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Jigawa
PDP Flag Off Rally and Why Lamido is Bragging
By Umar Danjani Hadejia
Newsdiaryonline Thurs Feb 24,2011
Arriving in 'Jirgin Futon Al'uma' aka the Ark that contains
everybody & can sail successfully.
The
best headline caster would still be challenged by the task of
writing the most apt headline for the occasion. That is the flag
off rally for Governor Sule Lamido’s gubernatorial campaign in
Dutse on February 21, 2011. The crowd was so intimidating that
when the NEPU veteran, Alhaji Baba Daguro alighted from the bus
(also known as “Jirgin Futon Al’uma” in Hausa OR ‘the Ark that
contains everybody and can sail successfully’) that brought
Governor Lamido and all the PDP leaders to the expansive,
ultra-modern Aminu Kano Triangle in Dutse, he exclaimed, “With
this crowd, we have won this election!”
For someone like
Daguro who has seen political rallies since the
First Republic to say so suggested that
something different had happened in the life of Jigawa. The only
rally of such capacity in recent history could be the grand
finale of the 2010 Local Government Council election campaign at
Birnin Kudu. But the Birnin Kudu space is less than one-tenth of
Aminu Kano Triangle, the venue of the flag off of Lamido’s
gubernatorial campaign. Taking place under such a diverse
audience, it was not an occasion from which any hate journalist
could invent or fabricate and peddle any falsehood or play the
killjoy, leaving us with reflecting on the imports of Sule
Lamido’s politics and political persona.
Lamido being escorted into the podium to speak at the flag off
of his gubernatorial campaign at Dutse Tuesday
This is more so in
the light of the very complicated nature of the audience. It was
not the usual mammoth crowd of alienated or rented spectators
given the passive aggression and animated activism of its major
component-the youths who, either as those energetic drummers or
the pervasive sloganeers, were active participants with
something at stake.
For this to be the
case in spite of the organised vilification of the same Governor
Lamido recently suggests that the crowd was either the reverse
effect of propaganda or a collective vote of absolute confidence
on the governor by his own people. Those who had their ears on
the ground were sure the latter would happen immediately a
phone-in programme on Freedom Radio on February 20, 2011 was
turned into a platform by the callers to advise the people of
Jigawa
State not to lose Sule
Lamido. Caller after caller, people who are not of Jigawa State
origin but mostly from Kano State, consistently urged the people
of Jigawa not to forget where the state was before Sule Lamido
came to power in May 2007. The frankness and genuineness of the
callers shocked everyone since the radio programme was live and
never promoted in advance.
So, analysts are
connecting the slogans of the rally to this seeming collective
resolve. Apart from the normal ‘Sai Lamido’, there are now more
potent ones such as “Ba canji”, “Sai ya coma”. These slogans are
suggestive of how a revolution can routinize itself. Under the
late Rimi, the dominant slogan of the progressive PRP was “canji
dole”. After assuming power, the slogan now is “Ba canji”. Why
is this so?
Lamido raises the hands of Ahmed Mahmud as Deputy
One way of
explaining this is to look at what the Lamido leadership has
done to Jigawa
State or the psyche of the
average Jigawa person in the last four years. From the
officially recognized poorest state in the federation in
December 2006, the Lamido leadership has taken the state to
where the World Bank could declare it as the best state to do
business in
Nigeria
in the year 2009. The DFID has thumbed up educational reform.
Key Nigerian leaders, from the Sultan to OBJ, IBB, Atiku
Abubakar, General Aliyu Gusau, Speaker Bankole Dimeji, Gov
Bukola Saraki and many others have said he is phenomenal in
performance. The Jigawa man or woman is proud of his or her
state again. The state no longer owes NECO and WAEC arrears of
the examination fees of her students for which reasons their
certificates were usually withheld.
In other words,
Lamido’s greatest achievement is the reification of Jigawa. To
reify means to make concrete. Before him, Jigawa was a fantasy,
about which the world was given the impression that its internet
revolution had reached a level where the citizens and dwellers
could order their menu on the internet, using a remote control.
In reality, there was no internet infrastructure on the ground.
There was actually no functional state, much less an internet
revolution. In the name of decentralization, ministries and
government departments were distributed to remote areas of the
state. Overwhelmed with confronting the challenges of
governance, the then governor, Alhaji Saminu Turaki, fled into
virtual self-exile in Singapore. This
was the situation from 1999 to May 29th, 2011.
In contrast to
these years of waste and grand deceit, Jigawa today is united
and positioned as a key player in Nigerian politics. The elite
have been united under one umbrella over and above localisms.
They now speak with one symbolic voice. Its modernisation under
Lamido’s governorship has been astounding. All the furniture,
vehicles and buildings in almost every government institution
today is brand new. All schools have been rehabilitated or
re-built or expanded. Money is provided for and released as and
when due.
Since 2007, there
has never been a dull moment in government. It is one big event
or another in which everyone is a key participant, from the
political party to the bureaucracy to the traditional authority,
the Ulama and the masses. It is in the same vein that one can
talk of big time visitors, from outsiders such as African Union
and ECOWAS Chairman to General Gowon, Obasanjo, the Sultan, NASS
leadership and other Nigerian political leaders.
The focus on the
poor has been comprehensive. Before May 29th, 2007,
Nigeria
did not have a social welfare policy with legal backing. Social
Welfarism was mainly the generosity of rich individuals or
dictators. In compliance with the proclamation of the Lamido
government that
the ideological background of the leadership of his new
government would be on the antecedent of Democratic Humanism as
defined and epitomized by its chief exponent, Mallam Aminu Kano,
as “the only ideological framework by which this government can
satisfy the yearnings of the vast majority of our people whom
poverty and misery have reduced to conditions unworthy of human
beings”, the policy of a monthly stipend of N7000 has
been in place. Instructively, one of the PDP leaders said at the
flag off that the physically challenged persons in Jigawa State
had prayed and Gov Lamido
had won ahead of the impending election. This kind of statements
cannot be dismissed because Heaven listens to the poor in spirit.
But beyond the
physically challenged persons are the numerous beneficiaries
from the programme of capital injection to rural livelihood,
something considered by common consensus to be more systematic
and dignifying than the extinct policy of throwing money at
people for the strongest of them to grab what he or she can. And
the leadership at that time will smile to himself in obvious
satisfaction and walk away.
In place of that
order came the Lamido order of massive infusion of funds into
schools, health, road development and, above all, the
construction of a state capital from the scratch. When Dimeji
Bankole, the Speaker of the House of Representatives visited
Jigawa in 2009, he said the state had the smoothest road network
in Nigeria. When Atiku Abubakar visited
in October 2010, he said, among others, that “as we moved around
both now and in my last visit here on May 29th, I
have seen wonders. We are really surprised about the
performance. I asked him what magic he did because it is as if
spirit came here to do the job, not a human being”.
Atiku Abubakar’s
point is critical. Jigawa gets, on the average, the sum of N3. 4
billion every month from the federation account. Out of this, it
pays a wage bill of more than half the sum. It is what remains
thereafter that is sunk into delivering development. So, Atiku’s
reference to a spirit is metaphorically apt.
Sule Lamido has
been criticized as exercising a strong, dictatorial grip on
Jigawa
State. With the attendance
at the rally on Tuesday, Jigawa people appear to be saying that
if his leadership since May 2007 is dictatorship, then it is the
good type of dictatorship, a dictatorship that has delivered
development, a developmental dictatorship. Is it not surprising
that at a time there is violent conflicts everywhere, there has
been none in Jigawa? That is because the man on top, the
dictator, if you like, takes his job seriously.
Hadejia is the
Special Assistant to Gov Lamido on Students’ Matters
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