Governor AbdulFatah Ahmed of Kwara State spoke with journalists  on his achievements in  his two and half years in office. He gave insights into his agricultural transformation agenda designed to commercialise farming, among sundry issues. BISI ADEDAYO covered the interview for Sunday Newswatch.

Your administration is almost two and half years in office. How has the journey been so far?

First, two and half years down the lane, it has been a bit tough and challenging but, we give thanks to God for His grace and mercies, for taking us thus far and for giving us the capacity to carry on activities as encapsulated in our promises to the electorate. Yes, by His Grace, we are delivering to the electorate accordingly. So, two years down the line, we want to say:  Praise be to God almighty to have brought us this far. We have been able to give people what we promised to do.

What is your concept of your ‘shared prosperity’, what is it all about?

The whole concept of shared prosperity is to articulate whatever it takes for people to feel part and parcel of government and ensure prosperity and development implemented.  And that takes us to the planning we came up with in 2011 which is:  we must begin to let people know what we see ourselves as custodians of public resources and these resources are to be optimally allocated to areas of need of our people and our people must be seen to be enjoying the benefit of these executions. To that extent, we have been able to harness our resources together. We have been able to ask our people the areas they want us to spend money on and we have been able to continue to spend money on those areas that our people want.

In other words, we have been making our people prosper and we have been creating value for money for our people. We have been creating empowerment scheme and we have been creating wealth platforms for the youths. These are prosperities of dividends of democracy. That is why we said shared prosperity, largely informed from articulating resources into proper aggregate platforms and getting it appropriated alongside what you have told the people you would do at your campaigns and that is exactly what we are doing

You came in on the platform of continuity from your predecessor. How have you been able to consolidate on what you met on ground?

I came in on the platform of continuity, largely premised on the fact that I was part and parcel of the last administration for eight years. I was  in vantage position to be part of the policy formulation and implementation, which gave me an insight into the level the State required to be taken especially, in terms of human capital development, economic development and of course, in terms of infrastructure. I recognize the fact that the bane of development in Nigeria had largely been based on the fact that we have not had situations where one government successfully transits to another so that the real gain of government is usually achieved.

Don’t forget that development requires medium to long term planning and if you say you want to move a particular environment from one level to another, you require to first articulate your plans which naturally in most cases, goes beyond where there is a successful transition. You usually see most projects abandoned or new ones started afresh without looking back to some of the ones that have been carried on by my predecessors. But, we came in the concept of continuity to tell the people that firstly we are committed to all programmes that were articulated into the planning process of this administration.

In other words, they are going to form the major platforms for us to lead from and we clearly spelt out the areas we wanted to move the State forward. We had them compartmentalised into three key areas; Human capital development, economic development and infrastructure. Taking firstly from infrastructure, there were quite a few programmes and projects that were on going at the end of the last administration. So, the concept of continuity was designed naturally to see us taking those projects to completion so that our people can begin to benefit from them. First ones are the issue of roads- all road projects we met on ground are currently being taken to completion levels. The water project we inherited are currently being driven to completion levels and  the health project we met on ground are currently being taken to completion levels and of course, ditto for education. But not only that, we began to develop new projects largely based on the same policy thrust but made current to suit prevailing exigencies. On the strength of that, we have outlined what we want to do in line with the funding profile of the State. We have demonstrated that it is possible for one government to transit to another government amicably evolving policy thrust and using the former administration as a platform to not only carry on projects to completion but also evolve new projects that would also be taken to completion within the same time frame. So, you can enjoy what we call benefit of money that is, value for money in terms of project execution.

Recently, you said that Nigeria is yet to attain nationhood. What does it take to be a nation?

Yes, it is very clear. A nation is an entity where you have people from different socio-cultural backgrounds agreeing to move together on a collective basis where they share common values, common languages, common future and of course, common laws and allow for well integrated process that encapsulates everybody’s interest and  allow everybody to feel part and parcel of that environment. That is when you would be said to be a nation. You would have created values that you can live and die for. Unfortunately in Nigeria today, we are still moving towards nationhood because most of us see ourselves firstly from our State of origin before we begin to talk of seeing ourselves as Nigerians. So, that is part of the problem. When you become a nation, you start from the top, not from the bottom.  When they ask you say firstly I am a Nigeria and you will not be talking about State of origin but State of residence. You see that quasi togetherness we share when we play football; that is the kind of thing a nation should drive.

And hopefully, we are on the right path. We need to recognize the fact that all nations that we see today across the world have been formed by the people from different nationalities but they had to jointly sit down and agree on certain values, agree on ways by which everybody would feel secured and everybody would have the same rights. Nobody would put pressure on him as a result of his colour or his ethnic background. It took America a little while, took England a little while and quite a number of countries some time to get there. We are moving on because don’t forget that people think that we are slow and  we are not slow as a country in moving towards nationhood. I don’t know of any other nation in the world that had been peopled by over 200 to 300 ethnic nationalities.

So, it is a very commendable effort that we have brought ourselves this far. What we require to do now is to look at the strength of each of the ethnic nationalities and encapsulate it into a working platform that would define values that we all share and agree that this is our own beliefs of what a nation should be. If somebody is your brother, it is because he is a Nigerian, not because he is from Kano, Bayelsa or from Kwara or Niger and then, we would have evolved platforms that would see us all as one and everybody would have equal opportunity. But before we get to that level, we require to get rid of this sense of suspicion we have among ourselves. We require to give everybody a sense of belonging through transparency by bringing strong political systems that would evolve policies that would create incentives, that every Nigerian no matter your tribe and creed or your ethnic background, will be able to key into those incentives, you will be able to derive values from there.

It was alleged that the Federal Government owes the 36 States of the federation about N300 billion. If this allegation is true, how has your administration been coping with payment of workers’ salaries and meeting the need of the people in the State?

It is been quite challenging, I must confess. This is because,  don’t forget at a point we entered into 2013, we came with the mindset of specific inflows from the federal allocation and on the strength of that, we created appropriation platforms.  It would naturally put pressure on us if the funding that is expected to come to support all appropriations as encapsulated in our budget which is the law is not coming in. I must tell you that it is a major pressure on us from the time we began to see shortfalls in the allocation because we have planned ahead and even though we intend to augment with borrowed funds, there is a limit to which we can borrow because your borrowing would be premised on your capacity to successfully use the funds and pay back.

So, borrowing is not even an option to shortfall, it can only serve as an option for recurrently in-flowing funds. But when there is a shortfall, borrowing cannot serve that purpose because don’t forget, when you borrow you still need to pay back. So, as it is now, we are still running the deficit that has not been remitted by NNPC. The Federal Government too is not different in this perspective. We are all being fed from the federation allocation and the inability to bring the much expected level of funds expected to be shared has put us all in this position. But I am sure it is being looked into and whatever is required to be done would be done to ensure that the appropriate funding gets to each of the three tiers of government.

One of the cardinal programmes of your administration is agriculture to the extent that people even came to the State from other countries to under study it. How far is agriculture moving in the State?

Agriculture is moving very well in Kwara State, because we are the first State to take the bull by the horns and audaciously moving our farmers from subsistence level to commercial level. To understand the kind of things we are doing in Kwara, we need to look a little bit backgrounds to what had happened to Nigeria’s agro-economy which was booming in the 60s, but with the discovery of crude oil, rather than using those funds to generate support and growth for the agro-sector, we decided to fund consumables. And in funding consumables, you are paying the wages and salaries of other countries that are producing finished goods and sending them to your country.

With that, we began to see our farmers gradually abandoning their farms for urban drift. Unfortunately, it took us to a point when we began to import the food we will eat. For a country like ours that houses every fifth black man in the world, we must be seen to be feeding ourselves because the strength of any nation is in its people.

That informed our judgment that if we truly must feed our people, subsistence farming cannot take us there, we need to evolve an agric policy that must be encapsulated in well structured platforms that would see us taking advantage of what we know how to do best. And on the strength of the fact that we have never had the experience of commercial farming before, how do we get this experience within the short term we want things to move? And we sought to get this experience by bringing in 13 farmers from Zimbabwe who are currently compartmentalized into three major consortiums namely dairy, poultry and mixed cropping. It is a major success story.

But, it came with its own challenges, being a novel thing and we are starting with it. But, I am telling you today, we have seen agric value chain transformation, taking place in Kwara because today we can conveniently see the value chain of diary. For instance, starting with growing of maize and soya beans to feed cattle, to produce milk and  milk is taken to WAMPCO and WAMPCO produces peak milk. That is a typical values chain and each level of this chain is capable of huge levels of support for the masses. We have typical value chain in the poultry section, the poultry grows maize and soya to feed day old chickens that are growing to table size within a period of six automated abattoir that makes chicken available to most of the eateries you see in this country today.