Right of reply: Response to Philosofaith

Upon reflection on your last week’s column, I felt lucky to use your platform to communicate with thousands who drink weekly from your knowledge fountain. It’s rare to get such an opportunity to interface with Dr. Ndagi’s readers directly. Also, as a Nigerlite, I thought you, our good doctor, deserves answers to the important questions you raised.
One, on the question of the indefatigable effort of Governor Bello not reported in the media, it would interest my elder brother to know that such efforts have been reported in all forms of media: press, electronic and social.  For example, please check Leadership of June 17, page 10; People’s Daily of June 17, page 6; and Nigerian Pilot, June 18, page 12, to give a few examples.
Since then, however, the governor has embarked on the inspection of some abandoned projects in this sector. An example is the statewide water projects of ex-governor Abdulkadir Kure’s administration. The projects situated in seven towns in Niger State, including Kontagora, Gawu and Bida, were given to Biray Group, a Turkish company and were 74 percent completed. However, the projects were abandoned for eight years, by the succeeding administration.
Now, here’s an economic argument why they shouldn’t have been abandoned. Water is a basic necessity. And if you don’t give the people good water, you’re giving them poor health, which will multiply your problems and stretch your resources. That is why the new leaders in Niger chose water as one of the first problems to solve.
But if you want to continue with a project that was left for eight years, you’ll soon discover many problems attached to it. For example, in Nigeria, prices of products appear to only go up not down. A contractor told us that what he used to buy eight years ago for N800 is now N2, 000.
What contractors do in this case is to submit a variation. This almost always means an increase in the money the government has to spend. My governor looked at one variation and said; “This is too much, we’re not doing it.” One variation was an increase of 73 percent!  This means if the contract value was N5 billion, it would now be N8.6 billion.
Also, although 74 percent of one of the projects was completed (the one in Gawu), Kure’s government paid only 49 percent thereby transferring the difference as a liability to the new administration.
You see why those projects shouldn’t have been abandoned in the first place?
Besides health, three other focus areas of the new government in Niger State are education, empowerment and agriculture. Dr. Ndagi mentioned three of these areas.  I’ll now direct my attention to education where Dr. Ndagi discouraged the continuation of turning Niger State College of Education into a university.
This in itself is a matter of serious debate globally. However, two questions assert themselves here. Do we need a new state university?  Can we afford it?  As an economist, these are the questions the governor asked. The answer to the first question is yes. If yes, how many universities do we need in the state?  A professor once told us that the standard is to have a university for every 130,000 people. In 2006, our population was four million – today we should be inching towards five million. Other than this, from education economics, we know that university education has been correlated with higher income, productivity (due to the human capital), GDP and so forth.  More importantly however, we need more teachers in the state and this is the focus of the governor – he wants to train more and better teachers.
The second question on the other hand returns a negative. We can’t afford or sustain a new university now. And to pay the managers of the new university the courtesy of this painful decision, Governor Bello visited the campus to tell them that for now, he can’t continue with it; this was also reported in the media.
On comparing Nasir el Rufai with other governors, I would like us to heed the advice of teachers to parents: ‘don’t compare your children.’  This is more so when those children are of different fathers, mothers and went to different schools.  Indeed, if we begin to compare we may be actually surprised, while El Rufai has stopped fertiliser distribution to traditional rulers and politicians, we’ve not only stopped those, but we’re also planning on using the federal government’s database (managed by Cellulant) of farmers, so that pretenders and big pockets will not abused the 50 percent subsidy we’re giving to farmers.
As for the Ramadan feeding, although we didn’t completely abolish it, the budget was drastically reduced and a far cry from the previous years of the PDP.  More importantly, the food was given to NGOs (such as Women in Da’wah and FOMWAN) with structures to distribute to those who were in need.
Although you didn’t mention hajj sponsorship, next year, in sha Allah, Niger State government is going to completely stop hajj subsidy.
Of course, there are many improvements needed in our media campaign. For example, Radio Niger used to be heard in Lagos, but since our AM infrastructure collapsed, it’s not even possible to reach all of Niger now through the FM station.  Therefore, we’ve just done a technical audit of Niger State Television and Radio Niger towards providing sustainable information to our people wherever they are.
The reason why it’s not fair to compare is that personalities and circumstances although similar are different. For example, the wife of our governor, Dr. Amina Abubakar, a consultant gyneacologist, is going to work at Minna General Hospital for free; we can’t because of that ask wives of other governors to do the same.
El Rufai, especially is a news medium of his own. The man has over 600,000 followers on Twitter, tell me how many newspaper houses in Nigeria have such following. People also tend to exaggerate. During my Sallah meeting with Bida youths, somebody asked me to tell the governor that he should do what El-Rufai did in Kaduna. When I asked for more details so that we can simply copy and paste, he couldn’t give me. Further investigation showed that what he said was not accurate.
Further, Governor Bello would sometimes dismiss us before secretly going on site tours and unscheduled visits to hospitals etc. Nobody sees these in the media because that’s not his objective. As far as he is concerned, he’s doing his job.
As for the charge of my incompetence, I agree, and for that reason I’m learning every day.  However, there are many who believe that Niger connects more with its people than many states in Nigeria; we’ve Nigerlite of the Month award for example. A friend called me from the UK and told me that his friend advised his state governor to get a media person like me. The social media are laden with such sentiments and prayers for me and the governor. But I focus more on what Gov. Bello always tells me: “What are the criticisms?  Those are the ones I’m interested in.”
Lastly, I didn’t slap anyone. Those who continue to sell that falsehood may one day land themselves in a defamation suit. I thank you for this opportunity, sir.