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Gov. ABDULFATAI AHMED Reveals Scorecard
•Takes City People Round His Many Projects
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At the last City People Political Awards held a few months back, Kwara Governor, Abdulfatah Ahmed was one of those who stood out in terms of his sterling programme as a Governor. This is because in the last 31/2 years Ahmed has transformed the state he took over from his predecessor and political leader, Senator Bukola Saraki. For 3 days in March City People inspected all the projects he had accomplished in the length and breadth of the State, from Health, to Roads, to Youth empowerment, Education, Rural infrastructure name it. It was this hardworking and highly cerebral Governor that showed us round all the gargantuan projects his done, whilst he was putting finishing touches in some ongoing ones. What stood Gov. Ahmed out is the fact that he not only completed the un-completed projects started by his predecessor, he initiated his own. And by the time City People visited Kwara, Gov. Ahmed told his visitor matter-of-factly that he has delivered fully on all his electoral promises. He also said cunningly that he has done enough work in Kwara to ensure his return to power and APC’s victory at the polls in the next few months. He says his group’s decision to leave PDP for APC early this year will not shake the fortunes of APC at the polls. After going round Kwara, City People sat down with Kwara Governor for 2 hours to take about his success story in Kwara.
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Your Excellency, what does you report card look like, from you own perspective? How has the journey being so far?
Let me start by saying we are happy and delighted to receive you here, in the Government House. I am happy that you’ve taken time to go round to see some of the things that we have been doing. Sincerely speaking, we rose to this platform on the crest of continuity, on the crest of continuation of legacies that were left behind by the last administration. We did that because we have since focused out that it is common practice in this country that when projects are initiated by certain administration and it hand over to the administration they are usually left undone. To us it is a major source of wastage on the part of the people because they are the ones that feel the pain. There are alternative uses that those funds would have been put into. On that note we ensured that all the projects we met on ground have been brought to completion and we have jump-started new ones.
But critical in our planning process is the issues of Human Capital Development because, most of the challenges we are being faced with in this country today are not unconnected with gaps that exist in our human capital support scheme especially the middle men power. With the population we have in the country ordinarily it should almost be impossible for people to come in outside the country to support the middle manpower requests, as we have it.
Unfortunately, this is the case. And unless we are able to address the issues adequately, by putting the right platforms in place, we are not likely to see much change. And that informs our focus on youth, on the understanding that they are key to the development of the State. And on the strength of that we must be seen to be driving the institution that will make them useful and key into the society for their own quota to be supportive.
This is what has been informing what we have been doing in the last 31/2 years. Between you and I we are happy with what we are doing, and we still expect that its going to come out better.
The most important things is that we are ensuring that other platforms of developing the youth keys into our Economic drive and also supports Security. This is because the 2 are interwoven, as it is.
That is why we expect to see a lot of activity that revolves around youth development in this administration. We hope to use that platform to create our youths into working tool of the economy, rather than becoming burdens on the economy. As it is today, many of the problems we are faced with in the North and most parts of the country, especially our security, are not unconnected with the poor support that we had given to the youth, in the past. We know that most of what we are seeing today are things that developed as a result of poor past planning programmes.
If we must avoid those things we must begin those changes now. And that is what is informing us and driving the things we are doing.
In Kwara State, we are very happy to inform you that we have one of the lowest levels of Unemployment, as it is today. It is deliberate to the extent that we’ve always worked on platforms that will see our youth getting a lot more engaged beyond just leaving school and hanging on the streets. This is what is helping us to drive the current peaceful environment we have seen in the State.
And as a State, we would continue to push that. And I will continue to hammer it into peoples heads on how to see the need to support government in areas of youth empowerment and ensuring that our youths are treated in the way and manner that will make them feel fulfilled
This is one of the things that we are doing. Of course, we are doing a lot more in the Health sector, water and Energy, Roads. Most importantly we are doing a lot in security.
These are all platforms that have been put together in measured terms to see and support the much desired economic growth, stability and peace for our environment.
Maybe we should look at your performance in the other sectors. How has the journey been in the last 3 ½ years?
I want to give out our sincere thanks to God almighty for the journey we’ve travelled so far and how far we’ve gone. We came in with very huge expectations, knowing fully well what responsibility is expected from us.
And I am very happy to let you know that we, from inception, knew what the business of governance will entail and we had a clear picture on areas of direction. For ease of references we broke it down into 3 major compartments –Human Capital: We isolated the critical areas in human capital to see how we were going to drive that to grow the state.
Issues were really looked at in Education for instance. We knew that Education needed to be properly put in place to ensure that the right people are coming out to support the right business.
Another critical one is the Health Sector. We recognize that it is only when the environment is healthy that you can see healthy and growing productivity. On the strength of that we sought to renovate about 5 General hospitals, and I am happy to announce to you that some of them have been completed.
Most importantly, we also Iook at the areas of the economy, and one of the areas we felt our people have advantage is in the area of Agriculture. We saw the success of the commercial farmers. So, the next level is now moving our subsistence Farmers into a Commercial Farming Scheme under what we call an off-taker driven initiative programme, which will see our farmers farming for specific off-taking arrangements. And this will derisk the business, as it enables us to fund them through banking systems. And the bank is comfortable with the funding because they can see that the business has already been derisked.
There are the kinds of things we have put in place and we have seen so far in driving the State in the last few years.
We have also done a lot in the area of youth empowerment, which has been very critical in this administration and it has been given the much desired support since the inception of this administration.
Why was there a need to focus on youth empowerment?
We had to focus on youth empowerment because we recognize the fact that 65% of the population of Kwara are young people between the ages of 15 and 35. So, that tells you that if you are doing any planning programme, we must take advantage of this critical mass, that forms the core work force. Because of your look at any society the core work force fits into almost this age bracket, and if you don’t utilize them now, when do we want to utilize them?
When they get old? This is the time to put them into proper use. That is why we must do a planning programme in the economy that sees that they are captured as critical mass with a key role to play in driving the State economy.
But most importantly they have to be empowered because the key gap that exist between their capacity to do it and expected service delivery is why the government is coming in on Intervention platform basis. In other words, we are looking at those who have left school, those who have gone through training programmes, who have funding challenges. We are looking at those who have left schools who don’t even have skills at all. We have various compartments for those who have learnt skills and would be clustering into co-operatives and founded under our funding scheme which we have one ground. There are some that have already learnt skills who have challenges with seed money. We’ve compartmentalized those ones too into co-operative groups and we’ve made funds available to them.
I am happy to let you know that today we service over 30,000 cooperative groups. We have supported them in this programme. The beauty of it is that it is a rocking scheme. It allows people to jump start, pay back and move on to the next level, while making fund, available for those who are coming behind.
With this system in place, we are so sure that we would continue to put our youths into proper use. Because if you look at global trends today you will see that most of the political problems that countries are faced with are largely, not unconnected with support for the youths.
Look at all those who are in the streets in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, everywhere, they are all youths.
Its tells you that there is a pain that is being felt and if this pain is not properly looked into, it will ultimately dovetail into a security problem. That is why we must look at this issue of youth empowerment very very critically and closely.
No doubt, fundamental mistakes have been made in that past and the result of this fundamental mistakes is what we are seeing today. And we must make sure that we effect corrections today so that we avoid future occurrences, where our youth will become security challenges to us.
That is why at the state and on a policy platform we have since recognized this and we are using it to drive our youth empowerment scheme.
And I am happy to let you know that we have done so much for youths under our various platforms.
One of it is the one we are working on now. We will be recruiting and empowering about 8,000 youths. Some of them will go into environmental services, some will go into the private sector, and a good percentage of them will go into training. We would train them to acquire skills. We would now group them into cooperative group and funds will be made available to them.
It is the same funds that is already existing would now be made bigger, to accommodate them. So that they can start as entrepreneurs.
This we hope will gradually begin to bring down the level of our youth unemployment statistics. But the beauty of this scheme is that these youths will also become employers of labour. On their own. So, for every I, we have seen a potential employment of about 5 others.
That is the minimum. So, on a ripple effect basis, if we are thinking of jumpstarting with about 8,000 youths we look at 8,000 x5. Ultimately, these are the kinds of things we are looking at, that will begin to gradually bring out youths from that unemployment levels that is giving us so much fear, to a level of support and empowerment, not only to generate unemployment but also to become entrepreneurs that will ultimately see our youths being useful and becoming better leaders of tomorrow.
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