Desmond Mgboh, Kano

Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia represents Jigawa North East in the upper legislative chamber. Hadejia, a former Commissioner, former Secretary to the State Government and former three-time Deputy Governor of Jigawa State, was a major governance actor at the state level. 

Senator Hadejia, who is also a lawyer of repute, has stepped up his game. He shares his view on the proposed  Fulani Ruga Settlement saga, the impression of the 9th Senate as a rubber stamp of President Buhari and the chances of the APC without a Buhari in the ballot paper come 2023. Excerpts:

 

You served as deputy governor for quite a long time and just when a whole lot of people were expecting you to prepare for the governorship seat, you opted out for the Senate. What happened?

Well, it is a very simple question. I actually had no choice. It was not a question of choosing between being a deputy governor and going to the Senate. I was probably the longest serving deputy governor in Nigeria. I served out half of somebody’s term and then I was elected for a four year term. I was elected again for another four year term, between 2015 and 2019. Giving the chance to work with Governor Badaru, I probably would never have gone to the Senate. I mean we had a fantastic partnership. I know what we put in to move Jigawa to where it is in four years and I would have loved to be part of the journey that would consolidate on that progress, but unfortunately I had to give way because of the term limit. A new deputy governor was chosen to pair with him till 2023. And an opportunity presented itself when the senator from my zone opted to leave the party and move to the PDP, which now paved a way for me to show my interest along with some other people. We went to the primaries, I won. I won the general elections and now, I am serving the eight local governments that constitute Jigawa North East, even though I know that, first of all, I am going to work for the whole country as a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and certainly to work for the interest of the people of Jigawa State.This is the first time that I am holding an office that concerns a constituency. From being a Commissioner to the SSG, to being a Deputy Governor, all these were offices that I was posted.  With that mind, I will do my best to see that what is good for Jigawa , not just my constituency, I would ensure that I will bring it down and whatever would be for the interest of my country, I will give my priority.

I had been to Jigawa since the new dissension, and there has been this general feeling of a vacuum. You played a lot of roles while you were the number two  man and it is like challenge to the new partnership. How do you feel about that? How are they coping with your departure?

They are working very well. I did what I did in Jigawa because I had a governor that allowed me to do that, because I had a governor who believed in delegation of responsibility and authority. I had a governor who believed in team work and I had a governor who is passionate about leaving a legacy and that governor is still there. So, whoever is the deputy governor would go through the same permutations that I did. I believe that he would be tasked, he would be given responsibilities, he would be given the authority  to carry out those responsibilities and he would be pushed to the limits because the governor is bringing a lot of private sector experience and expectations to governance. He believes in working hard and he believes that anybody working with his team should equally, even if you don’t work as hard as he is , you should put in something. He is result-oriented. He is target-driven. So, I don’t believe that there is a vacuum. As long as Badaru is the governor of Jigawa State, I am sure he would bring those leadership qualities that allowed some of us to shine, that allowed some of us to exhibit and implement our ideas.

The issue of poverty has continued to be widespread in Jigawa State in spite of claims of successes like yours. How do you explain this irony? 

I will tell you something. My experience is that in the last four years, a lot has changed in the state. We are establishing a statistics office in Jigawa State with the help of the National Bureau for Statistics.We have passed a statistic law. We have an acting Statistician General for the state. When you begin and dig in and get out our statistics out as verified independently, I think that people would be shocked. I will give an example. Yes, there is poverty in Jigawa State because there is no economy in the state. Jigawa is an economy driven by government, it is a salary economy. Government collects from the Federation Account, the budget is recurrent, they pay salaries, these salaries trickle down to local governments and whatever. If you pay salaries today in Jigawa, the queues develop in the ATMs , the markets are full of activities and after that, everything is gone. This was what we realized in 2015 and we said that we have to change it and we went ahead to say that if agriculture is the mainstay, how do we impact on agriculture? In the last four years, our empowerment programme has targeted over 130,000 youths , mainly youths and women. These are verifiable figures as contained in our brochure. The names are there, targeted at empowering the youths. The governor chairs the empowerment committee that meets every two weeks. What do they do? Take each local government, send a team there and come back and give us a report of the gaps that have been identified. Empowerment programme in Jigawa State, under Badaru, was not buying 500 sewing machines and distributing them evenly across local government areas. So, that if you have two tailors struggling to make ends meet in Hadejia, you bring eight more sewing machines, you have killed the tailoring business in two weeks. No! We identified that gap and we target the empowerment to fill in that gap, that business void, that commercial opportunity that we have seen and every empowerment loan is  guaranteed by a salaried earner,  so we are not afraid of non-payment. It is sustainable, we did that and we focused on agriculture. We created over 17,000 youths who are entirely dedicated to utilizing small scale implements in the farms , they are harvesting for people using handmade harvesters , they are threshing for people using hand made thresher , they are milling rice for people using small rice mills that cost about N200,000 or N300,000. I was not surprised when I saw the statistics for small and medium scale enterprises in Nigeria. Yes, Southwest is still ahead and Lagos is still ahead of the pack, but interestingly, we increased the number of SMEs in Jigawa State in four years by 117 per cent. We are the third fastest growing state in the country in terms of SMEs.

Despite this impressive statistics, we still have a lot of negative rating from your opposition, from the Sule Lamidos and others. Many of them say that nothing substantial has been done in Jigawa State in the last four years. How do you relate to this?

Nothing good would ever happen to the Lamidos of this world because they believe that government is about big project, big projects that are not revenue generating, big projects that have no social impact.Today, we have a N17 billion airport in Jigawa State that caters for 400 pilgrims per year. That is the bulk of the business they do for being there. It costs us over a N100 million to maintain every month and then private jets come in once in a while. That is not our idea of development. N17 billion would have completed the phase II of the Hadejia valley irrigation and put 20,000 farmers in business. I tell people that when we came in, we had two or three things in focus. Create an economy because it was not there. Create an economy because it was there. Create an economy based on agriculture. Create an economy based on agriculture that involves big business because big business is the only kind of business that would have the magnetic effects of pulling people up and I think that we have succeeded. The budget of Jigawa State, averagely, is about N80 billion. Today, in the last four years, we have attracted three investments that would generate a turn  over that is in excess of our budget. Dangote Rice Mill, which is about 60 per cent completed. If you go there now, there are 147 containers of equipment on site, occupying 40 heaters of land. They are building an airstrip to land aircraft there. They are going to be milling 32 tons of rice per hour. The largest rice mill in Africa by the time it is completed. The revenue, the turnover of that rice mill in a day is N233 million, while one year’s production is N2 billion. That is the state’s budget for you. Move to the other zone. Lee Group Gagarawa Sugar factory, 12,000 hectares of irrigated sugar field, four factories in one complex. Sugar, 120,000 tons per annum, particle bud, fertilizer, seasoning. When they are all combined, that is an output of over N100billion.

You have just arrived in the Senate. What is your impression of the present Senate?

I think we are up to a good start. For the first time in a long time, we have had a Senate that has produced a leadership with almost unanimous endorsement across party lines.So, we have a leadership that is not sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the enemy camp to impeach him. That is an excellent start. We have the leadership that the party wanted. We have the leadership that the party faithful have confidence in and we have a leadership that has support across the board. Good start. What we are hearing coming from this leadership is very positive. It is not about rubber stamping the decision of the executive. No! It is talking about a Senate that is going to work for Nigeria, a Senate that is going to focus on their core responsibilities of ensuring that we have a sensible budget for this country, and ensuring that those budget are monitored for accountability, prudence, ensuring that every penny that is sent to a sector is spent in that sector. So, I think that we are up to a good start. We have just started plenary sittings, the debates have been robust and the comradeship has been fantastic. We are going to break up into committees in two weeks time and the real work would start. I have very high hopes for his Ninth Senate.

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But as far Nigerians are concerned, the rubber stamp thing sticks. The party is pulling you, the Presidency is there and many of you guys are reputed to be blindly too loyal to Buhari. How do you defend the rubber stamp stuff?

There is nothing wrong with loyalty. We owe no apology to anybody. We have a party, we are all from that party and that party has a manifesto, that party has a vision. Every one of us is committed to implementing that vision and my vision cannot be different from that of the president or that of the governors of APC controlled states. So, if you want to call it rumber stamp, call it rubber stamp. There is no democracy in this world, no presidential system of government where the party does not have a say in creating harmony between the executive and the legislative arm of government.  Judiciary, leave them out. They have always been independent, but it has always been like this. And I can assure you it is not about rubber stamping. It is all about saying that we share one vision.

The idea of different arms of government is to offer some kind of checks and balances.With this kind of loyality, has the idea of a check on the executive not been defeated?

You will agree with me that the flip side of the coin is where checks and balances become four years of acrimony, of infighting, of delayed budgets and of non-confirmation of key personnel. It is also a problem. So it is a balance. Nobody is expecting a progress whereby the two arms of the government are at constant loggerhead simply because they want to play to the gallery, simply because they want to say no! We are not rubber stamping. What does rubber stamp mean? I mean if you bring your budget, we pass it, if you bring your …. These are constitutional issues. Like I said, we don’t have any apologies to offer to anybody who is that inclined. When the PDP was in power, why did they not call them rubber stamp? When PDP was in power, they were changing senate presidents like they were going through a revolving door. In fact, within a single tenure, we went through three or four senate presidents simply because those people seem to have some modicum of independence. They are the ones that are actually working towards a rubber stamp. And because they have that mindset, they believe that once you see harmony, once you see people working in cordial relationship, they must be rubber stamp. If we are rubber stamping anything, please identify what we are rubber stamping, identify anything that would come to this senate that would not be thoroughly discussed or thoroughly debated or if you are talking of people to be screened, that would not be thoroughly screened.

Let us shift to the politics of appointment of committees which is currently the talk of the moment in the Senate. What is your take, especially as you new comers are likely to be side-tracked?

I did not come into the Senate with any premonition that I will be in a particular committee. I have never been a legislator and I don’t know what is like to be in a particular committee. As far as I am concerned, this committee thing has been blown out of proportion. The only reason that Senate has committees is to break down the process of oversights because we cannot all 109 senators move from Ministry of Finance to agriculture by next week. So, it has to be broken down. Simply administrative! It is simply as saying four, five of you go and oversight this sector. That is all! Some people are talking of juicy committees. Are we saying that those committees that are not juicy, nobody is going to be there to manage them? I don’t know anything about juicy committees.I have absolutely no idea what people are talking about. I am waiting to be assigned a committee that I will go and work and whatever committee I am assigned to , I will apply myself to it.For me, I think that you are asking the wrong person, I don’t know anything about these committees. If you give me any committee, I will not know whether it falls into the category of juicy or not juicy.

Incidentally, a majority of the people of Hadejia are Fulani by virtue of their background. What is your take on the proposed Ruga Settlement concept and how do you think it can work in a place like Nigeria?

I think the Ruga Settlement issue …..eh eh eh, you know,  someone , somewhere has done a lot disservice to the efforts that this government had put in to address the issue of  herdsmen crisis, to address the issue of livestock rearing in this country. There has been a lot of work that has gone into in coming up with something sustainable, something locked up.The vice president has been working diligently, there has been sub –committees and the states have been working.  I know that I have done a lot of write ups that were sent to the Federal Government. The farmer and herdsmen board law which we inherited from Sule Lamido. A fantastic piece of legislation, a fantastic concept.We have handed it over verbatim to them and say maybe the states can look at it… then all of sudden we heard this Ruga issue. I don’t know what Ruga is. I have never heard of it. My own thinking is that someone, somewhere, maybe within the Minsitry of Agriculture, has overstepped his bounds because the first thing we know about this Ruga was when we saw signboards erected for contracts to develop Ruga. Nobody has reached to the point of developing Ruga. We were going to the extent of talking to the private investors who want to come and do livestock. Dangote was talking of 50,000 cows, we had a group from from France who wanted to come up and set artificial insemination centers all across Jigawa State so that we can improve the local breed. We had another group from the UK through the Dantata group that was talking to us. In Jigawa alone, three different groups, talking to us about developing livestock. As far as I am concerned, this should be the way to go – public, private partnership. States that are willing, states that have the capacity, let them come up with the land. And then all of a sudden, we heard of this Ruga thing. I don’t know anything about Ruga apart from what I read in the papers. Like I said , I think that somebody somewhere has done a great disservice to the amount of work put into finding a solution to this problem.

What about the reaction from the Southern part of the country to the Ruga stuff? They didn’t want any kind of colony; they didn’t want any kind of organized settlement in their area. Do you think they have approached the problem nice enough?

No! No!! No!!! It depends on what is thrown at them. If I wake in the morning and see a signboard in my state that the Federal Government is coming to set up Ruga and I am hearing of it for the first time, I would probably react the same way. The danger is that this Ruga thing has now taken us a long step back from the work that we have been tryng to do. There is nothing you will come up with that would not have this undertone.They have actually polluted the atmosphere which is very unfortunate. Tell me anybody, whether it is in Ebonyi or Ekiti or whatever, that you will approach with a concept for livestock development, a concept that would create jobs, a concept that would generate revenue for the government, that would make millionaires out of people that would say he does not like it. Who does not eat meat? Who does not like milk in this country? But the way it was packaged and the way it was quickly shut down, we have created an issue and we would have to do a lot of sensitization, we would have to double work  ourselves in trying to sell whatever new concept we would come up.

2019 election has gone and the APC has lesser number of states now than they had before in 2015. How do you relate to the verdict of Nigerians against your party? 

I think it is a function of maturity the democratic process has achieved. And also a function of the cleansing process that the electoral process has passed through. Most importantly, what you are seeing is that the president that we have today is a democrat. If we had wanted to maintain those states by hook or crook, if we had applied half the tactics that the other party had applied when they were in power….But this was a situation where the electoral process is getting better, we had card readers. For the first time, people are lining up to vote and they are seeing what they are lining up for. Don’t forget so soon that we once had a situation where you are in queue to vote and 30 people are in front of you. And if you have your radio in your hand, they would be announcing the result of that polling unit that you were in. Don’t forget so soon that a whole state came to vote 100 per cent, not a ward, not a polling unit, the whole state , nobody was sick, nobody died, nobody ran away, nobody went to Lagos for weekend. They all came out to vote. This was the kind of politics we had that was producing the kind of consistency that you were seeing. But now like I said, the electoral process is much better, is much more transparent and the power is going back to the people. And like I said you have a leader, who believes that whatever you get, I will hand it over to you!

With all these, if we look at the future what do you see for the APC? Can they withstand the storm without the imposing personality of President Buhari? 

We have learnt our lessons as a party. We have not handled the success that we fought so hard to get in 2015. We have not handled it well. I will be the first person to admit that. A lot of what has happened was as a result of in-fighting in the party. We have learnt our lesson. And everybody is aware of Buhari’s electoral value and everybody is aware of the impact of his not being on the ballot papers in 2023. And because of that, everybody is working hard to ensure that whatever it is that we have to do to achieve the usefulness that would fill in that vacuum, we are going to do it.