Alhaji Abu Gidado, 80, who was among the first set of graduates from the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, was a minister of state for finance during the military regime of the late Gen Sani Abacha. He was also a chief executive officer of the Arewa Textiles. He is a former Deputy Managing Director of Peugeot Automobile Nigeria Limited. He also served as a commissioner for finance in the old Kaduna State, as well as Katsina, among other positions. In this interview, he spoke on his experiences in life and other important issues.
How was growing up like?
I hail from Saulawa in Katsina city. I was born on April 2, 1940. At that time, very few of us had the opportunity to go to school. Some of our peers used to mock us, saying those of us pursuing western education would abide in hellfire. But our parents were determined. My father was appointed a judge but he declined the offer. He was determined that his children would acquire western education despite the dislike in this environment at that time.
I first attended Kayalwa Elementary School, which is now Kumasi Secondary School, Katsina. From there, I went to Katsina Middle School in 1951. I was there for three years and proceeded to Katsina Provincial School, where we spent six years. After provincial school, some of us had the opportunity to go further, so I was in Barewa College, Zaria for two years for advanced level.
From Barewa, I had the fortune of successfully passing my exams, so I went to the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, where I studied Administration, with bias to Business Administration and graduated in June 1965.
Were you among the first set of ABU graduates?
Yes, we were the first set to graduate from the ABU. Our vice chancellor was Mr Alexander Norman.
Is there any difference between studies then and what obtains nowadays?
Even when we were in middle school we could speak fluent English, with all the necessary grammar and a bit of Arabic as well. There was dedication on the part of our teachers and a very serious concern on the part of government, that children should be educated. When we were in elementary school, a supervisor would always visit to see how the teachers were performing with their methods. At that time, almost all the teachers were expatriates.
In secondary school, all our teachers were Britons, and they really drilled us. When you woke up early in the morning you would water your garden, take bath, get dressed and go to school. And you would clean your dormitory and make your bed every morning. If you failed to do anything you would be known and ridiculed by others as a lazy student. So, all of us had to sit up because our teachers were also assigned dormitories to inspect. And they would take note of anything unkempt. There was very serious discipline.
When did we begin to get it wrong as a country?
I think it began when the people realised the importance of education and everybody wanted their children to be educated; hence the facilities became overwhelmed. And the supervision, as it were, has also gone. I think that after the expatriates left, Premier Ahmadu Bello and the likes did very well, but afterwards, core politicians took over and the crisis began.
In 1953 when the North was given the opportunity to manage their affairs, but under the supervision of British rule, our leaders decided that every province should have a secondary school. Up to 1953, the North had only one full-fledged secondary school, Barewa College. However, Government College, Keffi was established in 1948/1949, almost half a century after the British occupation. So the North had only one public secondary school.
In Katsina, with Alhaji Isa Kaita as the education minister, we got the privilege of having the first buildings, which were started in 1953; and by 1954, most of the buildings were completed. Because we were in a hurry, they said we would take from Form 1 to Form 4 from all the northern provinces. In 1954, Katsina started, and there were forms 1 to 4. We were in Form 1.
We had people like Shehu Malami Sarkin Sudan, Abubakar Alhaji Alhaji and many others from all the provinces – Kano, Borno, Tivs, the Idoma, name them.
In their foresight, they also said the provincial secondary school chaps should be sent to the police and army because in all these places you would find people from the South. We had only six people in the federal civil service from the whole of the North.
But I think we have not fared very well in politics because today, people can take positions they do not deserve. In India, they take their public service seriously, but here, anybody can be picked from the street to manage what they don’t have the capacity to do.
People call me minister, but I don’t take any pride in being a minister because anybody can be picked to be one.
I have survived in a foreign business establishment; I think that carries more honour than picking anybody from the street and putting him up in a public position. I was a deputy managing director of Peugeot, and the managing director and other supporting members of management staff were French and I was able to keep that position. That, to me, carries more honour than being a minister.
Are you still in touch with some of your childhood friends?
Most of them have passed away, but I can mention Abubakar Kofar Bai, who is still alive, and Ilu Kayauki, who passed away recently. From elementary school, they picked only six of us to the middle school. Some of my friends in middle school are still alive; people like Ali Mashi, Bala Kankiya, who used to be a principal of Government College, Katsina, as well as Bello Saulawa. At Barewa College, Buhari Abukur, who is sick in Kaduna was one of them, and Ambassador Magaji Muhammad, who passed away recently.
There were pleasant things about those days. For example, in my second year, I think, Shell Nigeria Limited came to our university, and fortunately, I was picked amongst two others for a three-month summer holidays as a student. After the completion of our studies, they came right into my room and offered me a job.
At that time, we did not aspire to go to the private sector but work in government establishments and become district officers, resident officers etc. But when Shell came to me, they gave me almost the double salary of my colleagues in government. I consulted my uncle, a former chief justice, who advised that I should give it a try.
But in the private sector there was this concept of “hire and fire” because most of the organisations were foreign: British, Dutch etc. They could hire you and pay very well, but if you fell below expectation, they would fire you. That was why I was a little bit jittery about the whole thing, but with consultations, I was calmed down to accept the offer.
I started training in the Kaduna office of Shell, but after a while, most people from the South, who manned these organisations, started leaving for their region. So I was left to re-establish the branch office as it was called. That was how we continued.
After really getting things working, I was transferred to Kano as the business manager in charge of the Kano office of the company. I was there for about three years and the employers decided that I should acquire another experience. I was posted to Jos office in charge of a lot of areas, up to Mubi and Maiduguri. I was there also for three years. From there I was promoted to retail manager (North) and returned to Kaduna.
Afterwards, my employers said I should move to Lagos to acquire head office experience. And believe me; that shook me because I couldn’t imagine it. That was when I began to think of leaving Shell.
Were you frightened because you had never been to the South?
No; of course we always went for seminars or some discussions with the head office. But the 1966 crisis sent fears into a lot of northerners. In fact, what I told them was that I would go to Lagos if I were a soldier; but I was not one.
Are you saying it was a tactical way of rejecting the offer?
Absolutely! And I decided to quit. I walked into the office of Alhaji Yahaya Gusau of Northern Marketing Board and said I wanted a job because I left Shell. I stated my reason and he said he had a position for me.
So I resigned my position in Shell after eight years of service and joined the Marketing Board. I spent only one and a half years there, then Arewa Textiles offered me a job, which I accepted. I worked with them for more than 11 years, first as a sales manager. While I was there, there was change of government. The military administrator of Kaduna State then, Usman Jibril, was a good friend of mine, so he invited me to be a commissioner. I accepted the offer after due consultation.
I served as commissioner for trade, investments and cooperatives for six months and was redeployed to the Ministry of Finance. I held the position until I decided that I had had enough. I resigned and went back to Arewa Textiles as an executive director in charge of the finance of the company.
While there, after four months, the then Military Supreme Council decided to vacate their regime and invite Shehu Shagari to begin a civilian administration. But before then, they civilianised the military administration. They decided to formally start culturing the civil administration, and for that reason, a position of a so-called deputy chairman of state administration was created and I was invited to hold it.
I was a bit shaken because some of the colleagues with whom I was going to work were my seniors. But I took the position; and in fact, I was literally a de facto governor, the same thing with others who held that position. This was because the military administrators were given military assignments while we were left to manage the affairs of the state. And we were there for almost one and a half years and handed over to the civilian administration of Shehu Shagari as president; and in the case of Kaduna, to the late Balarabe Musa as the governor.
After that, I went back to the Arewa Textiles as general manager and executive director. After about two years I was invited to be the deputy managing director of Peugeot. People thought they must have counted on my long management experience because in Arewa Textiles, we had over 4,000 workers.
I was in Peugeot for five years in that position; then I decided to resign and come back home, I think in 1989 or thereabouts.
I refused to accept to be inferior, even when we worked with expatriates. I was a manager in Jos, and annually they had to write a report on you, which they would read to you, and if you had any objection there was a column where you could write it before it was sent to the head office.
One of my staff leaked that I bought one house in Kano and that triggered some thought in me, that this time around my salary adjustment would be faulty. When they came to my office, they brought an envelop and said it was my new salary. I collected it but refused to open it. I just kept it there and we went for some inspection of lubricants. When I returned I opened it and what I forecasted was correct. When I returned from depot, the Dutch said, “Mr Gidado you didn’t open that envelop.’’ I said there was nothing impressive about it. So he said, “But we learnt you bought a house.’’ I said, “Oh, was that the reason?’’
The issue here is that you should always be a step or two from what people think of you. When they went back to their office they readjusted my salary.
Although the Japanese couldn’t speak English and I was number two in the company as deputy managing director, they couldn’t hold any meeting until I was there. The French, despite their arrogance as colonial masters, we always had lunch together in our canteen. We socialised and talked about one another.
One day, while discussing, someone got the strong points of our general manager, operations. When it came to my turn, he said he would talk on my behalf to the hearing of others. He said the deputy managing director was one of the characters you could not bug down with routine jobs. If you put them up at the highest position you would discover that whenever there’s a problem they would come up with a solution.
I think it is a divine choice that one is able to grab the right thing, speak the right and direct the right focus, the right view and come up with the right solutions.
Was that due to your family upbringing or personal development?
Well, one thing is that I never begged my father for anything. In fact, at that time you didn’t go directly to your parents to beg for anything.
There are three things I would never forget about my father. His mother died when he was an infant, so he was brought up by a stepmother. During our middle school days, her house was somewhere along the way to school, so I would branch there and she would give me some coins. And you had to inform your parents that you visited Mr X or Mrs Y and they gave you this or that. He said, “Well, that’s good.’’ But in an unexpected, sudden voice, he said, “If you have your own later in life and fail to give her, may you not prosper.’’ That still lingers in my mind.
Secondly, in the provincial school, we were not used to getting letters from anybody, unlike our colleagues from other places. So one day, I had the opportunity to meet Justice Bello. He was in Kano and he wrote to my father. When I saw the letter, I picked the address and I wrote to him, greeting him and asking for stamp so that I could post a letter. I told my father so that he would be happy that I was communicating with his younger brother. He said that was good. But when I said I asked for a stamp, he grabbed me and shouted, “Why didn’t you just greet him instead of begging!’’
The third issue was that one day he sent my mom to collect some money from me and I was surprised because he had never asked me for anything. I asked how much he asked for and she said he did not call any amount, so I gave her what I could. In the evening when I went to greet him, he asked if I got his message. I said yes and he said I did not hear it well.
How do you feel about the present situation of the Arewa Textiles? How can industries in Nigeria be revived?
It is a disaster. To revive industries in Nigeria, there are two things we must do. The first is the issue of power while the second is subsidy. When you talk of subsidy, government should look at the activities of its people and see what to promote. If you subsidise power, a lot of industries – small, medium and large scale – will develop and you will have a lot of your people employed; and through taxation from these workers you will recover what you spent in subsidy. By so doing you create stability in your country, employment and ways of improving internal revenue.
The other thing is that government should give adequate attention and focus on projects the country will really develop, not just spending on anything. Government must evolve policies that will bring up the nation from nothing to recognition.
Were you also a minister of finance?
Yes, while I was at home I was invited by the Abacha military government to serve as minister of finance.
You never held any public office under a civilian administration?
I served in one of the extremely disliked organisations for politicians – the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission as deputy chairman, with Hamman Tukur as chairman.
You served as finance minister during the Abacha regime, which has been accused of looting; what do you have to say about the accusation?
What I know very well is that Abacha was very apprehensive of the West and was not listening to them. As a state minister of finance, my concern was domestic finance, the issue of banks, revenue allocations to states, local government areas etc. I think he was just afraid that the West could grab him or his resources and cripple him, so he devised some ways of keeping money safely somewhere, not with the intention of looting. But because they could not reach him, they engineered his murder. He was hale and hearty the previous night, and the following morning his death was announced.
What was your relationship with Abacha?
He had a lot of confidence in me.
I always evolve my own code of conduct so that I can manage my life independently. For example, when I had the best salary, almost double of that of my colleagues, I never had a car until after eight years when I decided to change my career to the Marketing Board. There, you had to get a loan to buy a car. When I was made a manager in Shell I had a company car, so I never spent a kobo in maintaining a car.
My plan was that before I owned a car I would have four houses so that even if I had crisis with my employers I could manage my life. I never wanted to seek help, except from my maker, and that is central in my policy.
There was a time a General wrote a memo that he wanted to spend over $140million on some equipment and Abacha awarded the project to me, but as I said, I have my own personal code of conduct. I collected the memo and passed to the minister of finance, Chief Ani. My permanent secretary came to me and asked, “What do you mean by this?’’ I said I was not doing it. He said the commander-in- chief instructed that I should do it, but I said I would not do it.
When he passed it to Chief Ani, he wrote another memo that he wanted to get the approval for himself, and it was a big crisis. It was in the midst of that crisis that Abacha was killed.
What is your take on local government autonomy?
Give them their money and try them. Let them see how they can manage their resources. This country has the right to call anybody to give account. You can’t pocket their money and expect them to perform. Most importantly, there must be scrutiny of public officeholders to ensure accountability.
As a member of the Katsina Elders Forum, how do you see the security situation in the state?
I always say that we are not yet well groomed to practise this democracy or the presidential system of government. The presidential system has to be backed up by very solid productivity to support all the rubbish it has. With an agrarian or primary economy, we need some reasonable military rule. This is not really because I served under them but because I have reasonable things I can say we achieved from those regimes.
When I was a commissioner for finance, one day I realised that we didn’t have any real development plan and I went to Usman Jibrin and told him. I said we needed to go to communities and find out the real bottleneck in terms of people’s welfare, then go with government force and knock it off. That, to me, is the definition of a development project. And that is what I told President Buhari recently when we met him. If you knock the problems of communities you would improve their quality of life.
What I am saying is that up till now, we have not understood the real idea of democracy, and we have not put the right people in the right places. You need to really have some sense of vision and focus to be able to lead people. What we have now is that any person can be picked and put in a place where he or she cannot contribute anything.
Public servants should have the courage to do what is right. Let me give you an example. When I was a finance commissioner in Kaduna, I had a rough dealing with one of my bosses, but I got credit for it. That was why I was brought back to be the deputy chairman.
Mukhtar came to me with the then chairman of Funtua Local Government, Iya Ibrahim, and asked me to issue a check of N5million for him to procure cotton. I said yes and opened what we call flimsy file in public service and instructed my permanent secretary, Malam Abbas Rafindadi, to issue Ibrahim a check of N5million and evolve a method of repayment from the local government subvention, with the instruction that failure to repay, we would deduct from the local government finances.
He quickly issued the check and wrote a stinker, saying what we did was unprecedented.
I took the file to the governor and told him that we had issued the check and that was for his information. He got the courage to read the stinker, and before long, the governor wrote, threading to deal with the permanent secretary personally. But I met him and said it was not my intention to create unnecessary argument, but the expenditure of public finances is governed by rules and regulations. I told him that what was important was obedience to his instruction, which was done with an unprecedented speed. I added that the stinker was not for him but me, so he should leave it to me. So, as a public servant you need to have guts.
What do you think Katsina and other states bedeviled by insecurity should do to have peace?
I am not impressed by the attitude of some of our public officeholders. They should put their people first in anything they do so that they can meet their moral obligations to them. They should just do what is right for the people, not even what the people are pressurising for. For example, as a government you have at your disposal all the resources for their service, so you have to decide and do what is best for the state and the people.
At 80 you still look agile, what is the secret?
If you reach a certain age you don’t eat everything you want. For example, you can’t eat meat properly, and so on.
What about your family?
I have two wives now and children, most of them females. The number is staggering, 16! All of them are married. I had six male children but one passed away.
How do you spend your day?
My family used to mock me, saying 9 to 9. I sleep very early. At my age, I try to ingrain myself with the realities of life. I don’t even listen to local news any longer. I listen to religious stations only. I sleep well, though you can’t have a clean sleep at this age. Sometimes in the evening I do take a friend to walk around. When I am tired of sitting in Katsina, I still retain my house in Kaduna, where my wife is. She was 15 when we got married as I graduated in 1965, so she decided to remain there. Sometimes I go there.
My hobby is gardening. But I sold my garden while trying to marshal resources for the education of my children. Almost all of whom studied abroad, and it was very expensive. The last one of them will have his degree next March. However, I still have space at the backyard where I can put some hives for honeybees.
What is your advice to the younger generation?
God has set a target for human beings – heaven or hell is waiting. In the interim, you are living and you have a gift of hearing, sight and sense, so you also need to set your own targets in life and plan very well to achieve them. Your ultimate target should be to meet God’s target peacefully.
Secondly, God has favoured human beings by placing them above other beings. So, as a human being you need to live up to that higher position that Allah placed you. You must behave differently from other animals. One also needs to know that such favour is not for a joke, and there is final judgement.
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