Governor Abdulfattah Ahmad of Kwara State has revealed the challenges faced by his administration in an effort to develop the state. He spoke to newsmen in Ilorin, the capital of the state. Excerpt:

The new Kwara logo was to bring a sense of belonging and most importantly, to showcase our diversities, resourcefulness and   strong desire to move forward as a people for progress, growth and of course development. In trying to move the state forward, it is usual that you create a sense of belonging where people would have a common goal, where people would have a common understanding that would be a buy-in on what development would be like. The essence of the logo is not unconnected with the current happenings in Nigeria. The current economic and social environment the people found themselves have led to a process whereby our differences are being taken negatively as a country. Government needs to recognize that moving any system forward is a deliberate effort and not a spontaneous one. It is required to come together as a people and agreed on a shared vision on how we intend to see the next level in development and how the benefit would get to the people. Under this shared vision, there has to be deliberate effort to take our differences as strength and use it as a source of pride rather than use it to create problems among the people. For Kwarans, we have found ourselves in the Middle Belt part of Nigeria and endowed with a lot of natural resources. If you look at the logo today, it tells you that there is agriculture, abundant surface water which could serve our economic prosperity. This has seen us evolving a strong desire to move Kwara forward under a shared vision.

Your government has awarded several contracts, but the usual problem is execution. How are you going to execute all?

Part of our concept of leadership as they always say, was that we have a very few government in Nigeria that transit from a government where we are part and parcel of a policy formulation and implementation. And we saw how the government took the aspect of development up to the level when we took over more than a year ago. On the strength of that, we develop a policy trust on critical areas that affects our people like roads, youth development, health, agriculture, education, water, energy and of course security. Our desire to pursue from this angle is largely due to the fact that resources for development are very scarce. And for you to begin to have impact on the people, you must have a planned process on how to allow these developmental programmes to carry on. That takes us to a strong development, planning process, which sees us articulating how we intend to reach our people in terms of infrastructure. We don’t have all the resources we need, if we have, governance itself would had been very easy. Why it is difficult is because we are required to clearly optimize allocation of resources. Our defined priorities are being carried largely from our desire to drive the economy. This is what is informing the choice of one project over another. We have made it clear even at the inception of this administration that all communities that did not have capital project would ultimately have capital project reaching them and we are moving on. Those who did not get electricity in the last administration are getting during this administration. So we begin to see development as a modulated programme which implies that as we are moving on, there are plans. That is why if you recall in the areas of our roads that we are going to execute, we outlined all the roads we want to do, but that does not mean that we want to do all the roads at the same time, but it will create a sense of hope in our people that development is gradual based on available resources. So our first responsibility was to complete all on-going projects to let people know that our programme is to ensure that there is no project that is left undone or abandoned. In carrying on and completing all on-going projects we now move to the new projects we have outlined, largely chosen on our outlined priority. There are some of our projects that are federal and we are trying to see how we create a synergy between the state and the federal governments because as it is now, there is a disconnect. When I was going to Erin-Ile, we passed between Ajasse and Offa and the road there is very bad. It is a federal road. It is our desired to do this road. I had to send   another save-our-soul (SOS) to the President that this road is becoming dangerous to Kwarans. Unless this road is fixed, it is going to serve as a source of insecurity and of course a source of economic loss. So, some of these federal projects that are not getting proper attention from the Federal Government are major problems for the state. Kwara has no resources to fix them and they are competing with our own projects. Though we manage to do them, there is no assurance that we are going to get our money back. So these are some of the challenges.

What specifically is your administration doing to arrest mass failure in public schools?

Education is one area that is very critical not only for the state but for the country. We all see the general down trend in the education sector as reflected by the outcome of the NECO and the senior secondary school exams. We know that their failure is not resulting from what we have done at that level, that was why it became expedient for us to have a complete transformation of the sector. Which led us to the fact that our Colleges of Education that are supposed to provide the basic education at that level require to have teachers who are trained to do that job. And that saw us reforming the colleges of education back to where they are supposed to be. The colleges of education that are set up largely to train teachers who would teach at the basic and junior secondary school levels were almost becoming degree awarding institutions, to the extent that they moved on by leaving their primary responsibilities and taken more of outreach courses for other institutions outside the state so that they are able to earn additional funding. If this funding they were earning were used to drive the primary focus for which the school was set up, it would have been good. But it has led to loss of focus. That was why we have to first, stop those outreach programmes for degree awarding that was threatening the focus and allow the schools to go back to train teachers in primary education and you saw the model that came out with Oro which was now being replicated in Ilorin and Lafiagi. Part of what led to the loss of focus was the bloating of the workforce.  You find out that most of the schools along the line, had loaded their non-academic staff over and above academic staff to the extent that we sometimes get confused as to the focus of the schools. There are academic institutions. So largely there should be every three academic staff and one non-academic staff, but the reverse is the case. So, more money is being spent on non-academic staff than the academic staff.  This is why we have decided to re-focus.

Is there an existing synergy between you and the local governments especially on infrastructural development?

The first thing we did when we came   was to make the local government buy-in into our policy. We have our budget packaged into a medium term. We define a four-year developmental programme across critical sectors that affect our people. We made them into documents which we will use as a basis for providing infrastructures, drive the economy and most importantly for human capital development for the next four years. This shared provision is now being shared with the local government. We have a platform where the local government areas are made to see that we desire to work on the same pace in terms of given specific target especially in areas of road for instance. That is why you see that we are deliberate to source about N1billion on primarily rural roads. This is designed to complement what each local government is doing on roads. We have been able to support the development of primary health care. The primary healthcare is actually the primary responsibility of the local governments, but we have also taken advantage of funding windows coming in from the MDGs to ensure that the grassroots health institutions are supported in terms of infrastructure development,   drugs,   personnel and we expect the local governments to take ownership.