Alhaji Shuaibu Abdullahi is a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, (APC) in Kwara State. In this interview with TAIWO AMODU, the aspirant for the party’s governorship ticket claims the state has been at the mercy of an oligarchy and he is on a rescue mission.
YOU are one of those gunning for the ticket of the APC to govern Kwara State. Why do you think that you are the most qualified to govern the state?
I think Kwara State deserves a bailout. It is quite sad that Kwara State kept pace with other states till the last 16 years. After that, the state has been a complete disaster and this brings to the fore the not-too-young-to-run bill just signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari. If you look at Kwara in the last 16 years, you will discover that the first of that was given to a young man and after that, it was another young man. But see the disaster that has been the result.
For lack of a better word, I want to say that the people of Kwara are almost in captivity and this is quite visible when you go to the state. I come from Kwara North and I can tell you that seeing the people walk on the streets and in their villages, you can see that everything is wrong. You can read it on their foreheads that they have not had any dividend of democracy. If you look at all sphere of lives, go and see the ramshackle things they call schools in Kwara State and compare that with recently created states like Katsina. In the area of health, apart from the General Hospital in Ilorin that was refurbished with so much money, there is nothing on ground. It is not in the beauty of the buildings that quality health is derived, but in the quality of the medical staff, the number you have in ratio to the number of people that come to access health care. So, in essence, I think that Kwara has suffered from incompetence of those who have led the state in the last 16 years. It is an incompetence that, if taken too far, will put the state’s development efforts on the reverse gear.
So, someone has to neutralise this gear and push it forward. I believe that the private sector people have to come in and use the efficiency of the private sector and drive Kwara State for the betterment of the people. I see myself as one of those people. I have been in the private sector for some time. I have never had any government job apart from serving on the board of a government company. So, I believe it is a rescue mission and some of us have to take the burden and the mantle. When I was approached by some of our people, I said fine because it is not all about self. In the private sector, I am doing fine and I can go on enjoying my life, but it has become a duty for all of us Kwarans that has something to offer to come out and offer it and I believe that I can render my own assistance this way. That is why I am coming out to contest.
There is this belief that in Kwara that there is an established way of succession. But it appears that you are rebelling against that. Do you think you will pull through considering what you might describe as the Saraki Dynasty factor?
Let me say this to you. I do not believe that democracy allows for any dynasty. I don’t believe in it. I am not part of it and I believe that democracy is all about majority and how you are able to convince the majority that you are the best man for the job. That is my belief. But there are those who believe that they just have to sit down and somebody points at you as the man. I don’t believe in it and I am not rebelling against any system because I don’t think there is anything like that. I think that is for people that are lazy and think that just need to please one Lord of the Manor and once you bow towards him, he will reward you with any appointment whether you are competent or not. Go and see Kwara State for yourself and compare it to other states, even the recently created ones.
There is a game of musical chairs in Kwara, recycling one set of people round and round. Are you telling me that it is the same set of people that are competent in Kwara? Again, some of us must rebel against these things if that is what you call it.
You have used some hard words to describe the past administrations in Kwara especially in the last 16 years and the conclusion is that these past governments in the state have been failures. The state has been under the APC on whose platform you are seeking to contest the election. Is that not an indictment of the party?
Well you might be right, because the guys who are there right now are of the APC and I will be running on the platform of the APC. But you cannot say that the APC has failed giving the peculiarities of Kwara State. You just spoke of something that looked like a dynasty being run in the state. I don’t belong to that, but I believe that when the history of Kwara is being written, it will not be written more about the party in power, but more about the people that were in power in the state. I accept that APC is my party and that they fielded wrong people because some of us can do better and show the things that APC is made of and that is why I am here.
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You have painted an unsavoury picture of things in Kwara in the last 16 years. What are you bringing on board and what do you intend to do differently?
I have always known that part of the problem we have is that we have always clap hands for people who do what anybody can do. That is not peculiar to Kwara, but the situation in Kwara is only worse. Sometimes, I say fools can do it. Anybody can spend money. The definition of good governance by our people is not based on competence, but doing what anybody does.
You collect your monthly allocation from Abuja, then you tar roads, build schools and others and the people clap hands for you. Our competency should be to look at the economic sector and see how we can create wealth from what we have. How do we get what we want from what we have and how do we create wealth? Until you are able to create wealth, things will not go well. If you have incompetent people that do not know what to do in the economic sector, the balance sheet will never balance.
So, for me, it is about creating the wealth. Kwara has a huge expanse of land and see the huge volume of water that passes through the state every day. I come from Shunga and I am sure that you must have heard of Zimbabwean farmers. Not even a semblance of irrigation is happening there. For a state that is serious, they will take advantage of the fertile land. The land is plain and it is there begging for usage. How much is a bag of rice today? Let us take paddy rice and get N100,000, get one hectares of rice from where you get about ten tons of rice. So, if you give a young graduate ten hectares which is mechanised. His colleagues also have the same thing around him and one of them is given the tractors to plough the land for them in the next three to six month, they are able to make about N1 million per hectare and that will translate to about ten million naira in six months. When you remove the cost of production, he will have about eight million left. Tell me how many graduates have jobs that pay them eight million naira a year. Assuming Kwara State government decides to add irrigation and they are able to farm three times a year, that will give them about N24 million per year. That translates to about N2 million a month. I don’t know where a young graduate can earn that much in a month. These things are there, but they are only available for a discerning mind; someone who can do the thinking and the connection.
Under my administration God willing, Kwara State will be able to make between N15 to N20 billion in my first year from agriculture alone. We are going to go on that graph until we will no longer depend on federations account to do anything. There are lots of minerals in Kwara which nobody is thinking of exploiting because we have lazy and incompetent people who are just comfortable with federation account. It is sad that it is only in Kwara state that people pay percentage as salaries. I don’t know how it sits on their conscience that fellow human beings are subjected to things like this. We are going to do a lot of things differently if God willing, we are there.
To be able to do all these, you need a platform. How will you secure the ticket of the APC?
I believe in Allah and I also believe that nobody, no matter how high he may think of himself, owns the people. Like Bob Marley said, you can deceive the people sometimes, but you can’t deceive the people all the time. We all have our limitations. But the limitation of those that think that they have the capacity to appropriate what belong to all of us, should know that it is over. They can do so much, but no one can do all things. We are in the game and like every game, you either lose or you win. But in this game, we are almost positive that we shall win.
and then