Lagos — Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi state who formally decamped to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) last Saturday, took some time off to speak to some journalists about his stewardship in the last 24 months. Chuks Okocha who was present at the parley brings excerpt

How has it been as governor of Bauchi State in the last 24 months?

My tenure as a governor for the past 24 months has been most challenging because when I came in, I was faced with many problems and these problems if not properly addressed as I settled down in office and recording some success in my solving the problem by now, may be, there would have been an uprising in the state. I can say that by the time I came in, I met a failed state and nothing just seemed to be working here. The dam that provides water for Bauchi, when we came in, that dam was supplying only 1.5 million gallons of water daily and the transformer that was providing steady power supply was blown off.

The two generating sets we inherited, one was completely unserviceable, the other two were just managing to provide power in the event that there was power failure. The 33 KVG was meant to provide 24 hours electricity supply to the dam but we are supposed to step down the 33 KVA to 11 KVA and then supply the dam. But when it blew off, we had to manage the 11 KVA and it was on and off, so we had that problem of water, our hospitals have no water, no medicine. In fact, there was completely absence of power. We had to power the hospitals, provide water for the hospitals and then provide medicine as well as personnel too for the sick and in fact some of the hospitals we have to close down three because we brought in consultants that said we had to close them otherwise, the patients that come in there, 95 percent of them might die either from the ailments that brought them to the hospital or the one that will afflict them in the hospitals. And that time, I believe some of you have seen the video clips of the hospitals we inherited because I had session with journalists in Lagos.

The same thing goes with the schools, there is no one single secondary school that you can say this is a secondary school, apart from the children being malnourished because we have to increase their feeding allowance; what the former government used to spend in one year, we spent it in one quarter and we had to rehabilitate all the infrastructure because everything had collapsed. There is no secondary school you go to that you don't see the entire structure being rebuilt so far.

There is a school in Misau; that school was the same school where the video clip showed students sleeping in the toilet, eating and also urinating in the toilet; it was that bad. In almost all the secondary schools, when it is raining they had to shift their desks. The situations were very, very bad. In fact, some of the journalists that watched it wept and the first time I saw it too, I was very emotional and in fact when I showed it to some of the elders of Bauchi, some of them were weeping.

The situation was very bad indeed and apart from that, I inherited an army of youth militants that killed at whim and a para-military arm of a political party. So, they were used to intimidating the people. In the event that they do not like you, you will get killed. It was so bad to the extent that when we came in, hardly will a day pass without somebody being slaughtered just like a goat. So, we had to address that; we had to provide over 30, 000 jobs both directly and indirectly to take them out of the streets and unfortunately those that have gotten accustomed to killing and will not stop, we had to get them arrested and prosecuted them and that is how we were able to arrest this youth restiveness. We are about the only state in Nigeria where we had the emergence of youth restiveness and we were able to stamp it out completely. Bauchi never used to be safe, but we have returned sanity, safety and peace to the peaceful town of Bauchi . Even the armed robbers we used to have on our highways, they have been checked. We have a lot of people who are in the business of politics who believe in using old means to foment trouble.

Sometimes you have crisis here and there which they normally give the colouration of religious crisis and it is certainly not religious crisis; it is all politically motivated and we have been able to address that very squarely because at the end of the day our citizens appreciate that. We don't have anything like religious crisis in our state because there is no religion that says go and kill in the name of God and the Bible is preaching peace, Islam is preaching peace and our brothers were made to understand that before you become a full Muslim, you must believe in Jesus Christ, in the Bible, the Virgin Mary, what is the issue of contention there.

This kind of interactive session has been holding and people really appreciate that if somebody wants to create problem for Isa Yuguda, he will just go late morning hours, may be around 3am, 4am and set a mosque ablaze and the following morning, they will say Christians have gone to burn down a mosque and then if somebody wants to commence crisis too, he will go and burn down the church and they will say Muslims have burnt down a church. This is what has been happening and we have been to trace this and stop it. All these are part of the challenges I inherited as governor and it has not been easy at all. I spend most of my days from morning till evening, I hardly see my family and that is how it has been. It has been a very big challenge for that matter.

Power is a major problem in the country and Bauchi is not an exception, is your administration thinking about Independent power generation?

I have just finished holding a meeting with some banks, BankPHB and one other bank and other solicitors, and the rest. I have identified a power plant through an embassy in Germany that will generate up to about 160 megawatts using crude oil and we have gone very far. The project is supposed to start as from the month of September. The financing arrangement as from 3rd of July, the parties will be here in Bauchi and we have already arranged for equity participants, those who are going to take up part of the equity, they are taking about 70 percent, they are ready with their money. Bauchi needs about 70 megawatts to power the entire state, with these industries that have collapsed because of the lack of power, so, if we are able to generate about 150, 170megawatts, we take 70 and the remaining balance, we will sell it to Power Holding Company and we are happy that Bauchi has is the only state in Nigeria I understand can generate power, hook up to the national grid, power the state, and if they generate excess, they can hook up to the national grid and sell it to them.

We are going very far in that direction and it is expected that, all things being equal even though that is what the economy says and by coincidence, they say things are normally no equal but I believe this time around, it is going to be equal. By next September, by the grace of the Almighty God, we are going to switch on our power plant because the manufacturers of the equipment are those who will come and run the power plant and aside from if you are very conversant with the oil sector, there has been a prospecting of oil in the Benue basin and already there are a lot of gas deposit in this basin and part of it are in Bauchi because when the prospecting was on, Shell sank a well and got over 30 million cubic of gas and we have been discussing with a German group so that they cane exploit the gas and start generating the power with the gas but beyond the gas, I believe they say is crude.

We have floated a limited Liability Company with three other states, that is Gombe, Adamawa and Taraba and we intend to use that as a vehicle to partner with the Oil Company so that we can see how we can get part of the oil blocks allocated to us so that we can start working. That may be medium or long term solution but the short term solution which I believe is going to surprise everybody is what we are doing now. Apparently there is no State that has access to this plan that I have so far.

You were elected governor on the platform of the ANPP and you have now dumped the party which was there for you at the time of need for PDP; is it not a sense of betrayal?

You have forgotten to mention that I migrated from PDP to join ANPP. You didn't ask me why I migrated from PDP to ANPP. I was a Minister under the PDP. I was one of the longest serving Ministers in Obasanjo's government. I served in the Transport Ministry and also as Aviation Minister. Apart from that, you should appreciate that I'm one of the founding members of PDP. As faith will have it, I never wanted to be in politics. I wanted to remain a professional banker that I was. But providence has it that I will have positions in the public service. When eventually, I was appointed Minister, I served the PDP government. I was part and parcel of the PDP family until 2007; I left PDP and joined ANPP. It was circumstances that made me to leave. I don't think it is necessary for me now to repeat the circumstances because I have spoken so much on the reason why I left then. I joined the ANPP, campaigned for three months and I won the election.

I was the only elected governor that was not taken to court because of the transparency in the counting of my votes. The gap between me and the PDP candidate was wide. I can say it is not the ANPP that was the issue. It was me as Isa Yuguda that was the issue. I want to tell you I have to thank the Almighty God that I have good rapport with my people. This can be appreciated from my relationship with all those whom I have worked with. If you want to prove it, you can go to First Inland and Aviation Ministry and interview those who have worked with me. They are very very close to me. In fact, almost all of them came in for my swearing in ceremony. I'm still working very closely with them. I have to thank God that my career has been a very successful one. This is not because I am wise or more intelligent than anybody but by the grace of the almighty God. I don't have any pot holes. I have history of transparency, honesty and dedication. I'm a man of peace. I don't like rancour and fighting. I'm in peace with everybody. Giving the dismal performance of the past administration, you know power can corrupt very easily; there is nothing you can give to human beings other than respect because I cannot make you comfortable.

It's only God that can make you comfortable. Simply because I'm a governor does not mean that I'm going to wear the act of arrogance. Only God has the exclusive rights to be arrogant because he is the one who created you. I was very dear to them and I'm still very dear to them. As a leader by the time you are voted into office, your popularity rate is normally about 98%. The day you are sworn in, it dropped to 50% and then you start struggling because somebody will just start hating you because you are in that office for no reason whatsoever. It might even be those who have been your strongest supporters. Suddenly, they will just develop hatred for you. When you start working, you either go down to 50% or you start climbing. And then, your rating also will improve. If your performance is that bad and your relationship with people is that bad, then you go down and your popularity rate will go down until when it gets to 20% or even 5%.

What is your comment on the MOU the Governors' Forum signed with the America Harvard University?

There is a saying that if you think that education is expensive, try ignorance. We are living in a knowledge world and we are living in a jet age and management is dynamic. When you are elected as a governor, you are supposed to govern a state; we need to add to our capacity. Training and retraining is the secret to success in any work environment. Take for instance now the profession of Medicine. If you go to some hospitals today, you we see some very modern equipment (Computerized). Some of the equipment are not more than 2 or 3 years of manufactured and if you don't train your Doctors on those equipment, how can they make use of it? Those equipment would be useless and if it so happened that you have wasted so much money in procuring such equipment and the Doctors don't have the training. So, what have you done? It is just motion without movement, amounting to dancing within the same circle.

I talk this way may be because I am coming from the private sector. When I graduated from the University, I worked with the mortgage bank for about three years. When I joined the Savannah Bank, I trained for twelve months and during the training period, I was attached to a branch and every month, we used to go and sit for examination in Ikeja training school and you have to pass 75% before you move to the next modus because there are 12 modus. Even if you had 3 PHDs, you must undertake those trainings for you to be confirmed an officer. Also during the period you are a staff, you were expected to be going to the school for minimum of three weeks in every three months. As at that time, Savannah Bank used to be the best in the country as far as I am concerned. They produced so many MDs in the country because they trained you as Commercial, Development and Investment Banker. So from the MD down wards, everybody goes for training. Imagine a governor who has been elected and he has never had an experience of managing his own business. May be he was even a failure while managing his own business and you come and saddle him with a responsibility of a state that is so complicated and you expect him to deliver without giving him some supports in terms of capacity building. I think you will be very unfair to the people. And if I know that I have those inadequacies, I think I will go for some sandwich programmes for one month or more so that I can improve my capacity. And let me say it, Empires come and go. The Roman Empire came and went. They were leaders in the world. We had the Othman Empire. It came and went. They were leaders in the world. You had the British Empire. They were the greatest in the world. They came and went. Now it is the American Empire. If you are a student of economic history, there is no nation on earth that has developed without assessing American market. Even the British economy much as they have the history of colonising so many countries. But after the 2nd World War, the American market was there for them to groom.

The Japanese were also there as example and recently the Asian Tigers and the Chinese. Today, the bulk of what is produced and consumed in America is produced in China. So, if America does not open its market for you, you are not likely going to grow. For example, the consumption of African-America is in the region of 1 trillion now and they are just about 60 million and if Nigeria can produce and export to the American markets textiles and attires and take 10% of the consumptions of the black African-Americans, they will get almost 100 billion dollars. We have this capacity in Nigeria because what you see or you consume in Europe as Moroccan leather is Nigerian leather. We produce the animals here. They export it to North Africa, process it and take it to Europe.

We can have the wear factory here, process them, produce the shoes and send them to the American market. You know the AGOA, African Growth and Opportunity Act that was passed gives us some quotas to export our goods. So, the long and short of what I am saying is that, if somebody is a leader, it is God that decided that and it is the will of God today that America is leading the world. And it is important to note that every policy that is captured in America comes from Harvard and Nigeria is misrepresented and misreported in America and particularly in those institutions. Every person that goes into those institutions will bad mouth Nigeria. Let me give an example, Ribadu was in the US at the time we went and they had a lobby group together with El-Rufai and they paid them. You can only have an access to US Congress through a lobby group. This afforded Ribadu an opportunity to go an address them on corruption in Nigeria and this to me is like piercing yourself with a knife and he was supposed to go to Harvard and give lecture on what was happening in Nigeria and this is somebody who is saying that he is on exile. So, our mere presence in Harvard and before the Head of Political Science made him to have a different version from elected Nigerians on what Nigeria is all about. An average person down there still imagines that we are still the crooks and the 419ners. If God has given America the leadership today, you have to give honour to whom it is due. Also of importance is that we visited an institution that has to do with leadership in Africa and we met an ex-president of an African country that was invited because the institute was headed by an African American who also was a retired Ambassador. The invitation was to find out the problems that have been bedevilling the African continent and for them to proffer solutions. If these ex-presidents went for three or four months, why wouldn't governors go? Knowledge is a sea and you continue learning until when you die. If you arrogate yourself monopoly of knowledge and wisdom as we are trying to have the monopoly of knowledge and wisdom of leadership in Nigeria, then we are in trouble. So I strongly support that people should go and learn. We can have an arrangement where facilitators can be brought from different parts of the world not only Harvard. Let them come and improve on our capacities. So, Harvard training will add good image to our country. I believe in the capacity building and I support my chairman for signing the MOU on behalf of the governors. For any reason, if I'm invited to attend, I will attend. We should not trivialize anything that has to do with capacity building, Governors are human beings.

Can you enlighten us on the state of education in Bauchi State?

We just have to make the best use of a bad situation, we inherited a student population of over 150, 000 students in secondary schools with only 1600 teachers to teach 150, 000. So, it is a very pathetic situation. At a point in time, if you have been reading the papers very well, I had to go into teaching myself to encourage civil servants to go and take lessons since most of them are graduates, they can take a subject they know how best to teach and teach. So, not only that I have pleaded with the NYSC Directorate to deploy a minimum of 10,000 Corpers to us, we are prepared to give them finance incentives so that they can teach in schools but the only condition he gave me was that I should improve the camp but not that I have quite a number of schools that corpers can come, I am ready for them so that they don't have to go to NYSC camp, there are quite a number of secondary schools where they can stay, not only that, I recalled all retired teachers who are able and willing to continue with the teaching job on contract basis, not only that, we advertised in the papers for recruitment and we got many from within Nigeria who came in to teach and that has improved, you will be surprised that in some of these schools particularly Disina, with that student population, we inherited not more than three or four teachers, that was the situation, it was very bad.

Sometimes they say seeing is believing, at the time we came in, whenever I talk, people will say because he wants to just make noise because he is a politician. If you go to all the local governments, the previous administration constructed two kilometre of roads in each of the local government but it is now that I am paying the debt, they are part of the debt that I inherited, no single kobo was paid and it is the same contractor that is doing the job now. You can see that is very challenging. Out of the 24 boarding secondary schools, we have done 18 now and we are yet to commence in full the rehabilitation of primary schools. One of the primary schools has over 6000 pupils, when the Minister of State for Finance came here, I had to take him to the school, I say come and see. There are potholes in the school, no desk, no roof and teachers have no place to write. I had to demolish everything and start all over. I am building 80 class rooms and it is almost completed, it just remains the plastering. This is the type of the thing that we intend to do for the primary schools. Right now through the SUBEC we are building new schools and rehabilitating the old ones through federal intervention and also counterpart funding to the state.

What is the health situation of the state and why the engagement of Egyptian doctors?

I don't think that giving the population of Nigeria that is over 140 million, the ratio of doctors to a number of citizens is good for us to say that we have sufficient doctors in the country, I don't think so, the ratio is so big and unfortunately, the previous government of Bauchi did not develop conscious effort to sponsor students who read medicine, if they had, may be by now, we would have so many Bauchi State indigenes as our doctors, but we have them, you won't believe some of them are not working for the State even though they enjoyed Bauchi State scholarship. We have quite a number of them working in Abuja, Kano, and the rest and we tried to attract them back.

Apparently, Bauchi State is one of the very few states that has implemented HATTIS salary scale for health workers and we are paying through our nose just to get the medical personnel properly motivated to be able to work and render services to the sick and we have placed adverts in the papers for doctors and nurses and we have quite a number of Nigerians from the East, West, North Central who are working in the Bauchi State Specialist Hospital and the Egyptian doctors are under special arrangement with the Egyptian government. We don't pay them salaries, we pay them allowances and we provide accommodation and transportation for them.

There is Arab fund for Africa and under that, we were able to secure the services of 30 Egyptian doctors and it is something like an extended goodwill of the Egyptian government towards Nigeria and we are about the only state in the country that is enjoying this patronage and I think after us, may be the door was closed and I have to assure you that all of them had to go registered with the Nigerian Medical Council. In fact, we had a running battle before Medical Council eventually accepted them. This is because some of the universities that some of them went to are world renowned universities. So we didn't have much problem. But some of them also went to universities that are quite known. So, they had to sit down and write examination before they were eventually admitted. So, you can be rest assured that that the condition has been fulfilled. Because of complete absence of female medical doctors, right now I'm sponsoring about 23 females and they went through a very tough screening process and we identified the most brilliant among them. In fact, all of them are extremely brilliant.

One from each local government; just like our pilot scheme, we have about 24 students in Florida reading Aeronautic Engineering and Piloting. They are graduating next year. By the time I visited them last year in the University, the Vice Chancellor and School Authorities congratulated us because we gave them the brightest brains the human race can introduce because they are among the best in the university. They went through a very serious screening process. It's not because somebody is somebody's child or daughter. Most of them are children of the poor. You won't believe it. Some of them have not even gone out of Bauchi and they find themselves in Florida. So, the same thing goes to the female. Almost all of them are children of the poor but very brilliant. They are in Ashanti University and we have 15 young boys in the University of Alexandria. They hope to graduate in the next four years.

These are part of interventions past regime should have been doing. If they were sponsoring 10, 15, by now we should have had sufficient medical doctors as long as they go through a screening process to give everybody a level playing field and choose the best because medicine is a very tough subject. So, you have to get somebody who has the mental capacity to be able go through the course. You are journalists by profession; I'm a banker by profession. Somebody is good in medicine. Everybody has his own core competency as gift from the almighty. I think when eventually we have them; we will be sufficiently staffed by medical doctors. But meanwhile more are coming. We recently recruited two specialists; one is for the ear and nose and they are very hard to get. He opted to come and work in Bauchi. He is from Kogi State. We are doing those kinds of searches so that at least we can get the good ones to come and join us here.