I used IGR to rescue Kano – Kwankwaso

Former Kano state governor and the lawmaker representing Kano Central Senatorial district in the National Assembly, Engr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, in this interview with BODE OLAGOKE, discloses the reason behind the Kwankwasiya ideology he founded in 2009 and also reflects on the impact of the ideology on Kano people six years after.

How do you feel celebrating your birthday with the anniversary of the Kwankwasiyya ideology?
I would like to 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.

I want to say that this young men and women are organizing it on their own even when I’m not in government. I’m happy that they keep on the tradition of ensuring that that day is celebrated. And it is just that 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 what we started.
If you look at our first term, we did so much in terms of infrastructure, human development, among others. 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 changeless, especially sentiments.

I remembered in the election of that year, it was the only time the presidential and governorship elections were fixed for 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. That was used effectively against us but we stood by our candidate and party. That is all history now; we reorganize ourselves again and re-contested on the same platform of the PDP in 2011 and despite all the challenges at the  national level against us from the leadership our party, and of course the sitting government at that particular time, we won the election due to the support we got from young men and women and people with good intentions.

From 2003 to 2011, I was opportune to be the minister of defense; I was also opportune to be member of NNDC representing the North-West, and I was able to do so many other things within the period. But above all, 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 and if you divided that number by four years you will know the arithmetic on what was done on the average on daily basis.

We thank God for the opportunity to go back to Kano and above all at the end of it, people appreciated to the extent that we now have 484 councilors, that is 100 percent.  We have 100 percent in the state assembly; we have 44 local government chairmen; all 24 House 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.   We have touched lives in all sectors in Kano state but we are particularly proud of what we did in the area of education. I cannot also forget the special school we built for the children of the internally displaced persons in Borno State, where we enrolled 100 of them in Kano and there are doing well as we speak. I’m sure more would be brought in by our successor to save the children of the consequences of the insurgency.

Ours was an ideology aimed at supporting them; support their children to go to school; create employment for them; provide them with basic amenities, and give them a sense of belonging and capacity to participate in the modern economy.  And you know the poor are in the majority; and politics is a game of number which is why the ideology is good for all. So by the time we were able to convince the masses of our state, get their trust and support based on our integrity. That was why we were always wining at any given time irrespective of the platform we chose to use.

I remember I contested 14 elections; I lost two – the 2003 governorship election and presidential primary that I contested with President Buhari in Lagos. Yes, I didn’t get the ticket but I believe if you look at the figures, it was a big a victory for myself. Nobody expected that I will come second under our circumstances but from the result, you can see that our support cut across not only in Kano but the country. This shows that we had people who believed in us. I had the opportunity to be in so many places, I was a civil servant for seventeen years, lucky to be deputy speaker of the House of Representatives during the NRC, SDP days, I was an elected delegate to the constitutional conference, I was also governor Kano 1993 -2003, Minister of defence, was on the board of the NDDC and went back to Kano for the second time as a governor and I am now a senator of the federal republic. So along the line I met so many people and the key thing is that you  should be kind, fair, and just to whomever you meet anywhere either on the plane, road, market, senate and all other places. People can say so many things against Nigerians but we are good people from my experience in politics. Our people are not foolish all what they need is to prove to them that you can protect their interests and they would always be there for you.

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. You build trust; you build followership through exemplary conduct.  Take our primaries in Lagos for instance; people who had cause to relate with me especially in my days at the House of Representatives identified with me. Many of them joined the APC from other parties, especially the PDP. Fortunately, APC said once you are member of the National Assembly you are an automatic delegate. So many of them came based on the conviction that I am the ideal candidate for the job and that is why I have that number of votes across the country. Do the right thing anywhere you find yourselves and with everybody you come across with and you would attract a following that would surprise you.

How does kwankwasiya get funding to execute its projects in Kano now that you are no longer the state governor?
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, I was invited by Gen Kontagora who was then the military administrator in piano 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. At that particular time, when we concluded the exercise, we had enough money to pay them as we did not sack one single person between 1999 – 2003, even when I had a documented agreement with my predecessor to sack 20 percent of the 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 that.

There was nothing like security votes in Kano. On overheads, I recall I brought the issue to the council and as we were debating I told council members that I don’t know how in the last eight years there was an increase of that money to this level. But I knew very well when I was governor in 2003 what we were giving as overheads. So I said let us go back to what we were giving as overhead.

And I said any commissioner or official who have any complaint should come and tell me. 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.
And I am happy to say that until we left government in both the first term and second term, we did not borrow any kobo in or outside the country.

We used what generated locally and what we were able to get from Abuja. In fact when came in, we realised the state government went into agreement with world Bank and they gave them over $200 million on certain projects like the supply of mosquito nets. I say why borrow just to buy mosquitoe nets for my people now that there is oil revenues. I say most of us would not be around in the next 30 -40 years to repay the loan and of course our children would grow up to bear the brunt of repaying the loan. I had to send commissioner for budget and planning to go and follow due process to exit from that loan taken by the state government. And our strength was based on the fact that whatever we got from Abuja was going straight to our coffers with minimum or no reduction.

And that is exactly what is happening today. So we are happy that we are able to live within our means. We did not borrow because that was the ideology of our administration. The truth is, it is very attractive to go and borrow money because they would say 20 -30 years as if it will never come. But why enslave our children to the children of the Chinese, Europeans or even our fellow Africans when you are not sure of your means of income tomorrow? Our resources were well managed at both the state and local council levels that it is difficult to count them. We had 6,378 concrete projects and programmes in just four years.

Kano is one of the places where the citizenry are well informed. People ordinarily will say Kano is difficult to govern. 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. Are you determined to do the right thing? Because even if you have the good intention, when it comes to implementation you may not have the guts and determination to do it but once you prove to them that you are on their side, they would give you the benefit of doubt. 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 homework 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. So people are ready to do the right thing as long as the leaders decide to give them opportunity and show them direction.

How did you get grassroots support?
Leaders must have good intention and good heart. You don’t assume that everybody should think the way you are thinking and you have to look at so many differences that exist between individuals in terms of age, educational background, family background, etc. So having the big heart is very important and the ability to accommodate people is also very important.

Even when you think they are doing the wrong thing you have to accommodate them and make sure you put them on track. Over the years we met so many people not only in Kano but across the country and even beyond. 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 piano, 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.

Do you believe that Nigerians now have the hope of redemption under the Buhari-led administration?
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 welfare. A key thing that government must do is protection of lives and properties. Then followed by welfare for the people. Nigerians want to send their children to schools; they want to get jobs; you notice our people are very hard working.

All you need do is go to villages and see how people are using primitive tools on their farms twenty four hours of the day working hard to eke out a living. And once any government can do that for them, I can assure you they will glue themselves to that government as we have seen in my piano state. We have the time to put things together to build confidence in the citizenry and deliver democracy dividends. I have never seen a country in this world that has the opportunity we have today. We succeeded in sending almost all our children to school in Kano in the last four years. We succeeded in changing the attitude of our people to governance. So I keep telling people that our people are good. All what they need is a very serious leadership that would improve their welfare and security.