Tambuwal’s 3-Point Dev Agenda, the journey so far

Governor Aminu Tambuwal says his stewardship in the past six and a half years has impacted the people of Sokoto State positively. With a number of legacy projects spanning education, health, agriculture and sports sectors at different stages of execution,

Tambuwal,  in this interview, is optimistic the state will reap the benefits of his foresight in the next few years.

He also speaks on a wide range of issues including his likely successor, and 2023 presidential election among others.

We have seen a lot of ongoing capital projects across critical sectors of the economy. Where did you get funds to execute all these?

When we came in May 2015, we all knew how the general economic situation of the country was, states and to some extent, the federal government were struggling to pay wages. Here in Sokoto, from that time and as bad as the situation is till now, we don’t owe any worker any salary to the best of my knowledge.

We pay our salaries as at when due and we pay our pensioners. We manage to stagger payments of even gratuities. We set aside every month either N100 million or N50 million to pay gratuities.

Our federal allocation is very well known and let me tell you that before now Sokoto could not hit N1 billion of Internally Generated Revenue, IGR until recently. We worked on the board of internal revenue service, and now, the IGR is beginning to pick up. So, it is all about planning, financial management and fiscal responsibility.

We are strategic in the use of public funds. We don’t waste money on frivolities, on things that are not necessary, things that will not bring about any impact on the lives of the people.
We have a very robust social scheme and we still pay monthly stipends to a number of indigent people in Sokoto State. Education is free for both indigenes and non-indigenes who attend public schools. Notebooks and textbooks are free for these students as well.

In Addition to that, we pay West African Examination Council, WAEC and National Examination Council, NECO registration fees for indigenous Sokoto students.  
It is about strategic expenditure planning and, of course, we took some loans that are targeted at projects and loans that are for capital expenditure. We don’t take loans for recurrent expenditure.

In a Nigeria without an oil economy, how ready is Sokoto?

Sokoto is largely an agrarian state, 85 per cent of our populace are farmers and we do everything to support them generally. We employed more extension workers that are helping them with skills and knowledge in terms of modern knowledge and skills and they also help them in terms of guiding them on the right seeds to plant. We are moving them from where they were to a knowledge-based agric business.

We support them with fertilizers and insecticide and all of that and I don’t think the are many states that really subsidized fertilizers the way we do here in Sokoto state to the farmers and I can tell you that in terms of subsidies, Sokoto is top among all states in the federation.  When we ventured into the anchor borrower scheme, we actually had to open accounts for farmers at the expense of the state government because of the low level of income of the farmers.

They could not even afford the basic requirements of money for opening of accounts and we had to, as government, open those accounts for them.

So, all of that has helped in boosting agriculture in Sokoto. We realised between N250 million and N300 million annually from the sale of onions alone.

What informed your massive investment in education, particularly education of the girl-child?

When we came in, I commissioned some of our experts, both local and a very few that are outside Sokoto to understudy our health, education and agricultural sectors, and charged them to advise the government because I identified those three as key priorities. If you educate people, they will be more healthy and productive.

So we deliberately set out to really change the narratives in education because whenever you were counting states backward in western education, you would count Sokoto as one. But that is no longer the case today. It is about getting the right infrastructure, getting the right instructional materials, and getting the right teachers and personnel.

So we decided to commission that study on the needs assessment of the education sector of Sokoto State. We started implementation of the report and that largely is the reason we are here today.

Figuratively, the governor of the state is like the father of all the children. So, why don’t you sit down and look, reflect and see how best you can give them education that is not only quantitative, not only providing them with many schools but quality education, to prepare better for their future?

The bandits we have in North-West, the insurgents in the North-East, when you check them out, you will realise they are young people who are not educated either in the Western education sense or even in religious sense. So, education is the key to addressing all of those challenges of insecurity and poverty.  

And about the girl-child education, the figures have not been and if you want to address the issue of a girl wanting to go to school, there is a problem back home because she wants to hawk for her mother. You must find something to support them. We met a programme that had to do with cash transfer, conditional cash transfer. If a mother agrees to send her daughter to school, instead of her to be hawking, you give her N5,000. If she has two daughters  you give N10,000, three daughters, that is N15,000. We have sustained this and improved on it.

And we have been very deliberate by creating an agency mandated to take charge of girl-child education in addition to the law we passed in the state for compulsory education, which is the first of its kind in Nigeria.

All of these go to show that we have identified the gaps, the problems and the issues. And then we decided to be deliberate in seeing how best we can now change the narrative positively and have these children educated and reduce the number of out-of-school-children.

Closely related to that is the issue of almajiri. When some governors called for the abolition of the almajiri system, I said no. There is a misconception about the almajiri system.

Almajiri is not these boys you see roaming about the streets; almajiri is a system of education. We studied some countries that are largely Islamic in terms of population and one of them is Indonesia.

I personally led a delegation to Indonesia, we studied their system of Islamic education and that’s what we’re using now to reposition the almajiri system of education.  it’s not something that you just throw away because it’s been practiced for hundreds of years and you cannot just say one day, you are now going to disruptively cancel it or ban it without providing an alternative.

The committee on health care came up with what we should do in attending to primary health care.

We have over 800 primary healthcare centres, dispensaries and facilities across the state and then, of course, the general hospitals. And then we decided to say okay, these general hospitals, some are in local government headquarters but when we came in about two or three local governments headquarters did not even have the general hospitals, some were under construction.

We renovated and built more. We ensured that every local government has a functional general hospital and we provide drugs free of charge. We provide free malaria drugs in the state and we set up a malaria agency, the first of its kind that has been mandated to look, and take care of issues about malaria campaigns and all of that.

So we decided and said okay, outside the local government headquarters; there are bigger settlements with a large population of people. We have now identified about four of them and we are providing them with general hospitals, upgrading their primary health centre facilities to general hospitals.

And when we looked at the general tertiary medical situation of the state, we decided to come up with an idea of a premier hospital that is slightly higher than the general hospitals but not up to a teaching hospital.

We identified the need for that and said, okay, let’s have three of them, one in each of the three senatorial districts with 150 bed spaces and the apex should be the State University Teaching Hospital. We did what they call telemedicine, connecting these three premier hospitals with the teaching hospital. If a patient is referred to any of the premier hospitals, by the time he gets to the teaching hospital, his record is already there because that is telemedicine. We have a shortage of doctors and medical personnel in Sokoto State.

So if you have your own teaching hospital, you have schools of nursing, health technology; they will all be training and retraining your medical workers and medical force. So that is part of the reason we now decided to have all of these in place. And the third one is to address the issue of medical tourism.

That’s why we partly came up with the idea of a diagnostic centre, advanced diagnostics centre, which is second to none around here in the whole of North-West Nigeria. I don’t want to say the whole of Northern Nigeria, but I am sure, I don’t think there’s any other one like this even in Abuja that is up to this one stop shop.

Every test is being carried out in one place. Nigeria is losing dollars because of medical tourism; people are going out for medical attention. If we can have these facilities here, neighbouring states and even the general public will come here to use our facilities. We will generate more income for the state and the country.

Are you worried that you may not be able to complete all these projects given the fact that you have a little over a year in office?

We took all this consideration and I can assure you that we did our financial planning and outlay. By the grace of God, all ongoing projects would be completed in the next few months.

Tell us a thing or two about the New Sokoto City Project

On the issue of a new city, Sokoto is getting congested and we don’t want what happened to some key major cities in Nigeria to befall Sokoto. Sokoto is well planned, if you go around, you will see it. As far back as 1975, the Sokoto master plan was developed and since then, there has been no second master plan.

That is why this administration decided on another master plan. That is why we decided to build a new Sokoto City that will decongest the main city. The new city has newer structures and all of that.

Is there any division in the PDP governors’ forum over zoning?

No.

How is your consultation going about the 2023 presidency?

Well, it is going on well. We are still consulting. When we are done, we will sit down and appraise it and then come back with a position.

Now that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has rolled out the election timetable, what is your next move now?

I am still consulting.

Do you think your party stands a chance?

Are you talking about thinking? PDP is the party to beat.

The issue of insecurity in Sokoto is quite disturbing. What are you doing to curb the menace?

We have done quite a lot and I have addressed it a number of times. And you see, basically, it is the responsibility of the Federal Government but what we do at the state level is to support the federal security agencies, by way of providing them with the logistics and vehicles. When they’re on special operations, we give them allowances to look after their welfare.

Even as we speak now, some of the security personnel that sustained injury somewhere recently are on their way to Abuja, on the account of Sokoto State Government, to one of the specialized facilities.

So we are giving them every support that they require. There is nothing the security agencies in Sokoto State requested from us in terms of support that we have not given them.

And in the last four or five years, we have provided them with nothing less than 500 vehicles.