Kano Is Not Difficult To Govern– Kwankwaso

How do you feel celebrating your birthday with the anniversary of the Kwankwasiyya ideology?
I thank the good people of Kano State who over the years decided to support us and elect us to various positions and to also thank Nigerians for voting our party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which clinched power at the centre during the last elections and in various states across the country. I also want to use the opportunity of my birthday to thank all our friends in Kano and Nigeria in general, people who over the years decided to take it upon themselves to organize certain activities on the October 21 of every year to commemorate the birth of our Movement like visits to orphanages, the prisons to support the needy, the lectures and symposium as well as other innovations. It is just by coincidence that they decided also to use my birthday to celebrate
Kwankwasiyya. They have done it many times in Kano and today even when I’m hardly in Kano, they feel they should celebrate what has been achieved so far. We will continue to pray for our state and our country so that things will continue to move in positive direction for the benefit of all of us. In the last years, we decided to come together in Kano with the people of like minds to see if we can have an ideology and of course , an identity so that we can check ourselves to ensure that whether in government or out of it our members across the state and in the country do the right thing. That was exactly how we started.
We did so much in terms of infrastructure when I was first elected, human development and many other areas. And even when after I left office for eight years, the good people of Kano decided to vote for me again in the same party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) through which I lost in 2003. Of course in 2003, we had a lot of challenges. I remember in the election of that year, it was the only time the presidential and governorship elections were fixed on the same day; and it was the era of Sharia in the Northern part of the country when people weep up a lot of sentiments. Our presidential candidate was a Christian from the South and that of the opposition was somebody from our backyard of Kano. We won the election due to the support we got from young men and women and people with good intentions in 2011.
Also as Defence minister and member of the NDDC I was able to reflect on what we did wrong and right when we were in government and try to avoid areas of weaknesses of our first term. I’m very delighted that so much has been achieved. So far in four years we were able to do over 6,000 projects and programmes. We now have 484 councilors. We have 100 percent in the state assembly; we have 44 local government chairmen; all 24 Houses of Representatives seats; we have governor and deputy and of course, a president elected on the platform of our party. During the 2015 elections what came from Kano was so significant in terms of support for President Muhammadu Buhari being in power today.   Within the period of four years we have built more than 230 secondary schools and we are delighted to say that of this number, 44 are school for Islamic studies, all boarding.
In the Senate how do you intend to further the ideology of your Movement?
The Senate is not where you begin to preach an ideology but people will always imbibe a good ideology from your relationship with them. So it is not like you go around shouting your ideology for who cares to listen in the Senate but you continue with the normal thing.
How would paucity of funds affect the implementation of the kwankwasiya projects in kano?
For me, you are always what you think you are. If you think you are poor, you are poor even when you have so much. I remember in 1999 when I was Governor -elect, Gen Kontagora who was then the military administrator in Kano and he showed me documents that they agreed with the labour union to sack 40 percent of the workers which I felt was abnormal. He called me because he had very limited time and so he could only remove 20 percent of the workers and he left 20 percent for me. Even as he was talking I was just looking at him because I told myself that God willing I will get away of working for the people without necessarily removing one percent of workers in kano. By the time we were sworn in we started working. Instead of concentrating on sacking workers, we concentrated on sacking ghost workers and ghost pensioners. On the pensioners list we had 14,000 as official figure. But by the time I went and closed the pension board and asked all pensioners to
come and open new files and show evidence of their genuineness, I ended up having 7,000 in the end as we discovered that 50 percent were just ghost pensioners. I went into the payroll because at that time we had 33,000 workers on the official list. But by the time I took drastic action, we ended up with 23,000 only to discover that 8,000 were ghost workers. In 2011 when I took over in kano, many workers were on strike especially the teachers of tertiary institutions because they were not paid and I was also aware that banks were giving to the state to pay salaries, when we started, we did a similar thing by blocking wastages that we could remember and at the same time we were able to raise our income from N400 million per month to N2 billion per month. take a look at the issue of security votes where governors , especially in kano were just doling out N10 million for as high as 13 times just in one day in the name of security votes because we had all the documents. We said no way for this because this is stealing because we can’t do that. So we stopped. I can comfortably tell you that until we left there was an attempt by some persons to say what we gave 300,000, 400,000 to ministries as overhead was not enough. We asked them to show evidence that it was not enough and they couldn’t provide evidence on that. And the difference between this amount and what we met on ground was over N500 million monthly. If you add this amount together, it amounts to N6 billion and this N6 billion is more than the cost of two flyovers that I built – the two in Kofar Nasarawa cost us N5.9 billion.
Kano is not difficult to govern. kano is a good place. All what the people want is whether you are a good man with good intention to help them. There were so many things we did in my first and second term in office like a miracle. Take the case of Achaba (commercial motorcycle riders), we had about two million of them. Just over night after doing some home work and all that was necessary, when I announced the ban of their activities, I got the support of people. Of course there was the issue of job loss but I created many alternatives as we bought hundreds of tokunbo buses, brand new 250 Corolla cars food graduates and they are still use till today. Before now, it was unthinkable to see graduates and diploma holders to be taxi drivers but now we have many of them and they are much better than their colleagues that joined the civil service and other endeavours of life.
But if you take kano for example, when we started, we started with our very senior people in the game. In the days of Aminu kano, we were very young in the primary schools and secondary schools and even during the PRP days, I was president of the students union in Kaduna polytechnic in 1978 -79 and we learnt so much from them. And then we had the second group of RImi’s era and so on so forth. They were our seniors and our leaders. We related well with them and managed them. Today Aminu kano and Abubakar Rimi are no more. When we started in 1991 when I retired from the civil service to join politics, I was a very young man. I told myself at the time that the game of politics is a game of number not a game of quality and I had to tolerate people because I cannot just come overnight to say I have to change people and their ways of thinking, but with time many people will understand you and queue in and that was why we are where we are today. By the grace of God we would continue to attract more people to salvage our country.
Is there any hope under President Buhuri for Nigeria ?
Of course there is hope. All that we want is to bring in the change that we promised during our campaign. We have tried so many ways that did not work in the past. People were worried and today everybody is interested in doing the things that would improve their wellfare. A key thing that government must do is protection of lives and properties, then followed by welfare for the people. And once any government can do that for them, I can assure you they will glue themselves to that government.