Our decision on Shiite in order —el-Rufai

Governor Nasiru el-Rufai of Kaduna State speaks to select journalists on the challenges and achievements of his administration since he assumed office. Muhammad Sabiu was there. Excerpts:

 

KADUNA was the first state that launched the free feeding programme. Why did you stop free feeding and does that mean that the state is not doing as well as expected in the education sector?

Education is the fundamental gift you can give to your citizens. Unfortunately, education investments don’t show returns immediately. It takes about a generation – 30 years before you see the benefits. Many of us are beneficiaries of education investments made by the northern regional government. That is why many governments ignore education because it is not like building a road that people will see it and praise you. But we believe that the restoration of public education to the quality that we had when we were going to school is an imperative and we are doing all that we can, to achieve this. Part of the package of the reforms that we introduced in education included not only the free basic education for nine years, but the primary school feeding programme. It was costing us N1. 1 billion a month and we believe in it.  We felt that even if you make education free, if a child cannot get pocket money to eat while in school, the parents may decide it is better to withdraw him or her from school and we didn’t want that. This is why we introduced the programme. For the 1.8 million children in schools in Kaduna, this is what we were spending. We were encouraged to start the programme because the Office of the Vice-President, under the Social Investment Programme, promised to subsidise 60 per cent of the cost of the programme. So we started spending our money in the expectation of being reimbursed. We have spent nearly N8 billion on this programme this year and the Office of the vice-president is supposed to pay us back in the region of N6 billion to N7 billion.

Since we made education free, the enrollment in class one was huge. We have not been paid this money. The amount we earmarked for the programme in the 2016 budget has been exhausted; so we cannot continue with the programme. We are expecting the reimbursement from the office of the Vice President and we had been assured over and over that we would be reimbursed. But we didn’t think that we had the resources to continue without that reimbursement and we had exhausted what we budgeted for it. We have to take supplementary appropriation to the House of Assembly to continue. Even if we did that, we have liquidity constraints because our revenue projections have not been fully realised. We decided to put it on hold and we are waiting for reimbursement from the Office of the Vice-President. I think we are doing well in education generally. I cannot prove it because it takes time before education investments are matured. But I can give you some statistics to show that we are doing well.

But there is an issue because education is not just about enrollment and classrooms. Education is mostly around quality of teachers. What we inherited from the PDP government is that 42 per cent of our teachers in primary schools are not qualified to teach. Recently the chairman of Makarfi local government administered a test to primary school teachers in his local government. The test was an equivalent of what a class four primary school pupil should be able to pass and a large percentage of the teachers failed to score 40 per cent of the test. Some of them have certificates that show that they are qualified, but couldn’t pass an equivalent of class four exam.

 

You mean teachers failed examination meant for school children, is it that bad?

We have a serious problem of teacher quality. Over the years, PDP governments had allowed thugs and others to be employed as teachers. The previous government gave those without qualification five years to acquire qualification and that dateline expired in 2015. So those that have not acquired the required qualification may have to be eased out. That will open the opportunity for us to employ younger and more qualified people.

But in spite of this, Kaduna came first within the northern states in the last WAEC exams and placed 12th overall in Nigeria. So I will say we are doing pretty well. We are not where we should be, because I want us to be number three not number 12; we are getting there by God’s grace.

We have spent N3 billion on school modernisation and N2 billion on renovation of schools. We spent N7. 5 billion on school feeding this year and N80 million on teachers’ professional training. We have paid N180 million for NECO exams for our students; we spent N275 million on scholarships – N145 million for local scholarship and N130 million for foreign scholarship and this will continue.

We have 30 girls in Uganda studying medicine and we hope to send more of our girls to other countries. We are discussing with Cuba to send more of our girls to study medicine because we have shortage of doctors in Kaduna, especially female doctors. We will resume the primary school feeding programme as soon as we complete the verification of the vendors and we have a framework that the office of the Vice-President finds acceptable to not only reimburse us but also to continue to pay for primaries one to three. We have already budgeted for 2017 to continue with these assumptions in mind.

 

There is a lot of apprehension amongst civil servants that your public service reform programme is aimed at retrenching workers. Can you clarify what the reforms are all about?

People usually worry when you talk of public service reforms because of retrenchment and so on. I think if people have been very discerning as far as this government is concerned, we’ve been a job creating government, not a job destroying government.

I think we are the only state in Nigeria that has hired 5,000 people in its first year in office.

We also brought back 800 retired nurses because we have a shortage of nurses in the state. We brought them back to mentor the younger nurses. We have not retrenched since we came. We have verified and removed ghost workers, but that is not retrenchment, that is removing those that don’t exist. Though we have added 5,000 people to the payroll, we still spend less on salaries and allowances than when we came into office. The purpose of this reform has nothing to do with retrenchment. We call it public service revitalisation programme. There are three legs to it: we want to bring in younger people. There has been an embargo on employment in Kaduna State since 2008. Only when you know the governor, you will hire one or two people or when people retire, you will do a memo to the governor, asking to replace and then you bring your friends and relations. There has not been proper employment of young people into the government for eight years! The result is that our civil service is aging.

The way and manner public servants think need to be restructured. We are called public servants, but we don’t behave like public servants. We behave like lords of the manor; we behave like masters. You need to take all various grades and cadre of the public service for a reorientation programme for them to understand that they exist to serve the people and not the other way round. All these are the key components of the programme. We have no intention of retrenching anyone. Of course, some people will lose their jobs because some have fake certificates. Someone sent me the name of a person through Whatsapp with the photocopy of his degree certificate from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and said governor, it is fake, check. I asked the commissioner for education to check, the certificate looks as good as my ABU certificate but it is fake. They said the name has never registered in ABU.  But he has a proper ABU certificate and NYSC discharge certificate and he is working in one of our agencies! So one of the things we are going to do as part of this   reform is to crosscheck things like that.

So there are many people with certificates that are fake. If you find such a person are you going to leave him in the service? There are people that have three birth dates. They had gone to their records and change their age three or four times because they don’t want to retire. If you catch those people, according to public service rule, it is gross misconduct; they should be punished. In the process of the reform and checking, all these people will lose their jobs. But that is not the intention; the goal is to clean the service, get the right people. For me, it is more important to inject young people into the service.  Eighty nine per cent of the population of Kaduna State is below the age of 35. What percentage of people below the age of 35 are in the public service? Just 15 per cent. There is something wrong. It is all old people that are trying to run a state in which the majority of the people are young and are angry and frustrated because they can’t get work. It is our intention to try to reform the service to bring in younger people. There is no motive behind the reforms other than to get our service to work better, bring in younger, more skillful, more vibrant people. That is the objective.

 

There have been a lot of hues and cries over the banning of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), as activists argued that their human rights have been violated. Why did the government decide to infringe on the Shiites’ freedom of association and the freedom to practise their religion?

The issue of Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) and their declaration as an unlawful society is something that we did with all sense of responsibility. Many media outlets have presented what we did in various ways which are misleading.

What we did was not to ban any organisation; we have no power to ban an organisation if it exists; we cannot ban religion or religious practice. What we did is to say that the Islamic Movement in Nigeria is an unlawful society and we derived the powers to do this under the Penal Code that was passed in 1963. So it is not a new thing that we did. The governor can declare any organisation an unlawful society, if it poses a threat to the security, peace and governance of the state. And we concluded, after receiving the report of the judicial commission of inquiry that looked into the clashes between the IMN and the army, that the IMN poses a threat to the peace, security and good governance of Kaduna State. That is what we did.

We did not ban Shiism. We did not ban Shiites. We did not say they cannot practise their religion, because in Kaduna State, there are at least two Shiites organisations that we know. There is Al-Thaqalayn Foundation; there is Rasul A’azam Society. These are all Shiites organisations and they are not outlawed. They are not outlawed because all they do is to preach their brand of Islam and they practise their brand of Islam and they are free to do so. Both of them are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). They recognise the constitutional order in Nigeria. They recognise President Muhammadu Buhari as president of Nigeria. They recognise Nasiru El-Rufai as governor of Kaduna State and they obey the laws of Nigeria and Kaduna State. They have no paramilitary arm; they do not carry arms. They do not block public highways; they do not occupy schools.

The IMN does not recognise the constitution of Nigeria; does not recognise Buhari as President of Nigeria. They [their members] do not recognise me as governor of Kaduna State because they had their governor in Tudun Wada. They have their paramilitary wing; they call them ‘Hurras’. They train them in violation of our laws. They do not accept that any law in Nigeria applies to them. They block public highways. They occupy schools when they are doing their processions and they feel that to practise their religion, they have to infringe on the right of others. That is completely wrong!

There is also a misconception that IMN is the same as Shiites. IMN is only one out of many Shiites organisations. There is a prominent Shiite organisation with its headquarters here in Kaduna that is headed by Sheikh Hamza Lawal. Because IMN doesn’t recognise Nigerian laws, they are not registered with CAC, so they cannot be sued or held responsible. They build anywhere they want without approval. They don’t even bother to acquire title to land. Their allegiance is not to Nigerian government; their allegiance is to somewhere else.  I want to ask you, if you put all these facts together, what does IMN look like? IMN looks like an insurgency waiting to happen.

The report of the commission of inquiry recommended that we should proscribe IMN because they are not registered; they can’t sue or be sued in their own name. The media should stop referring to the IMN as Shiites because they are just one group out of many others. I will like you to speak with other groups to hear what they think of IMN. IMN is a political organisation. The objective of El-Zakzaky is to gather enough followers to effect an Iranian type Islamic Revolution in Nigeria and you know what that can cause! Nigeria is not 100 per cent a Muslim country that you can do Islamic Revolution; it is a recipe for crisis.

I laugh when some people that are not informed on this subject are sympathetic to him, talking about human rights. What he has in plan for you, you will not have any human rights. Anybody that tries to say Nigeria will be an Islamic country; do you know how much crisis he is trying to create? That is the agenda. So let us understand this problem.

We remain open to talk to their members like any citizen, not as IMN because they are unlawful and if you claimed to be a member of IMN, it is seven years imprisonment. That is why we are looking for Ibrahim Musa who has signed a statement as their spokesman. We are raising the reward for exposing him to N500,000. Anyone that knows where he is should tell us so that the police can [arrest] him. We are going to try him for signing a statement that he is a spokesman for IMN after the publication of an order outlawing the organisation.

 

 The crisis in Southern Kaduna has been recurrent and there seems not to be an end in sight. Recently, the Centre of Humanitarian Dialogue has started a peace building effort. Will this initiative make any difference?

When we came to office, the two problems we faced in the area of security were cattle rustling in Birnin Gwari/Giwa axis and these communal killings in southern Kaduna. We were very concerned about both and we did two things. We needed to understand what was happening in southern Kaduna. We understood cattle rustling and we convened a meeting of all the north-west governors because the problem was centred around the forest ranges of Kuyambana and we felt state cooperation was necessary. We came together and launched an operation to deal with cattle rustling. We were successful because we degraded their ability to do cattle rustling, even though that created a problem of kidnapping, because they moved from cattle rustling to kidnapping we are still facing.

For southern Kaduna, we didn’t understand what was going on and we decided to set up a committee under Gen. Martin Luther Agwai (retd) to find out what was going on there. What was established was that the root of the problem has a history starting from the 2011 post-election violence. Fulani herdsmen from across Africa bring their cattle down towards middle belt and southern Nigeria. The moment the rains starts around March, April, they start moving them up to go back to their various communities and countries. Unfortunately, it was when they were moving up with their cattle across southern Kaduna that the elections of 2011 took place and the crisis trapped some of them. Some of them were from Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal. Fulanis are in 14 African countries and they traverse this country with the cattle. So many of these people were killed, cattle lost and they organised themselves and came back to revenge.

So a lot of what was happening in Southern Kaduna was actually from outside Nigeria. We got a hint that the late Governor Patrick Yakowa got this information and he sent someone to go round some of these Fulani communities, but of course after he died, the whole thing stopped. That is what we inherited. But the Agwai committee established that.

We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people, trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging you to stop killing. In most of the communities, once that appeal was made to them, they said they have forgiven. There is one or two that asked for monetary compensation. They said they have forgiven the death of human beings, but want compensation for cattle. We said no problem, so we paid. As recently as two weeks ago, the team went to Niger republic to attend one Fulani gathering that they do every year with a message from me.