29 June 2009
(Page 2 of 3)
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.
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