Senator Mamman Ali: A year after

This group expected business as usual, but when it was not, they constituted themselves into a clique that was always exploring ways to have free access to public funds which they could embezzle. They were an opposition but within. They held secret meetings mostly in Maiduguri to perfect ways of finding their way into corrupt acts. Mamman Ali was also confronted by tribalists, especially from his own hometown. In their tribal worldview, an Ngizim man would never be governor. When God made it to happen, they denied it by using every means to try to pull Ali down.

Despite all these forces that were directed at one man who always said, ‘my faith is Allah’, Senator Mamman Ali went ahead to bring back accountability and stamp out corruption in Yobe State government. He sealed all the leakages that in the past allowed ordinary clerks at the Finance Ministry to be so rich that they owned mansions in big cities. Mamman Ali was able to put in place a programme of development for Yobe State in the key sectors of education, agriculture, environment, economic development and healthcare. All the programmes and projects he started have not yet been completed and some of them have already been abandoned. Even the Yobe State budget this year is about allocating more funds to the same projects with exception in a few cases.

Mamman Ali made his mark as a lawmaker in the eight years that he was the senator representing Yobe South senatorial zone.  Around 2003, he walked to the front of the Senate chamber and handed over a large bag full of cash. The money, which was about three million naira, had been given to him to influence his vote in the Senate.

“I was confronted by some people in my house: ‘Take this,’ he said. I was offered a parcel with three million naira. I was confronted by them. I had never known them, so I said, ‘OK, thank you.’ I collected it and immediately moved to the Senate floor.”

This singular act puts Mamman Ali in the limelight of the nation’s politics. In between 2003 and 2007, Mamman Ali was chairman of the important Senate Committee on Public Accounts. During this period, he diligently ensured that the government of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo never got away with any act of corruption while bragging about fighting it. When the then Minister of the FCT, Malam Nasir el-Rufai was mounting the high horse of uprightness and even calling people names, Mamman Ali cut him to size by revealing how he employed a certain lady fresh from the university on a one million naira monthly salary.

The late Senator Mamman Ali was born in 1958 in Jimeta, Adamawa State. He attended both primary and secondary schools in Jimeta and then went to Numan Craft School. He obtained a Higher National Diploma in engineering from Kaduna Polytechnic. His quest for more knowledge took him to Tuskegee University in Alabama, United States, where he obtained higher degrees in construction. He worked in the then Borno State Ministry of Works for over fifteen years before he retired in 1990. He ventured into business and never looked back. Then he joined politics.

Senator Mamman Ali was an epitome of humility and was never given to the flamboyance that politicians are identified with. His opponents can say all they can about him, but they never found him wanting in the vogue of the day, i.e. the mad acquisition of expensive property and other worldly things.

A week before his death, he addressed visiting journalists at the Government House, Damaturu, telling all about his wishes, as if he had a premonition of his death. He mentioned all the projects he’d embarked upon and his dream for Yobe State, particularly in the areas of education, agriculture and healthcare. He on that occasion warned that he did not want any of the projects to be named after him. He also mentioned his lack of inclination to make a big occasion out of the commissioning of projects, saying, “I leave history to historians.”

Muhammad wrote from Isa Kaita Road, Unguwar Sarki, Kaduna.