Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State shares his experience on the January 20 bombings in Kano and other related incidents. Excerpt:
Let us start from the issue of the moment: bombings by the Boko Haram sect. Kano State has had more than a fair share of the bombings, especially with the incident of January 20. How has this affected governance and the government?
We started the year 2012 on a bad note. Petrol subsidy was removed January 1; protests rocked Kano January 9; some well-behaved protesters went to the race course while our political adversary masterminded an attack on the seat of government. On January 20, there was this attack (by the Boko Haram sect) which compelled us to impose a 24-hour curfew. We relaxed the curfew to 12 hours and later to eight hours.
Very soon we will try and relax it further. You learn more when the going is tough;when everything is smooth, you learn nothing. From January 1 to date, we have learnt so much. The good thing is that we are in charge and things are beginning to get better. By the grace of God, things will continue to be better. We want to use this opportunity to appeal to the enemies of the state to stop being wicked.
We were out of government for eight years, our supporters did not come near Government House not to talk of harming anyone. The attack at the Government House on January 9 was not in the best interest of anybody. Those things that happened over the last couple of weeks have strengthened me and the government. We are much stronger now than where we were before the incidents.
Your predecessor, Mallam Shekarau, recently accused you of underfunding several policies initiated by him to sustain peace. How correct is this assertion?
There is much to this allegation than meets the eye. I don’t want to discuss personality. We are all Muslims. We have been here before him; we set up most of this institutions he mentioned, but we set them to do certain things which they did. Even now, we are doing our best to ensure they function properly. Iam not against Hisbah or any other government agency. I established Hisbah and I see no reason why I should work against it now.
You said you met ‘zero treasury’ when you came in. Many people believe that was a political statement to discredit your predecessor?
I inherited not only zero treasury but N77billion debt. But I decided to zero it down to nothing because I am not in a hurry to pay any debt and I personally do not believe in the genuinty or otherwise of the debt profile. N4billion hotel bill was left behind and I am not in a hurry to pay such a frivolous debt.
I am also not in a haste to pay for posh cars purchased in the name of Kano State government and given out to friends and hangers on. For now, I am concentrating on projects that have direct bearing on the people of Kano State and, if at the end of the day, I have the resource to play with, I may consider the debt payment.
I am also not in a hurry to pay for any inflated contracts neither am I in a hurry to pay for fertilizer acquired in the name of the state government distributed to local governments but ended up in the black market. Let’s not open a can of worm because if I have to pay the N77billion debt, I may not have the resources to attend to projects that will assist the people.
We have decided to make the best use of what we have and, in the last eight months or so that we decided not to steal tax payers money in the name of security vote, whatever we get goes to the treasury. We have the right set up of people manning strategic areas of leakages. I have said, many times, security vote is corruption. Any governor or anybody taking security vote is stealing.
If you have any reason to give anybody N10, you put in it writing what it was meant for and why it was given. Collecting billions of naira in the name of security is something I have not done in the past and I will not start it now. Security vote, in most cases, ends up in private pockets because it is not accounted for. What we have as balance in our account is money that ordinarily would have been blown in the name of security vote.
I have not purchased any vehicle since I came in. What I use as official cars are old vehicles that I inherited from the last administration. I have not traveled anywhere. All these journeys abroad I have not embarked on and would not go because they amount to wastages that ordinarily people were taking advantage of . We have what we call overhead.
In 2003, we were giving Hisbah N100,000 but by the time we came back they were receiving N4million per month, I was shocked and directed they should revert to N100,000. I reviewed the whole thing and directed every ministry to revert to the 2003 bench mark.
All these leakages have been blocked. We don’t have trees that grow money here neither do we borrow money from corporate organizations or banks.. We don’t borrow money so as not to mortgage our future. We don’t waste money. That is why we have so much money in the treasury; by January 2012, we had over N25billion in our account, and the figure is increasing daily.
This fiscal policy has earned us the confidence of investors as exemplified by Alhaji Aliko Dangote that injected N600million into our poverty reduction programme. People are paying their taxes. IGR has jumped from N500m to N1.5billion. We are working assiduously to ensure that our IGR pays workers salaries and we will get there.
Critics do not believe your supporters claim that you are in a haste to fix the state?
Since we were sworn-in, we have been conscious that we have four years. Four years can been seen to be a very long time, but I know that four years in terms of programme and projects is not a long time. We have projects that span couple of years and that is why we have to start early.
Based on my experience, we started many projects during my first shot as governor of Kano in 1999-2003. Unfortunately we were not able to finish them, and we left of them for our successors, now predecessors to complete and we have cases where they laid claim to our jobs.
This time around we are trying to start projects as soon as possible so that we can finish them within my four years tenure in office which explains why we are making use of the time. The projects are very important to the people of Kano state, especially our poverty alleviation programme, one thousand women per local government. Poverty is embedded in our society and we want to get the money down to the root so that the people can benefit.
We are in haste due to no other reason than time and we are working very hard to make impact. We have so many four years in life. We witnessed the first one in 1999 -2003 and we hope this second tenure ends in a more positive note. We are making sure that every minute is fully utilized for service to humanity.
What do you made of reports that funds allocated to women are being hijacked by their husbands?
I don’t want to interfere in the personal relationship of husband and wife. My main job here is to create jobs through investments and we have allocated funds for women who I believe are better resource managers and we have also made provision for men and want to appeal to whoever is involved in such practice to have a rethink.
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