There is, unarguably, no governor in modern Nigeria that has gone through mindboggling misfortunes as Governor Kashimn Shettima of Borno state.
No state in today’s Nigeria has had a running battle with a relentless, restlessness and mindless bloodletting as visited on Borno state.
The wonder is that despite all these, Borno is still standing.
Regardless of all the battery, bloodletting and destruction of lives and property which Borno has undergone in the entire two term tenure of Kashim Shettima, there is still in place, not just a government and its structures, but a people, leadership and an unparalleled resilience to rise from the ashes of a senseless insurgency that had threatened, at its peak, to encase the entire country.
That the people of Borno are still on their feet and cohabiting, as normally as is possible alongside other units of the country, despite the obvious endless assault and pounding by a group of sophisticated and mentally derailed psychopaths who look through the barrel of a gun and see salvation, is to say the least very uncommon.
Borno, Yobe and to some extent Adamawa states are actually the flash points of the Boko Haram terrorism.
But as the epicenter of the lunacy, Borno state has remained the most battered and hammered of the terror campaign.
At several points in the last seven years, Borno was a conquered territory, eff ectively under the control of the insurgents.
If anyone needed assurances that Borno would outlive the insurgency, the fact that at no time did the government of Kashim Shettima took flight or abandoned the people despite evident dangers of staying put, was enough to provide those assurances.
At its very peak, the Boko Haram insurgency looked very capable of conquering the whole of the state, going by the reality of their effective takeover of virtually the entire state.
The reality of the inherent dangers and the consistency of the attacks statewide should have, ordinarily become a very justifiable reason for the governor to either move out of the state or run government from a vintage and safer comfort zones.
It still beats me that after all these, Kashim Shettima can boast of strings of successes in very critical areas of development.
The litany of infrastructural facilities in all sectors visible all over the state reconfirms the place of share courage and valor in governance.
I am particularly impressed by the infrastructure outlay in the education sector on one hand as well as the policy formulation objective which targeted the most vulnerable people who were either direct victims of the insurgency or were pre-insurgency susceptible group of people, on the other.
One will mistake the super structures that have been put in place in the 40 mega schools that have either been completed or are at various stages of completion across the state for newly established Federal Universities.
In fact, not a single newly established federal university enjoys some of the finer attributes of any of these mega schools either in spacious classes, e-learning instruments, air-conditioning facilities and general conducive environment for learning.
The idea is that each of these mega schools will be built in 25 of the 27 local government areas of the state while Maiduguri and Jere local government areas will share the remaining 15.
The fact that most of them have actually been completed while others are at 90% and above completion stages has proved that indeed the policy is a top priority.
While structures are being provided to accommodate high turnover of displaced students whose education was abruptly disrupted by the insurgency, and to take in high volume of school-age children who are on the blocks to be registered, one can easily deduce a deliberate bias towards girl child education.
At every juncture of his policy formulation and execution, one can put a finger at a deliberate design to encourage the girl child.
While giving scholarships to student lawyers to the various law schools, Governor Kashim Shettima made sure that the girls amongst them got much more than the boys.
Again, about one hundred students were sent to Sudan to study medicine, but in a deliberate policy to turn in more female doctors to fi ll in critical and peculiar needs of the state, the government sent in more girls.
When he initiated and took over the registration fees, feeding and transportation of 517 Bororo boys and girls into a Maiduguri choice school, close to 400 of them were girls.
Even now that 1000 more of them are to be next in line, preference will still toward the girls.
Why the bias towards the girl child? Borno is still grappling with the vicious circle of insurgency.
Consideration for vulnerability is very vital in the effort to launch the whole state on a trajectory of recovery in the short and long term.
In this group, the weakest and most exposed are the women, the elderly and children.
In the later group, the girl child’s delicate nature, the ratio-deficiency, its implication for the immediate and future developmental projections as well as the need to outsource locally, comes into view.
Although the war against terrorism is far from over, it is safe to conclude that Borno has seen the worst of it.
Since the government of Kashim Shettima had stood its ground in the face of Boko Haram’s most ferocious mindlessness and still was able to conceive and execute people-oriented projects as if it was in peace time, history will etch the name of Kashim Shettima as a rare and unusually quintessential leader who re-echoed the historical and classical audacity and boldness of the Kanuri people.
It is instructive to note that despite its misfortune, Borno is still far ahead of many states in terms of dividends of democracy which underlines the fact that if the state had enjoyed a measure of tranquility, the sky will have been the limit.
Ahmed-BK wrote in from Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State
