“We have eased access to land for agriculture as well as for industrial and commercial purposes”

 

Kaduna State has, undoubtedly, gained prominence in recent months as one of the emerging investment hubs in Nigeria in view of the leading global brands that have registered interests in the state. In this exclusive interview with BusinessDay team comprising Anthony Osae-Brown (Editor), Bashir Ibrahim Hassan (GM, Northern Operations) and Patrick Atuanya ( Chief Economist), Nasir Ahmad El-Rufa’i, Executive Governor, Kaduna State, highlights the reforms that have so far taken place in the State and the overwhelming interests that the State has received from local and foreign investors. All these efforts, and many more, are geared towards making Kaduna, the seat of power of the then Regional Government of Northern Nigeria, regain its lost glorious status and make it great again. Excerpts:

BusinessDay would like to know where Kaduna State was when you took over and where it is now in terms of development.

The state that we were elected to govern was falling behind in terms of development compared to its neighbouring states. Kaduna gave birth to all the 19 northern states and the FCT, but from what we saw going round the country campaigning with President Buhari, some of the states we gave birth to, had overtaken us in terms of physical infrastructure, certainly ahead of us in terms of peace, and even attractiveness of investment. So, we inherited a state that was deeply divided across ethnic and religious lines, and that had accumulated infrastructure deficits and huge arrears of investments in education, health care and other social services.

 

We were briefed that over 50 percent of the pupils in our public schools were receiving instructions on bare floors as they did not have furniture to seat on. We were informed that over 42 percent of teachers in our primary schools were not qualified to teach. Though the state inherited a very good network of urban and rural roads, they have fallen into despair because they have not been maintained in the last decade or so. So, that was the legacy we inherited but I think a more serious challenge to moving forward was the fact that the government was over bloated. The culture was to spend as much as possible on recurrent expenditure and as little on capital projects, and everything had just gone hay-wire, that’s what we inherited. With all these you would think that the state do not have lots of debts but Kaduna State has the second highest level of debt in the country after Lagos, the difference is thatwhile Lagos has the capacity to pay, the capacity of Kaduna to bear that kind of burden was questionable. This was the legacy we inherited and it was our duty to do whatever we could to address it, and that’s what we have been trying to do so since we assumed office.

 

So, from day one, we recognised that we had to make the government smaller; we had to make the cost of governance much lower, so as to free resources for capital investment. While the previous government had 24 commissioners for example, we started with 13, so we shrank that by nearly 50 percent. While the previous government had exactly 40 special advisers, we started with 10 and we have had less than 10. We got approval to appoint 10, but we have never had up to 10. So, we consciously took steps to shrink the size of the government to make it lean, mean and fit for purpose. We scaled down significantly the recurrent budget of the agencies. For instance, the 2015 budget for the government house was over N2.2 billion, by 2016 the government house budget had dropped to about N500 million, that is about 75 percent drop, and this is typical across the board we reduced recurrent expenses to create space for capital, and we focused on improving the quality and scope of social services.

 

One of the steps we took was to make basic education truly free. I say truly free because in many states, they say that basic education – the first 9 year of education is free but they find a way to charge PTA fees and all that, but we abolished all fees and made it truly free and that put a dent of about N3 billion in our revenues because that was what we used to earn as a state every year from charging fees for basic education but we stopped it. We also began to invest aggressively in renovating our schools, we did over 400 primary schools out of 4000, and we began to buy furniture so that our children will have something to sit on.

 

We introduced primary school feeding, one meal a day for our primary school pupils to make it as easy as possible for parents to send their children to school and the results have been quite encouraging. We have seen primary school enrolment increase from 1.1 million in 2015 when we took over to 2.1 million now, we almost doubled with an increase of nearly 1 million and we are quite confident that by September 2017 when the new school year opens it will probably jump to 2.2 million. So we have taken nearly a million children out of the streets into schools, now are they getting the best quality public education? No; we have to deal with congestion, we have to deal with over stressed teachers, not to mention the fact that the 42 percent we inherited were not qualified to teach, but we still feel that the socialization value of being in school exceeds that of not being in school at all, and we are working on improving the quality of education that we offer; so that is on basic education. We then went to our secondary schools and began to upgrade them and convert most of our senior secondary schools to boarding schools. Senior secondary schools pay tuition on boarding but we are looking at a way to make it free; we are investigating how much we need to make it totally free, we want to make secondary education free in Kaduna State, if we can but if we cannot, we will at least make senior secondary education for girls free, that one we must do no matter what happens, so that is how far we have gone in education. In health, we tried to revamp primary health care to ensure that within a 5-kilometer radius in every part of the state there is a functioning primary health centre that has human resources, commodities and open 24/7.

 

So we went into a contract with General Electric (GE) to equip 255 primary health centres (PHCs), and that is ongoing. We have to not only renovate the PHCs, but in some cases expand them and they are all being equipped, with ultrasound equipment, incubators and whatever we need to ensure that prenatal, antenatal and postnatal cares are provided and also to ensure that when babies are born they have a very good chance of surviving. We have ramped up our investment in routine immunization; our coverage is now nearly 100 percent and we have brought all our PHCs under the state government. Primary health care is the first legislation we sent to the State House of Assembly. So we are looking at this two- education and health care, because we believe that that is the greatest gift you can give to the ordinary citizens so that the poorest of the poor can send their children to school for nine years without making payment. The poorest of the poor can take their children and his wife to the hospital and get free medical care until they have a baby, and the baby has free care until he or she reaches the age of 5. These we believe are fundamental gifts that every government should give to the ordinary citizens.

 

That is the biggest equalizer, that is, when you give every child a chance to achieve his or her potential, so we focus on that but in addition, we are trying to cover the infrastructure gaps, we are investing in road construction, and are going into rural areas to build rural roads, we are going into communities and we are applying the millennium village concept to empower communities. The commissioner of rural and community development came up with this millennium village concept where we go to every village and give them 5 basic things that will enable them to become fully empowered to realise their full potential. We saw that done in Kaduna State in a few local governments and we are duplicating that in several communities in Kaduna State.   We believe that with all these investments, the poorest of the poor particularly those in the rural areas, our farmers that form 70 percent of our population will have the platform to actualize their ambitions and realise their full potential. But in addition, all the things we are doing both now and in the future have an eye on just one thing- creating jobs. We have a very young state in terms of demography as 89 percent of the population is below the age of 35, so the biggest challenge we have is jobs and to attract jobs we have to make our environment very friendly for investment, and we have taken many steps to ensure that Kaduna State become an attractive location for investment.

 

We are lucky because of the history of the state: its well-known, central in Nigeria and we have certain advantages but we need to leverage on those advantages. So we created an investment promotion agency, which is a one-stop shop for all investors. We have lowered land charges; we have eased access to land for agriculture as well as for industrial and commercial purposes. We have computerized our land register to make transactions in land easy and make it cheaper for businesses. Significantly, we have as much as 50 percent decrease in land charges that we inherited and we have also tasked our public servants to treat investors with respect, love and efficiency. Decisions should be taken quickly, approvals should be given quickly, we have signed on to an ease of doing business charter that have significantly reduced the time it takes to get any government approval from building plans, that must be approved within 3 weeks to titles to land you must get, once you apply and give all your documents for agriculture or commercial you must get your approval within 30 business days. So we have done all these to ensure that we attract jobs to the state to supplement whatever the government can do. To be honest, the Kaduna state government has also done well in the area of direct employment because we have employed thousands of teachers: 2,250 secondary school teachers to teach English, Mathematics and Sciences, we have hired 2,550 persons as road marshals to police our roads, at the height of the primary school feeding programme we employed about 17,000 women that cook every day for over 1.8 million children.

 

We hired 6,300 youths to engage in garbage collection and street cleaning, and they are still being used by the company that is handling that. We have got an even larger number of people involved in some of our civil work contracts like drainage, road maintenance and so on, these are all targeted at providing job opportunities for our young people but at the end of the day, unless we can get investors these ad hoc jobs will come and go but it is companies investing in factories, commercial outlets that will provide semi-permanent jobs, and we are focussing on that. So this is what we have been trying to do in the last one and half to two years, we think we are in the right direction, we have been religiously following our state development plan, we have a 5-year development plan which we published in 2016, we have been following that strictly and each sector of the state, each ministry has developed its own separately and we have been following that religiously, and once in a while we check to see what we are doing, we make corrections where things are not done in the right way, or if we start something and realise that it’s not quite working, we stop and reflect on it. For instance we started renovating primary schools then realised that was the wrong thing to do, we have done 10 percent of the schools when we realised we should be rebuilding more schools, we should be rebuilding classrooms to reduce congestions, so we stopped renovating; we are now back to the drawing board to build multi story schools, multi story classrooms because when you have 100 or more pupils in a classroom, renovating that class is not a wise decision, so it is better you build two or three classrooms in the same space, so that is what we are doing. We constantly engage in evaluation and self-correction and we are always learning from our mistakes and as well as from other states, what they are doing right.

We have visited Edo and Lagos State to learn how they have been able to raise their internally generated revenue (IGR) significantly within a very short time. So essentially that is what we have been trying to do and hope we succeed.

What are the priority investment sectors in the state as you focus on job creation?

 

Well, we believe that our natural endowment is all around land, we believe we have comparative advantage in agriculture because we have close to 46,000 square kilometre of land in Kaduna State and all of it is arable. So agriculture is one area we think there are significant opportunities for investment. Already, Kaduna State is the leading producer of maize, soya beans, and ginger, and we are number one or two in tomatoes, chili pepper, even potatoes and so on. So we are essentially an agricultural state and we think that we have the opportunity and the platform to leverage that comparative advantage into a competitive advantage in agro industrial production, which is one broad area. We are exploring other product like wheat because some parts of Kaduna State have the climate and soil to produce wheat. And as you know Nigeria spends $4 billion dollar a year importing wheat, and we think it is right for us to get some of that market. We are also experimenting with palsy which is a legume that is consumed in huge quantity in India which imports about $100 billion dollar worth of palsies every year and we have advanced in conversations with the Indian government to produce palsies for export into India. We are working with a couple of Indian companies to start planting and exporting palsies into India, so agriculture is one area.

 

Other area of course is mining because Kaduna State has many minerals, all kinds of minerals, from nickel to Gold and all kinds of precious stones in the southern part of Kaduna State, we also have iron ore, tin, we have dimension stones; we have a large range of minerals that have not been exploited. So what the state government has done is to established a Kaduna State Mining Development Company to be a potential joint ventures partner with the private sector and we have obtained licenses for Gold mining, dimension stone, tin, and other minerals, where we have established that there are significant potential reserves, we have obtained the licenses from the Federal Ministry of Solid Minerals, and we are still looking to partner with companies to explore these minerals. We have already found partners for Gold, the nickel is being done fully as a private initiative but the Kaduna state government and the local government will be partners in that venture with the Australian company and we are also discussing with another company to partner in the area of tin mining. So the state government has been very proactive in identifying where these minerals are, acquiring the land, getting the licenses from the Federal Ministry of Solid Minerals and then attracting investors that are in that field. We will just offer the license as our equity and the investor takes over and does the rest. So, we are looking at that as well as a potential investment area as well as a significant revenue earner for the state.

 

Of course the third area is commerce generally as Kaduna is a transportation hub for the entire northern region, both the old rail system and the new rail system, have Kaduna as a hub, you cannot access most of northern Nigeria without passing through Kaduna, that gives us an advantage in the location of distribution centres, warehouses, and so on for all kinds of commodities, from consumer goods to fertilizer, so we believe that with the size of population here, with access that Kaduna provides to the rest of northern Nigeria, there are many opportunities for large consumer goods companies and retailers, and wholesale of goods and services to locate to Kaduna. We have seen many of those talking to us, we had a visit from Notore that wanted to establish there their largest distribution centre in northern Nigeria here in Kaduna, they are already doing a lot in Kaduna because of our agricultural endowment but they want to do more. We are talking to the French, Moroccan, many international companies that want to locate their regional distribution centres in Kaduna because of our proximity to Abuja and access to the rest of northern Nigeria.

 

So, I think these are the three broad areas that we see opportunities. But another area that has opened up in Kaduna is ICT related because we have one of the largest concentrations of tertiary institutions in northern Nigeria implying that Kaduna is slowly emerging as an ICT hub. We have a couple of call centre companies here, Google is here in Kaduna. In our ICT hub, we are committed to training about 5,000 youths every year in ICT skills and last year the Tony Elumelu Fellows had 25 young people from Kaduna, 20 of them were entrepreneurs in ICT taking advantage of the presence of Ahmadu Bello University, Kaduna State University, Kaduna State Polytechnic, and so on. So we are also looking at that as a potential new area to develop.

 

Finally, the other area of course is entertainment, we think that most of Kannywood will move to Kaduna because the environment here is more open and music particularly in this part of the country is also moving towards the direction of Kaduna because we are a very cosmopolitan state, we are very inclusive, we are open and accept all cultures and people from every part of Nigeria, feel comfortable in Kaduna so we want to build on that as a potential job creator, and area where there are potentially lots of investment. Our fortune this year was the closure of Abuja airport, so for six weeks we tested our capacity to handle huge volumes of people from outside. Our tourism infrastructure was tested and it was capable and we are looking to develop the capabilities of Kaduna airport to continue operating as an international airport, so we are in discussions with Ethiopia airline and others to resume international flights out of Kaduna.

 

So all these are precursor to what our ambitions are, Nigeria does not have facility for the maintenance and service of aircraft, they all go abroad for anything order than changing of tires. We are in discussion with two foreign groups to establish an MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) here in Kaduna and indeed we are meeting with a Chinese group in a couple of weeks, and an American group in about 3 weeks to look at the possibilities of establishing an MRO facility here in Kaduna. Now all these things are areas of opportunities for businesses for us to find job opportunities for our young people, which constitute a significant proportion of our population.

Your Excellency, the state appears to have very ambitious agenda and of course every ambitious agenda must have a cost and how much money it’s going to take. But can we look at the balance sheet of the state in terms of liabilities and assets, and what you are doing to boost your IGR?

As I said before, we inherited a state that is second most indebted amongst states in Nigeria and unfortunately shortly after we came in, the country went into recession and we realised that in the short time to get out of recession we have to even borrow more adding to the debt burden of the state. We had to ensure that whatever borrowing we embarked upon was sustainable and we are taking steps to expand our internally generated revenue (IGR). I think we have had some success, for instance our IGR was N11 billion in 2015 and jump to N21 billion in 2016. So we nearly doubled our IGR within one year because of the reforms we put in place and the establishment of the new Kaduna Internally Revenue Service. So our IGR is increasing significantly as a cushion for falling oil prices and falling inflows from the Federation Account, we went further to summit ourselves to Fitch to be rated and I am happy to say that our first rating was B last year B with a stable outlook, and this year we maintain the same B with stable outlook where other states and even the federal government was downgraded, Kaduna was not downgraded as we maintain our ratings because a look at our balance sheet by Fitch clearly showed that our revenues are increasing, the cost of our operations was being reduced significantly, we are being more efficient in the deployment of every naira, so we maintained our outlook.

 

Fitch just issued a statement maintaining our B rating stable outlook and I do not know of any state government in Nigeria that has been able to maintain its rating in this recession, but Kaduna state was able to maintain its ratings. Yes, our ambitions are huge, yes they will cost us a lot of money but as I said, in the short to medium terms, we will have to incur more debt but also we see in the short to medium terms not only how we are going to be able to service the debt but pare it down and reduce it significantly and we are about to get a $350 million dollar budget support facility from the World Bank on concessionary terms of about 5 to 10 years moratorium, 40-50 repayment plan or something like that, which will significantly add to our debt burden but it’s a long term concessionary borrowing plan that will give us a lot breathing space to invest even more in our infrastructure attracting investors that will give us the tax revenue to take the state to the next level. So, on the whole I think we are doing pretty well and our balance sheet looks very solid if you read the statement by Fitch, which we will be happy to share with you, you will see that they believe that our prospects are better than any other sub-national that they have seen in Nigeria, and we are very happy about that.

 

Every state in the country is talking about the cost of governance, to what extent have you reduced it, how much was it then and how much is it now?

 

I think the way to measure it is to look at the budget we inherited, the 2015 budget of which 75 percent of the budget was recurrent expenditure, by 2016, we had flipped it and made recurrent expenditure only 40 percent of the budget. We reduced the recurrent expenditure size by more than 50 percent, so effectively we have cut the cost of government by between 60 and 70 percent, and we did not have to sack any one to do that, we just reduced the number of political appointees significantly, we blocked areas of leakages, scaled down on travelling, we looked at training programmes that were just jamborees, cancelled them and that is how we are able to achieve that. And in 2017, we cut the recurrent expenditure even further. I think in the 2017 budget our capital expenditure is like 64 percent against 36 percent recurrent, so this is a continuous exercise; we are always seeking for ways and means to reduce the levels of recurrent expenditure so that we have more resources for capital expenditure. In 2016, our capital budget spending was N59 billion, it’s the highest in the history of the state. I think in 2015, largely because of our efforts what we were able to do in the second half of the year when we took over, I think the capital budget spending was like N35 to N40 billion most of which was spent after we took over because the previous government spent almost entirely on recurrent and did very little on capital.

 

You set up a Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency, what do you want this agency to achieve and how does it help investors to set up in Kaduna state? 

The whole idea of Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency is to have a one-stop shop that interfaces with investors and solves their problems; we do not want investors moving from one government office to another looking for consent or approvals and so on. The whole idea of KADIPA is to be the surrogate for investors as far as interfacing with the government is concern, so once you have decided you want to invest in X, Y sector, you go to KADIPA with your business plans, once you make a convincing presentation, you just list whatever you want from the government, from land to building plan approvals, and KADIPA is supposed to take that up with the relevant government agency and get it for you. This is what we set it up for but in addition, KADIPA also have the mandate to continuously look at the processes in every government department and work with that government department to simplify and shorten these processes so that life will be easier for investors, interfacing with government will be more efficient and less costly and that is what they have been trying to do.

 

They are at the forefront of ensuring that Kaduna state becomes the easiest place to do business not only in Nigeria but also in the whole world that is their mandate and that is what they have been doing, and I have to say that so far they have done pretty well. The fact that you are here and have given us that recognition is an indication that they have done well but we are not resting on our oars, KADIPA is working with the World Bank to do more, they have been introduced to a consulting firm owned by the government of Singapore to work and deepen some of these reforms because Singapore is the easiest place in the world to do business, so we went to the best to get them to come and advise us on how we can learn from what they have done and replicate it and make Kaduna state the easiest place to do business in the country. We have very high expectations of KADIPA but I must say so far they have done pretty well and we expect them to do even better.

You have said a lot about Kaduna but out there, Kaduna is known for the security issues, which places doubt about the positive things you said so far about Kaduna. So what are you doing to change this perception because it is a huge challenge for investors coming into Kaduna?

I know we have a huge challenge but fortunately it has not been, maybe that is the reason why we have not bothered too much about it, I think investors knows the difference between the hype and the reality. Every day here in Kaduna we receive prospective investors that have seen or heard about efforts of the state government in implementing reforms, and unfortunately bad news sells, so the situation in Southern Kaduna has been having more air than it deserves in my opinion but I must say that has not discouraged investors, people are here all the time, our investment summit was very successful. We will continue to work on the issues of security, it is not an issue that you resolve over night or solve permanently, it is a continuous challenge for governments around the world but I want to say that it is not a big issue in Kaduna, the headlines are bigger than the reality and on that reality we will continue to try to explain that things as not as they appear to be and the best test is for anyone to come to Kaduna and see things as they are, but as I said, fortunately for us those headlines have not significantly discouraged investors because whether you talk to multi-literal or bi-literal institutions their opinions of Kaduna state is up there in spite of the negative news, so that is the reality, that is the truth, the headlines do not represent that reality.

 

 Is there a privatisation programme for moribund state assets in Kaduna and how are you approaching it?

There is a privatization programme; I think we have 3 or 4 companies, industrial enterprises that we inherited that we have already put out for privatization. We have the Kara Fruit Process, which processes tomatoes. We have Kaise Ginger which was set up to process ginger, and we have the Zaria Pharmaceutical which produces syringes for the medical sector, all 3 are moribund and we have appointed a consortium of advisers led by Deloitte, to privatize them and the process in going on. I think they are about to receive bids or they have received bids, so that is the industrial enterprise. We also have the tourism assets, we have hotels, and such assets we are also in the process of putting up for sell. The third group of assets are state government houses; we have about 3,000 state-owned residential properties that are also up for sale. We have advertised them and are in the process of receiving bids. We have extended the time to the end of May to give more time to receive bids. So all these 3 group of assets are being privatized. For the industrial companies and the tourism assets, what we are hoping is that investors will come in and inject more money into the enterprises to revive and expand them. We are not just looking to sell the assets and get money, we are more interested in reviving and expanding, and recapitalizing these assets because the whole purpose of the privatisation programme is not to raise money but to create jobs, so we are more interested in reviving the enterprises by capital injection and dilution of the state government equity than getting money up front.

 

We believe that once the enterprises are revived and expanded, jobs will be created, and one day we will be able to sell our diluted equity for much more, so we are ready to do that. So that essentially is the strategy for the two classes of assets. For the government houses we just want to get out of that business, apart from the governor, deputy governor, and high court judges, we are selling all the houses to the highest bidder and if you are entitled to or you have been allocated the house and you have the right to match the highest bidder, it is strictly the highest bidder approach, and based on open market value. So we want to extract maximum value for the houses and then we want to take that money, inject part of it into creating a mortgage system in Kaduna State, part in infrastructure in private sector housing because we want to have at least 20,000 houses built in Kaduna State in our 4 years in office and we are on course, to perhaps exceeding that. But we need to invest in primary infrastructure, wherever these estates may be, but we also need to invest in a mortgage system so that people can buy houses and pay over 20 years; so that is what we want to apply these resources for.

 

Where are you taking Kaduna State to in the next 2 years and what legacy would you like to leave behind for the state?

I do not know whether I will be able to answer your question exactly. We had a manifesto, a platform upon which we campaigned and we identified 5 areas that we are going to work on and those 5 areas we hoped that we will achieve significant mileage in our 4 years. We did not plan for more than 4 years. We are half way now and we have just done a review and we found out that we are making progress in all the areas. We believe that for many of them we would have achieved significant closure but there are many that we will not be able to finish in 4 years, some will extend into another 4 to 5 years. I will give just a couple of examples. Let’s take education, we have 4,255 primary schools, we want to rebuild them; we are half way in our term and we are going to get this budget support from the World Bank so we have the financial resources to be able to rebuild all our schools because we need about $60 million dollars just to rebuild primary schools and we have it from the budget support but will we be able to build 4000 schools in two years? No. but we will start and if the APC government is re-elected in 2019, of course we will continue but we will not be able to finish.

We have 1,068 primary health centre buildings in the state, which averages about 4 per ward, which is ideal but they are buildings we need to equip them, we need to hire more nurses, mid wives, birth attendants for each of them.

 

We have started with 255, we are doing 255 now and within the next 2 years we will do another 255, that is 510 and the rest we have to move to the next tenure, but even if we are just able to do half of these, we would have achieved significant progress. So we had a very clear picture of where we wanted to take the state and we have made significant progress in achieving all of them, and if you look at our restoration programme which is our manifesto you will see we have made significant progress. We want to put Kaduna on a sound footing by 2019. We want to restore the confidence of Kaduna back because Kaduna lost confidence, Kaduna lost progress, Kaduna lost leadership of Northern Nigeria, we want to restore that confidence, that is why we called our campaign slogan ‘Restoration Programme’, to restore the confidence of Kaduna, to restore its cosmopolitan nature, right now Kaduna state/ Kaduna city is divided between the river, Muslims on the Northern side, Christians on the Southern side, we want to reintegrate Kaduna so that anyone can live anywhere in Kaduna and feel safe.

Now, how are you able to do this?

I think we consciously tried to lay solid governance foundation. These are things that are done that we do not see but they are the foundation for everything. Now when we came in, the first thing we did was to say we are not going to have 24 commissioners, every government in Kaduna state since the advent of democracy has had one commissioner per local government and we have 23 local government, but we say no; that is a wrong way to go, it’s not the number of commissioners you have, it’s how good they are. It is not the number of ministries we have that deliver services; it’s how effective the ministries are. So we started with 13, now we have 14 ministries, because we created the ministry of rural and community development because we saw the need to mainstream the millennium village concept across the state and we felt we needed a commissioner to oversee it full time. Initially we thought we can do it through the deputy governor’s office, so our approach was to reform the legal and regulatory climate, reform the administrative system, and reform the financial management system. But as I said, these are things that you do that do not translate directly into roads, water and so on because they are not seen, and many governments do not pay the necessary attention to lay this foundation. Since we came in, we established Treasury Single Account, we did it in 6 weeks, the federal governments has been trying to do it for 3 years until President Buhari mandated it and it was done.

 

We did it in 6 weeks, we closed 470 accounts and created one treasury single account with N25.5 billion that we did not know we had.  We find it very easy to do but for many governments it was difficult to do, why? Because this money were in different bank accounts and the bank managers are friends of the commissioner or the governors, so they have vested interest; we did not care, we did it in 6 weeks. It’s a world record, the IMF now send people to Kaduna to study how we did it, because they told us it has never been done anywhere else in the world and we did it. We were the first government to introduce zero based budgeting ahead of the federal government, we have been doing zero based budgeting since we got in in 2015, essentially every year, every commissioner must justify every item on his budget what he is going to do with it starting with zero. We did a lot of trainings, we got support from the IMF, we hired Bain and Co as consultants to train our people, but we did it. This is a basic foundation that enabled us not only to get a handle on our finances but also get some sense of our budgeting, and then we reformed out tax code. Taxes in Kaduna were spread over 20 different laws and we consolidated everything to one tax law and repealed all the provisions in all other taxes in all other laws. Thus when you come to Kaduna state, and get our tax code, every tax that you need to pay as a business, or as an individual is there in one document. We reformed pensions, we introduced a contributory pension scheme and had a clear-cut off date which has already started working, and we also looked at the arrears we inherited, cleaned them up and removed ghost pensioners in thousands, now we have a sustainable pension system.

 

We also did land reforms, we abolished the ministry of lands and created the Kaduna Geographic Information Service, which is the custodian of all lands, records and data, and we are implementing the complete computerisation of land records in the state, we hope to issue land title (C of O) to every land owner in Kaduna State within the next 2 years, that is our goal. To do this we will be hiring at least 10,000 young people to be going house-by-house, village-to-village, to take data of your land holdings, ensure that the community confirms you own the land, the traditional ruler, the religious leader there confirms you own the land and we issue that title, and you pay just N5000 naira to get C of O, because we want people to own titles to their land, in rural areas urban areas, we already started in Kaduna, Doka, people get their title for the first time by just paying N5000 and this we want to do across the state by deploying thousands of young people to be going in teams, house-by-house consulting with communities, confirming  you own that land and issuing title, now these are all governance foundation, they do not bring us a lot of money, in fact we spend more money establishing this than we are getting but the payoff will come much later.

 

We reformed procurement by establishing a Public Procurement Authority. We now have a new procurement law and everything above certain threshold must be advertised subject to due process and so on. People come to me and say I want a contract, and I tell them honestly, I do not award contract, if you want a contract, watch out in the newspapers or go to the ministry and summit a bid. I do not award contract, no contract come to me because I do not see any contract. Then we reformed our public finance laws. The public finance laws in most states in Nigeria are the 1958 Public Finance Management and Control Act. Kaduna State has repealed that 1958 law, we have enacted a new 21st century Public Finance Management and Control Law and I think we are the only state that has done that. For instance, we abolished the Kaduna Board of Internal Revenue, we practically sacked all the staff, we just started an institution from day one, we took out all the staff back to the ministries, back to the office of the head of service for deployment into other functions and created an IT complaint, brand new tax institution and within a year we saw a jump in our revenues by more than 60 percent without any new tax being introduced, we just blocked leakages, no cash collections, only one agency collecting taxes, new people with a new attitude and we got Ifueko Omoigui (former head of FIRS) to help us establish the new Kaduna IRS and with time we can see the results.

 

For me it is these steps that we have taken, small steps that look insignificant that have laid the foundation for this. What does that translate in real life? All these are only possible when you have good people, sound people and we go out of our way to look for people that will help us achieve our objectives. It will be excellent if they are from Kaduna State but it will not matter if they are not, we look for people that are good and bring them together, we try to encourage young people; for most of our agencies we look for young people of 35 to 45, we do not want old people, we do not want people my age running the agencies, and some have done very well, some are not doing so well, we change them , we give them a chance to grow; this is what we do and because we have good people, because we go out of our way to get good people not because of politics, not because they have godfathers they give their best.

I did not know the commissioner for rural development until after the election, we went to a project they were handling for the millennium project and met her and a colleague of hers, they made a presentation to us on what they were doing, the deputy governor and I immediately said we will hire these people if they will come and work for us.

This is how we formed our government wherever it is we are looking for excellence, I have been criticized for having Muyiwa as my media adviser but he is getting the job done, I do not care where he comes from; never mind he was born in Sabon Gari, Zaria, so he is from this state but you know people hear his name and want a reason why is he there and truly if we are going to build the nation we have to realise what matters ahead of everything is competence, capacity and capability ahead of where the person comes from. So here in Kaduna we want to get the best people for the job and that is it.

 

Now what will happen after I leave? I think when something is working no one wants to break it, I think if we get Kaduna to a point where everyone sees that things are working, that is what will preserve what we are doing. I do not intend to be governor forever but my hope is that the system we are putting in place, the ideological orientation of the APC will be continued. If I do not run for another term of office I am hoping that an APC candidate will be elected so he will continue on this path. If I run for a second term and am re-elected we will continue but after I will still have to leave, somebody will have to continue, but the whole idea is to lay foundation, build on them to the extent we can and grow others to replace you, and that is how societies make progress and that is what we are trying to do. This is why as I said earlier for our agencies, our parastatals we look for people who are 30s and 40s, even among our commissioners there are only few that are above 50, most of them are relatively young and we are doing so to prepare them to be the replacement generation. I do not want the next governor of Kaduna State to be as old as I am, I would like someone significantly younger and the only way we can get such people is if we test them, if we give them responsibilities, they may make mistakes but you know you can only get better when you make mistakes. So this is what we are trying to do, will it work? I don’t know but certainly that is what we are working on and I am grateful to God we have good people and a good team and I am confident they will continue with the good work we are doing.

 

Why are you so controversial?

I am not; you know I will like to put it this way, why do you media make everything I do controversial? Please I am not controversial, I think my misfortune or good fortune is that in my public service life I always end up getting difficult jobs and because I do take whatever job I accept seriously, I try to do it and when you try to do the job there are people that are always unhappy. There is nothing in the realm of public service policy that you implement that will not have winners or losers, the losers are usually noisier than the winners, and because the feeling in Nigeria is that if you make sufficient noise you will discourage a lot of people, there is always a lot of noise about whatever I try to do that I believe is the right thing to do. Now because I do not respond to noise, I have a thick skin, I respond to signals, I respond to what is right it makes the losers even more angry and therefore noisier and the media likes that, so you make me unfairly controversial. In the BPE, when I was appointed the head of the BPE many people were ideologically against privatization, they did not see the sense, they see privatization as unfairness, as capitalism. I saw privatization pragmatically – if something is not working, sell it. Nobody will keep a business that is losing if it is your business but because it is government business nobody cares.

 

I care because government is me; I am part of the government. If the government is doing well I feel it, if the government is doing badly I feel the impact. So I took privatization with every seriousness but with a very pragmatic approach, so that was controversial. Then I moved to the FCT, Abuja was being destroyed by selfish people who think that the master plan of Abuja is not worth the paper it was written on. I was given the job to restore it, I took it seriously, I believe that Nigeria should have at least one city that works, we cannot all be in Lagos, and if we ran away from Lagos because it was disorganized, surely we should not come and replicate it in Abuja, so what did I do in Abuja? I tried to put some order into the chaos that was emerging and again you guys made it controversial, there was nothing controversial about it.

 

So I am here in Kaduna which is a very complex and difficult state with a political culture of settlement. If you want to be noticed in Kaduna, you want to be important, if you want easy money you abuse the governor, you attack the governor, you are called into the government house, you are given tea and coffee and an envelope, but we say we are not going to do that. You can abuse us, you can attack us, we will just look at you and keep doing what we believe to be the right thing, and again you have made that look controversial. So what can I say? Finally I write a very private, secret memo to my boss, the president; you find it, you publish it: you say I am controversial, I did not ask you to publish it, it was a private memo, so this is the story of my life but you and I know I move on with life nevertheless, but to answer, I am not controversial, but maybe I have a bad luck of getting very difficult jobs that someone has to do, and once I accept to do a job I do it with all my heart and I think that is the difference.