team of editors met him in Ilorin could least be described as excellent.

He impressed with his response on the key areas of governance, his understanding of Kwara and national politics and many more.

Eze Anaba, the Editor of Vanguard and Saturday Editor, Onochie Anibeze were in Ilorin to present to AbdulRahman his letter of nomination as 2022 Governor of the Year in the Vanguard Personality Of The Year Awards. The editor commended him for his tremendous achievements, noting that his humility and style of working silently for his people have been remarkable. Mr Anaba added:

“Our consultants for this project said something, that nobody saw you coming, that you are a quiet efficient worker. That’s why you deserve this award and we pray that you continue to do this and make us proud.”

The governor then made some remarks and fielded questions.

Attaining success amidst entrenched propaganda

Thank you so much, we really appreciate this. There is one thing you said that no one sees us coming. Tinubu came recently, they heard the loudest noise on social media, that our party members were leaving and all sorts of stories. Immediately we got to the venue, Shettima (Tinubu’s running mate) tapped me and embraced me that they didn’t see this coming.

They were excited about what they saw, that they have been going to rallies but that this is generic, not renting of crowd but these people are family members of the party, genuinely there for a purpose. They said this was a different experience to them to the extent that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu didn’t want to leave the stage but for Emir of Ilorin who was waiting for them.

Philosophy about governance.

Our own philosophy is that, let your work speak for you, but it seems not to be so in Nigerian politics. People who have done only one thing shout as if they have done one hundred. That’s politics but the people you’re doing it for, see what you’re doing irrespective of whatever you’re saying on social media. So, people see all the propaganda, the challenge we are having from the opposition is negative and false news. For example, they have kept quiet now, what they were saying before was that we collected N500b and they kept pushing the narrative. But the truth is that we have received less since we came in.

From 2015 to 2019 and 2019 to date, the state has received N44b. They were paying 18000 minimum wage and they even paid in percentages. But here we are today we are paying N30,000 minimum wage while receiving less money than they received and we’re doing more work than they did.

The Challenges

When we came in, education had collapsed in the state. They diverted UBEC funds, so we had to refund the money. UBEC will give you N1b and you’ll add N1b, so if you did not put your N1b to get the free UBEC’s N1b, it means you didn’t invest anything in education. That was why things were so bad in education when we came. We have three Colleges of Education, they were on strike for over one year by the time we came on board. We had to clear N750m unpaid salaries and also paid to restore their accreditation. The West Africa Examination Board (WAEC )also fined us about N500m because over 100 schools cheated.

To bridge this gap in education, we looked at what other states were doing. We visited Lagos and Edo states and what we gathered helped us. Lagos schools are heavily supported by private school systems. But they have something in common with Edo. What they do in Edo is to give a computer tabloid to every teacher. What that tablet does is that as soon as you get to your classroom and log in, same appears in headmaster’s office and the Ministry of Education, when a child doesn’t come to school it is captured on a data and reflected on the tabloid, so you’ll interrogate why such student is not in school.

The topics are also the same thing for the teachers as captured on the tabloid, so basically it’s a robust system. It also throws out ghost workers. What we are now seeing is a reversal from private school to government school. It’s working for them in Edo and Lagos. Here, we started with five local governments, we are now at the eleven. It remains five. So, there’s continuous training of teachers, it’s a catch-up mechanism for us but it would take us years to fix all our schools, some don’t have roofs, no furniture and so on, but gradually we’ll get there.

Same in health care, they could not pay counterpart funding for anything. Roll back malaria, HYGEA all left Kwara. With our investment in HYGEA they want to come back to step up and train our doctors because they see seriousness in our engagements.

Our data has changed, what you’re seeing does not match our investment, but we now realise that the amount you put in, the donor agency gives you one hundred times even though they don’t give you cash, they give vaccine, training and all sorts. So, it’s a worthwhile venture that we must invest in healthcare. It’s also a sort of empowerment because the advocates under them are paid stipends. We only paid N100m, and they gave us 2.5m mosquito nets which we distributed and now the latest data show that we are up national average percentage.

Without statistics, you

can’t grow a state.

People don’t pay attention to the most important thing, they want to see you commissioning roads, streetlights. Data are important for planning and execution of projects. They are key to development; data on infant mortality, under hospital attendance, etc. Believe me, our hospitals are fantastic.

You people in the media are also guilty of it. You’re not looking at those data. The first thing a governor should do when he comes in is to look at data. Number of children in school, number of out of school children, hospital attendance at tertiary, hospital attendance at primary healthcare, maternal issues, etc. These are the issues one should look at. Many states are poor on statistics, they are not properly managed. Without statistics, you can’t grow a state.

When we came on board, we hired a consultant to get us the data, that’s how we got the statistics and that has enabled us to make the impacts in the key areas in governance.

Really, it’s a long journey, but the people we took over from, I don’t understand the concept of why they should be in government. Their system is money is coming, let’s share the money and make some people happy.

It’s better not to sack the civil servants

This is civil service state, we don’t need all of them to work, we need 30% of them but it is not even wise to sack them, it doesn’t pay to do so. We also understand that it’s a safety net, it’s a social service not a civil service. This is because there is hardly any home you go to that there is no civil servant related to that house. So, any salary that is paid, when alert drops, a lot of problem is solved. The man has to feed the extended family members. And there is wedding, funeral here and there and he has to attend to all of them.

So, you have to understand that you can’t sack them. Even if you sack them, what do they do? What do you do with them and how does it affect your bottom line? It gets worse for you. You sack 100 people, you’re thinking you have saved the salaries, on the other side, you have to pay pension which is 70% of their salaries. You have only saved 30% of their salaries, but then you have to start paying pension, disengagement, so it’s worse for you, you might as well keep them.

Since we came in, about 1,500 or so, have left and we have taken in about 600 because if you cut off completely, there would be a gap. It’s better not to sack but to screen the number of people coming in. And we have changed the course of the state which is civil service state where everyone is expecting salary to strategic thinking which has been done years ago. We did it in the development plan, it took us a year and a half, it was data and statistics driven. You can’t just say this is what I want to do. When we were doing that Covid-19 set in and it held us down.

So, our long term focus is to move this state forward from civil service state to business driven one, and data and statistics are guiding us.

Moving Kwara to Business driven state

In Lagos, Tinubu got N600m IGR, and it was there for years, the military didn’t bother, nobody bothered. Then he took it from N600m to over N60b a month, and people are abusing Alpha beta? What is our IGR per year, we just crossed N30b and this man is doing N60bn in a month and you’re abusing him and you think we will support you? No, it won’t work. We’ll try and see how he has done it and try and deliver on the same. We look at our comparative advantages, agriculture, agro processing, that is where we should focus on, and we are looking at Garment production.

Why Garment production in Kwara?

Kwara is known for Aso Oke, there is talent for weaving clothes and sewing and so on. Bangladesh in the last two years have earned more from Garment production than what we earn from oil and we keep saving oil. So, in Kwara we don’t have oil but we have about a million people in the garment industry. Our starting point is 2000 people and we intend to grow it to 100 thousand of nobody earning less than N50,000 of today’s wages.

So, if Bangladesh can do it, why can’t we do it? In Sri Lanka the country next door, there was mass protest over economic issues and they sacked their president. In Bangladesh they were equally poor, even worse than Sri Lanka but Bangladesh focused on one main industry and they have come out from it, earning more than we are earning from oil. If that’s the case, we should try and do it and see if we can succeed at it.

Garment industry started in UK, then moved to America after the 2nd World War. They marshaled plan and US resuscitated it. Japan, with the nuclear bombing, were flat out, later, Garment industry moved to China and it started rising. To grow a bag of rice in Nigeria cost about 15000, in Japan it cost more. China studied a template from Japan, today they are number one, Bangladesh number two. In Africa, Ethiopia is a leading country now in Garment production. But we are smarter than them, we are more skillful than them. Our electricity is cheaper than theirs and so on, so we have the advantages to produce at cheaper rates than Ethiopia. We have to remain focused, each state can’t do everything on things they have comparative advantage. We want to focus on that and on other areas like Shear butter.

Why we must also invest in Shear Butter

Nigeria is number one in Shear production, that’s what we have left 60,70 years ago. Before independence, Nigeria was number one in Groundnut, Cotton, Cocoa and Cashew and others. We were number one in many things but what we have left is Shear Butter and for Shear, from the day you plant it and the day you harvest it, is about 15 years, so nobody has that patience, nobody is looking at that 60 % of the world production in Cosmetics, Garment production and so on. But now Shear price has gone up. Recently, a company invested 20million dollars to put a Shear plant in Ghana and they took the Shear plant from Nigeria. So, the main reason we have to invest in that is sustainability, those Shear things are being depleted everyday. Lebanese people used to come to Kwara for them. It is used in doing many things including Shisha that is common in the Middle East. Unfortunately, they’re damaging our forests. So, part of the plan we are making towards Shear Butter production would be ready later this year.

Agro processing

is also good

We’re focusing on food processing, agro processing and Shear production. But it’s better for us to invest in agro processing than in the farms because it makes more economic sense. There’s a company called OLAM, it started in 1987 or so. Today it’s one of the top 10 in the world. It wanted to start in Lagos but Singapore told them ‘here is 50million dollars grant, come and put your headquarters here.’ They went there and from there they became a global company. What does Olam do? It’s processing between the farmer and the market. That’s all they do, Olam will take all the Cocoa, Cashew and export, they weren’t farming anything. To farm you need to know the topography, do soil test to know what can be grown, the type of fertilizer etc. We hardly do these here.

The price of a

peaceful Kwara state

You have to assist security agencies to make things work. Not everybody will do that because they’ll see it as federal government work. But the reality is that whatever you agree with the security agencies they’ll still have to take approval from Abuja, they can’t use their own discretion. For us, the reality is that we have security architecture that involves the Emir, community heads, vigilantes etc. It comes at a cost.

Second term agenda – Move Kwara from Civil Service to production state, give women bigger role in decision-making

Basically, it’s to move the state from civil service to a more productive state. So, it’s about getting the people working, getting our private sector very active and getting more women into decision making structures like government.

Go to any ward meeting, it’s women you’ll see but when election is over, it is men that will take all the benefits. They are not on the table when decisions are being made for them and men think our responsibility is to go and put money on the table. We forget the natural bond between children and their mothers. We are naturally closer to our mothers in Africa. The men are always away in the farms or in other places chasing money. The women bring up the children but when it now comes to taking responsibility and decision for the family, we now forget that they nurtured the children which means they should be more than 50 percent on the table because they come to the table with their children and extended family. So they should have more than the 50 percent. We will continue to push the gender issue and help them take over.

Most of our problem is education, people do not understand the role of government. Our focus is to be the first in Nigeria in terms of garment production, then set up a factory and create confidence that it can work. Last week, foreigners came to invest 50million on soya. So we are working on it. They said they need land and I said easy, so they are happy they don’t have to go through stress. In the south east, you have garment factories. There’s no industry where you can guarantee quality. We are working with a group from Dubai (Bangladesh-Pakistan) group to come and manage it.