By Yakubu Uba
It is said that one never really lived until he or she did something outstanding to someone who is not in the position to pay back. As a citizen of Adamawa, the retired Admiral Murtala Nyako I know, who served as elected governor before his illegal impeachment, has done much to me and many other citizens of our dear state, particularly rural farmers who will always remember his leadership era with nostalgia.
Nyako, who was born on August 27, 1942, has rendered many years in service to God, the nation and humanity.
Nyako served the nation as Chief of Naval Staff before venturing into full agriculture where he attained similar feat of having the largest mango farm in the country that exports exotic mangoes to Europe, earning him the popular nickname “Baba Mai Mangoro.”
Baba Mai Mangoro attained the positions of president of Horticultural Crops Growers Association of Nigeria, Practicing Farmers Association of Nigeria, and was Honourary Adviser to former President Goodluck Jonathan on Agriculture.
Simple, easy going and too kind to a fault, Nyako, though, a courageous fighter renowned for his valour in defending the rights of his people and constituency; dared his then political party, PDP, and presidency, under Jonathan, on the issue of Boko Haram insurgency through his memos on insecurity in the North-east.
That act of calling a spade by its name earned him impeachment. He was betrayed and illegally impeached for daring the powers that be, but he was finally vindicated and returned, smelling like a bouquet of roses, while his betrayers and traducers came out smelling like what the cat brought home.
How swift nemesis caught up with his traducers and betrayers is a topic for another day. Nyako is blessed and fortunate to see how those who harassed him ended up screwing themselves.
A Japanese proverb says, ‘you can’t see the whole sky through a bamboo tube.’ Nyako’s legacies are too much for a write up like this, but for the few years I knew him as governor of Adamawa, Baba Mai Mangoro helped many farming families to discover the beauty of modern agriculture. Under Nyako, agriculture remained the centre piece of the economic development of the state.
Nyako’s administration will be remembered for opening a one-stop Farming Skills Acquisition Centres (FSAC) in the rural areas where many farmers were trained on necessary skills to improve their yield and its quality.
Baba Mai Mangoro never got tired of personally lecturing farmers during field days and organising agric programmes on why they needed to patronise those centres to boost their yield of rice from the average 1.5 tons/hectare to about 30 tons through improved yield and multiple cultivation, exactly like it is being done by their counter parts in Thailand.
There is also the Adamawa Agricultural Development and Investment Limited (AADIL) set up by Baba to “facilitate, encourage and provide necessary linkages, nationally and internationally for the development of agriculture and the Agro-industrial complex of the state.”
Services provided by AADIL in collaboration with FSACs included advice to farmers at all levels, provision of inputs like Agro-chemicals, fertilizer and seedlings as well as acting as procurement agents to buy, grade and demonstrate the benefit of value chain by producing, processing and marketing of selected commodities within the scope of the Federal Government guaranteed minimum prize initiative.
Another legacy of the man is his unrivalled youth empowerment programme, known as Local Apprenticeship Scheme (LAS) which remained a house hold name because of its visibility, spread and impact across the state.
Established to train youths and women in 21 selected marketable trades identified in the state, LAS achieved to a large extend one of its main objectives of providing vocational, business and managerial skills training to 40,000 unemployed individuals in the state.
Under LAS, many experts in tailoring, shoe making, auto mechanic, welding, hairdressing etc were recruited as Masters Trainers and they used their respective workshops and business centres across the state to train thousands of youths who were provided tools on graduation to set up their businesses.
There are also Vocational Skills Training Centres and Technical Training Centres manned by German consultants whose graduates were hot cake for reputable companies like Dangote Group which was reported to employ about 100 of them.
Nyako’s tenure, in spite of its turbulent moments, was a watershed in the area of transformation of our dear Adamawa State whose slogan is the Land of Beauty. Baba sure left legacies that will continue to remain a reference point and a benchmark for judging his successors.
Ahmadu Fintiri, who succeeded him as acting governor, was responsible for scrapping all the empowerment programmes introduced by Baba Mai Mangoro and sadly failed to come up with alternatives before he (Fintiri) got sacked by a Federal High Court ruling. Fintiri’s successor, Bala Ngilari, also left after a brief tenure without an empowerment programme.
Nobody blinded by political reason or primordial sentiment can dim your light in Adamawa and beyond. A proverb says, a light is always a light even if the blind cannot see it. Happy birthday, Baba.
Uba wrote from Yola, Adamawa state
