By Mohammed Adamu
AS I was on that jaggedly potholed Abuja-Minna road last Sunday driving home and musing over what subject next to write on, I received a text message from a fellow Nigerlite and erstwhile Newsline colleague of mine, Khadijah Umar Mashegu. And although we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in a long time, it appeared my sister was still her usual ‘cut-the-crap-and-get-straight-to-the-point kind of communicator’ I had always known her to be: “Salam” she said, “Do you have any thoughts on what can help Niger State move forward?” Hhhmmm! Who would not heave a sigh? By the way, aside the media matters, Khadija I understand is now involved in development issues, especially at the grassroots.

And for a moment my ordeal with potholes -some, the sizes of craters and mini gorges- almost got me into soliloquized road-rage as I said aloud to myself ‘what else do you need to move Niger State forward Khadijah than fix this tragedy of a road that is the gateway to the so called ‘Power State’?’ Yes, I was virtually taking it personal. In truth there is more to moving Niger State forward than merely fixing her potholed gateway road to Minna. Maybe we should even start by fixing this terribly masochismic mentality of Nigerlites –who are always ready to take the short end of the stick from our selfish politicians. We have continued, it seems, to be left more abjectly poor with every passing government.

Former Governor Abdulkadir Kure and his immediate successor Babangida Aliyu both had humongous amounts of State funds at their disposal, but they were either bereft of the ideas to move the State forward or their severely itchy fingers simply would not let them. Even when we thought that no government could ever be as bad as Kure’s, Babangida Aliyu still came to angelise Kure by taking governance to the lowliest low. And now our current APC government, like a happy-go-lucky moth-butterfly, borne cheaply on the wings of populist Buharism, is presently caught in the wax and flux either of paucity of funds or of ideas; or of both.

One term only governor

•Gov.Abubakar Sani Bello

In fact, it is unfortunate that already a three-word sobriquet ‘One Term Only’ is now snidely hauled at the new Government by impatient youths who see it as the proverbial ‘kyanwan lami’ which, as the saying goes, ‘ba ki cizo, ba kya yaqushi’ –meaning ‘the ineffectual cat that neither paws nor catches any mouse at all’. This certainly is a cause for worry for our princely Governor Abu Lolo, pampered son of one-time Military Governor of Kano State, Col. Sani Bello and the doted son-in-law of the Abdulsalamis.

By the way even if he desires to probe his immediate predecessor Aliyu to raise the crucial funds needed to buoy his insolvent government, Abu may be constrained by both filial consanguinity and affinity not be able to do so. Because his mother-in-law Fati Abdussalam herself is a blood niece to Aliyu who is thus a grand-uncle-in-law to the new Governor. In the sixteen years that PDP had conquered and despoiled my beloved Niger State, I had written one too many titles either passionately importuning good governance, or in moments of personal outrage, reprimanding the brazen lack of it. And until Khadijah’s last Sunday’s text I had thought that I am done with the goings-on in Niger. But you just never say never!

First, we may ask: ‘is Niger State viable?’ That I had answered in a piece I once wrote, titled ‘Niger: Cry the beloved power State’.

Niger State is famed for ‘Power’ on account of two inherently contradistinctive sources of ‘power’. And she is noted also for ‘history’ on account of two mutually opposing causes of ‘history’. As a ‘Power State’, Niger is both the metaphorical and the existential source of two high voltages, one ‘political’ –being the birth place of two former Military heads of State, Generals Babangida and Abdussalami; and the other ‘hydro-electrical’ -being home to the nation’s two major hydro dams, Kainji and Shiroro.

And of ‘history’ Niger State is noted for an interesting dual apposite: namely being home to Nigeria’s first colonial seat of Power, Zungeru; -and which town was itself also the birth-place of two Eastern great personages: one, Nigeria’s foremost nationalists and her first President, Nnamdi Azikiwe and the other, the very agent provocateur of Nigeria’s Civil war himself, Odumegwu Ojukwu. Thus, Zungeru alone is quite a piece of tourist laboratory for any serious minded governor with the gift of fertile imagination. But Niger State is all these and even more.

Of note also are the State’s enormous agricultural potentials in virtually all of the sectors of it; the ‘expanse’ and the ‘fecundity’ of her soil types; the multi variegation of her crop and plant varieties; the wide range of her irrigable land locations; the existence of largely untapped ecosystems; her numerous fish sources and diverse species; a plenitude of an immensely provident graze-able plains for animal husbandry and an agriculturally clement weather conducive for a variety of all-year farming systems, Niger State is preeminently nonpareil – except perhaps for a contentious Benue State that also lays claim to being the ‘food basket of the nation’.

Untapped treasures

Nor is the State any less endowed in other exploitable but regrettably untapped treasures such as her huge deposits of gold and other precious metals; or yet her many tourist destinations like the Shiroro and Kainji dams, the waterfalls of Gurara, the Borgu Games Reserve; the first colonial Capital and Zik’s cum Ojukwu’s birth place Zungeru; the famous Ladi Kwali Pottery; the potentially exploitable Zuma Rock, -which is a natural landmark-mystic of national significance both in its touristic value and its symbolic uniting force. Neither Kure nor Aliyu could discern the potentials of this landmark.

Once, Governor Aliyu in his typical, do-nothing populist stunts, had arranged to be physically launched on top of Zuma Rock for the titillation of his own ego and for the amusement of political hangers-on. In fact, typically for Aliyu this Zuma-climbing event would’ve been enough to form the fulcrum of governance discourse with himself as the trail-blazing star who had done what no governor had ever done. Ironically right beneath the Zuma Rock itself was a 30-year-old abandoned and uncompleted State-owned five-star hotel. Talba the star-Rock-climber took the shine off of this derelict five-star metaphor of waste and misplaced priority.

In fact, it was to the credit of the ‘heroics’ of another do-nothing Governor, Kure that the battle to get the Federal Government remove Zuma Rock from the five naira note was won, because Niger State had insisted that the landmark exclusively belonged to it and that the Federal Government’s use of it on our national currency was tantamount to a violation of landmark rights. Interestingly since then apart from the historic landing of Governor Aliyu on it, the State has done nothing to exploit the tourist potentials of Zuma Rock other than lend the use of ‘Zuma’ ironically to a federal agency, the Nigeria Police on its State crime patrol vehicles. ‘ba cinyar ba’ the Hausas would say, ‘kafar baya!’ –‘not the hind but the foreleg’.

Again to Niger State belongs a strategically positioned Suleja (originally Abuja) town that is a virtual entrepot to the Federal Capital and an ancient city readily exploit-able in its Real-estate potentials both on account of its Gateway location to the nation’s capital and its enviable history as the baptismal precursor to the present day ‘Abuja’. By the way, Suleja as the veritable historical surrogate mother to Abuja, is a national monument of some sort deserving of special funding by the federal government. No governor had ever put forth this legitimate claim; the same way neither has fought for HYPERDEC to cushion the effect of perennial flooding of the major dams suffered by various communities.

To any discerning Governor, Suleja by now should’ve been a veritable alter-ego of Abuja with choice property and especially star-studded hotels that operate low-flying helicopters offering customised shuttle services daily to and from Abuja’s Central Business District for those who may want to stay on the outskirts as they deal with the bureaucracy in Abuja. Or maybe even a little less ‘crazier’, an FCT-Niger State owned light-rail by now could daily be ferrying passengers who work in Abuja but live in Suleja or any of the numerous connected settlements through which the rail would traverse. In Suleja alone a veritable potpourri of investables abide and from which a world of infinite commercial possibilities lie. But where is the Governor?

By the way Niger State is home to some of the best species of yam anywhere in the country; and in fact our hard-working, agrarian Gbagyi population cultivates about the largest share –admittedly in contention with Benue’s Tiv farmers- of the nation’s annual yam production. Yet no Governor of Niger State has ever deemed it desirable to transform this raw yam resource by the addition of value which will compensate our poor local farmers for their investment of capital and for the drudgery put in annual to bring that produce to us at a street value that sometimes amounts literally to robbing the farmer.

Truckloads after truckloads of yam exit the State, purchased at abysmally low glut-rate prices and transported down to the industrial suburbs of Lagos and Ogun states to be processed into ‘poundo-yam flour’ which now sells in supermarkets at about a thousand naira per single-meal sachet. Ironically, at the peak of yam glut in my State a thousand naira sometimes can give you a boot-full of yams bought off a street-hawking, often-child-nestling gbagyi mother who would sell not because the price is right, but because she needs to free her neck from the weight of the commodity.

Processed local rice

As with the Niger State yam, so it is with the Niger State ‘stoned fadama rice’ that neither Governor Kure nor Aliyu ever deemed it necessary to work to un-stone –by gradually setting a milling process in motion either through the empowerment of our predominantly Nupe local rice farmers or even the direct involvement of Government in improving and adding value to this commodity so that farmers get equitable value for their drudgery and the nation is gradually weaned from its overdependence on foreign rice. None of our governors cared.

One can go on and on from the uniquely palatable diverse fish species either from Shiroro, Kainji or in fact the exceptionally salt-sweet fadama fishes of the rice-farming communities of Nupe land who are left too at the mercy of the vagaries of a cruel informal market; and then even to the numerous varieties of fruits especially mangoes sold at glut-street price sometimes of one-penny-to-the-dozens, while street-smart juice-making factories from Sango-Otta sneak in annually to cart truckload after truckload literally at no cost from local Gbagyi communities who may only be too happy to be rid of it

EPILOGUE

Yet, critics would say ‘Mohammed, this is preposterous. The current Governor is battling to pay salaries, and you are talking about big time projects. Even previous governors who had brimming treasuries at their disposal couldn’t execute such projects’. No! It was not that previous governors COULDN’T . In truth they simply WOULDN’T.

Yet,   just because projects were not executed when there was money, does not mean that projects cannot now be executed because there is no money. Governor Abu Lolo just has to look inwards and create ‘wealth’. The Einstein peach of genuine exertion in the art of governance is all about creating ‘something’, -sometimes even from ‘nothing’!