Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa State has challenged the United Nations system to deeply and courageously consider completely new and absolutely transformative categories, approaches and models, saying that the reformism that characterized the steps of the United Nations in matters of poverty eradication in Africa has exhausted its potentials and it is time to go frontal and transformative.

In a Keynote Address to the opening of Zone ‘D’ Top Policy Makers’ meeting of UNICEF’s in Dutse, Monday, Governor Lamido said he had cause to make this point on the floor of the UN itself and will make it again “that there is no greater threat to international peace and security as the unspeakable level of poverty and deprivation in many of the poor countries of the world today, most of them in Africa, South of the Sahara”.

When contrasted with the prosperity and affluence observable in the Western world, Lamido said, that level of poverty should be unacceptable to any one with any sense of fairness and equity. The governor insisted that whatever is the explanation for the contrasting realities, the challenge is how to mitigate it in such a way as to nip in the bud the transfer of the sense of righteous indignation and desperation into misdirected aggression, whether open or closed, Hot or Cold Wars between Northern and Southern hemisphere.

This is why he said that the security of the poor areas of the world should be very primary to the club of the rich world and it is agencies like UNICEF, WHO, World Food Programme, etc which reify the United Nations by taking holistic strategies rather than elitist, piecemeal models and practices that romanticize the problems.

He said he considered the argument to be such an important one because it is actually agencies of the UN like UNICEF that have the most meaning for the teeming poor, more than the UN Security Council or the UN General Assembly which are about big power politics and the worries of those who are already comfortable and fulfilled. While saying that his state of Jigawa might have benefited a lot already over the years, the governor, however, maintained that the problems were still there, ranging from infant and maternal mortality, access to qualitative basic education, gender inequality and the likes. “It is such that about three years ago, precisely 2007, this state was rated as having the highest infant and maternal mortality crisis in Nigeria. I don’t know what the current ratings are but whatever it is, there is a basis for me to call on you and your sister agencies of the UN to consider aggregating efforts and concentrating same in areas with peculiar and known cases of extreme poverty, particularly as it affects children, women and youths. Such a re-definition of your focus would be in the spirit of positive discrimination”, Lamido said.

His government, he said, has not been sitting down doing nothing, details of which he said he did not need to regale UNICEF top policy makers since anyone in doubt could easily check them out but that the challenges are beyond the capacity of individual government, much less a state government in Nigeria of today strapped to a meager monthly federal allocation, barely enough to pay staff salaries every month.

According to the governor, this is why he has been insisting that Jigawa is where all who are entrusted with the mandate of poverty reduction and eradication should converge to give effect to that mandate because “it is only by so doing that they can, jointly and severally, appreciate the enormity of the problems, the way they are connected to underdevelopment and how best to tackle them within the context of its implications for collective peace and security”.