Judiciary sides crooks against the innocent –el-Rufai, Kaduna gov

Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, in this interview on Channels TV Sunrise Daily, monitored by Linus Aleke, says the judiciary takes sides with alleged crooks against the innocent. The former Minister of Federal Capital Territory (FCT), also talks about other salient political issues

You are counting down on your exit on the winding up of your administration, does that mean you are looking forward to leaving office?

I am looking forward to handing over the burden to someone else, trying to get my life back, and spending more time with my family. I have young children, and they need my time I have a Ph.D. to complete also. I have been on the Ph.D. programme for a few years now, I need to focus on it and get it out of my way.

The APC presidential candidate said that you have to stay here and work with him, what happens to that arrangement?

We are still talking, you know that Bola Tinubu is the candidate of our party and we would do whatever we can not only to get him elected but also to make him succeed. I still believe that when Tinubu tells me what he wants me to do in his government, I will be able to recommend a much younger and more energetic person that can even do the job better than myself. My experiment in Kaduna has shown that if you empower young people and give them political backing, they can deliver incredible results. I don’t think that there is any job in government that we cannot get a younger person to do, but as I said, we are still talking with Tinubu. Nigeria is the only country whose passport I have and whatever I can do to make sure that our country is better, I will do it. But I am just saying that he can be presented with options.

Back to your stewardship, what kind of emotion are you dealing with now, having seen how you had performed over the years, bearing also in mind what people will say of you when you finally hand over to the new administration?

Frankly, I don’t think about that a lot. At this point, what I am concerned with is trying to get my team to focus and tidy up some of the things that we have started and ultimately trying to correct some of our mistakes, having seen so much in the last seven and half years. We would try to put in place frameworks and legislations that will ensure that the next administration does not spend the next two years trying to find out what we have found out in seven years. Luckily for us in Kaduna State, my successor I hope from our party is someone that had been in our government from the beginning. So, he understands our policy direction. But still, there are a few things that we learnt even within the last year. We discovered that either we did not get it quite right or we ignore the problem. We are trying to put those things in place. It is a very busy time for us we have decided in the state executive council to hold our weekly meetings almost every Monday until after the election, then we start the handover process because there is so much to do. I don’t think much about what we have achieved or what we did not or what people will think of our administration. We leave that for posterity and history. All I know is that we did the best that we can and we worked flat out in the past seven and half years. I do hope that what we have been able to do in many aspects of governance in the state will be sustained but that is all we can do. We can only do what we can do and move on and leave the rest for history and our successors.

When you talk about the things that you are just finding out, would you want to give an example?

One of the things that we just found out was that a lot was going on in certain key ministries that we didn’t know about. For instance, we buy books and laboratory equipment. These are things we need to buy every year. We found that in previous years, we had bought those books on paper but they were not delivered to the schools. The store people in the ministry of education just have the arrangement to do the paperwork to make it appear as if these books have been delivered but they are not, as well as medical equipment. How we found this out was that the Speaker of our State Assembly got one of his companies to bid for this contract, and when he won the bid. He encountered a problem along the line. The first problem was that the prices of the items in the market were higher than what he bided, this was due to the exchange rate because they are imported stuff. But when he went to complain to the appropriate authority in the state, they asked him not to worry that these things are never delivered. Let us just sign this, you will be paid and you settle us. At this point, he came to me and said that he does not understand this system. I didn’t lobby for this contract, we got it on merit. So, discovering such rot after five years was quite a shock and this is how governance is, many things are buried deep that you don’t just know because you are sitting at the top and many things are happening at the bottom. I just gave one example that is transactional but there are also, policy issues that we found that we have to do something about. There are many things like that that we are trying to resolve, for instance, one of the decisions we have taken is that our governorship candidate will begin to attend executive council meetings so that he gets to know everything that we are discussing. He sat in the first four years but he had been absent in the last four years because he is in the Senate. Senate does not sit on Monday so, I asked him to be attending executive council meetings so that he will see some of these things himself and learn from them.

That is an unfair advantage because there are also candidates of the opposition parties that may likely win the election, in the interest of the state, inviting all of them would have been the best, don’t you think so?

I owe no responsibility to the candidates of the opposition, my responsibility is to my party and the overall interest of the state. I believe that it is in the best interest of the state if my party wins the election. This opposition party spent 16 years doing unbelievable things that we have spent eight years trying to deconstruct and even when they are campaigning, they are still threatening that they will bring back the bad teachers that we fired, they will bring back the 390 district heads that we thought placed an unnecessary burden on the finances of local government. They have not learnt anything, what value are they going to get sitting in the council? Our political and governance ideologies are miles apart.

Because politics is more emotional than rational if the opposition wins on the above premise, will you allow them to sit in your council meetings to learn as well?

If another party is elected, I will not only invite the governor-elect but also the state chairman of that party to sit in our executive council meetings, so that we have a seamless transition. The interest of the state prevails but, this is how we look at things.

This systemic corruption you uncovered after five years in office is endemic and widespread, what in your thinking is the permanent solution to it?

The solution to it is very early in the game of governance … don’t assume that because many of us went to the school when these things worked, it is still working. Don’t assume that they work as they used to. This is why it is important to have younger people who are closer to how the world works now than some of us who went to school in the 60s and 70s and think that students get textbooks every year. In each academic year, we got books, pencils and other, but these things are not done anymore. So, you see them on the budget line, you propose to the state assembly, it is appropriated but the schools don’t get those things and the headmasters cannot speak out because it is their bosses at the Headquarters that do these funny things. So, we need to be up and doing, by paying a surprise visit to schools and asking them during the visit if they have books or if they had taken delivery of the items in the budget line for them. Do the same to hospitals and primary healthcare centres and ask the same questions. It took us several years before we figured out this corruption because I presume that a person is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. So, when you have that view about human nature, a lot can go wrong under your watch, and you are hardly ever aware. Don’t tell your protocol where you are headed just enter the car, and order them to drive behind you. It is the only way you can uncover these things through a surprise visit and taking steps to address them. The system is broken, and the public service system is broken and only works in an isolated island of performance. It is worrying and it is one of the things that tells some of us, that maybe our time is up.

Considering your passion for young people in leadership positions, one would have expected you to support a much younger person as your successor

Our governorship candidate is young, he is more than 10 years younger than me. We tried to bring up young people, and we looked at four people, I did not want my successor to be older than the mid-40s but at the end of the day, the person that we narrowed on and the deputy governor were the best when we carried out a survey. We surveyed the state four times. I did not just wake up one morning and just picked someone. We had four different surveys to test their acceptability and two of them consistently maintained 1st and second positions. And others including some younger people that we groomed just did not show up as they should. There are others that I would refer to as outsiders, people that were running Federal Government agencies, I consider them outsiders because they don’t know the change in policy direction that we pursued in the last four years. My goal was to ensure that we have a successor amongst the original APC Kaduna team of 2014 and we ended up with one.

You agree that age is a big factor in leadership, so Nigerians are not complaining about the age of the APC presidential candidate for nothing…

Look, instinctively, I would prefer to see younger people at all levels of leadership and we have tried to do that in Kaduna State. We have brought in young people and they have performed very well, few have disappointed as is normal. We brought in women, and they have also done very well, and few had disappointed, it is normal. At the national level, I would have preferred a younger person but the reality of Nigeria is that a younger person must also have the varied experience that will enable him to hold the country together. It is a complex society, it requires experience, and requires a track record of performance that may be a 50 year old cannot, or convince either the political class or the public that he has. So, I consider those in their 70s that are running for office now as transitional leaders. I hope that whoever, is the next president of Nigeria and I can say if Tinubu or when Tinubu wins because I am confident he will win. We would see a large collection of young people in the administration because Tinubu sees his role as that of a transitional leader. Fix some of the problems that we have but built a new leadership class. That is the only way because it is very difficult for 40 or 50 years old to convince Nigerians or even those of us in the political system that they have the experience to manage this country. It is a complex country and some of the people running, frankly are a joke as far as I am concerned. Every job looks easy from a distance but I have had the privilege of working with at least 3 presidents very closely and I have seen the demand of that office and what it is and people don’t just know. Even being Governor is tough but people don’t know, they think it is easy, people can only criticize from a distance, by saying you should have done this or done it this way but get them to do that then, they will begin to speak in tongues.

You said that the civil service is broken, what can be done to arrest it from further decline?
The country makes progress if it has visionary, and strong political leaders, but that alone will not lead to progress unless we have a functional public service. It doesn’t matter how good a president is, if the public service is broken, the president cannot succeed, and the same with the governor. I think one of the major priorities for any administration is to look at the structure of the public service and take a huge surgical operation on it to make it slim, effective, and competent. Right now, the federal bureaucracy is over bloated, they are over 800 ministries, departments, and agencies, the Orasanye report that recommended the merger of institutions has not been implemented. More have been added since then. There is no political will to face this issue.

We spent 60 to 70 per cent of our budget on recurrent expenditure, which, is consumed by the bureaucracy. Either the salaries or overhead of running the government and the attention that is not the way to develop. We must slim down the government and ensure that the best and brightest go into public service. The public service should not be a dumping ground for sons and daughters of those that are connected, sons and daughters of the elite. Going into public service now is no longer based on competitive examination where we pick the best and brightest. We now pick the worst and connected, and that has to change. The public service needs to be looked at, and the size, the quality should be addressed. Those who are unable to scale through certain levels at certain ages and years of service should be compelled to exit the service to create vacant for bright personnel to come in. The military is already doing that, we should do something like that in the public service. In addition to getting a good president, we must create for ourselves, a sound public service. We don’t have one now, it is part of the reason why corruption is so rampant and endemic in the system.

No more ‘Christmas’ in the village

What mechanism have you put in place in Kaduna to forestall future occurrences of this endemic corruption that your administration uncovered?

We have a whistle-blower law that we enacted in Kaduna State. We even have a witness protection programme, just to facilitate this and there are other things that we discovered early enough and corrected, because of the whistle-blower law that enables people to submit an anonymous petition of any wrongdoing anywhere in government. According to the public service rule operational in Nigeria, the anonymous petition should not be entertained. This is crazy, In Kaduna State, we have a law that says whether a petition is signed by a person or anonymous, we would investigate it and because of that, we found many cases of wrongdoing that we have corrected, disciplined the people involved, and dismissed many. We are currently prosecuting several others. We have passed anti-corruption laws in the state and created an anti-corruption office in the office of the attorney general. We did not create another agency like EFCC, we don’t need it. We just think that a unit in the attorney general’s office can look at things like that and they have done extremely well in tracking cases of corruption and dealing with them. This is where I believe that if we now do a corruption perception index that is sub-national, we would discover that corruption perception will be lower in Kaduna State because we have taken certain measures. We have made examples of people in the public service, we have sacked those diverting public funds to personal pockets, and we are prosecuting them. We have not convicted anybody because the judicial system is pathetic, it is too slow and it is often time, in my view on the side of the crooks rather than on the side of the government or the innocent. One of the biggest mistakes this country made was creating this national industrial court, which sees its duty as taking sides with the employee against the employer.

It is not always the employer that is wrong but the national industrial court always, 99 percent of the time rule against the employer and in favour of criminals, which the judicial system is slow to punish. There are people we sacked from Kaduna State Water Corporation in 2016 because they embezzled counterpart funding of multilateral development projects. We got a judgement from the national industrial court last week that one of the thieves should be reinstated because he was not given a written query, he got a verbal query they did not advance their mind to the fact that the man embezzled millions of naira. That was not their concern, their concern was that he did not get a written query under the public service rule. So, there is that problem, it is systemic and unless we stand as a country and say that this has to change, I am sorry Nigeria will just be struggling forever and ever or be a country of potential permanently.

Kaduna State is notorious security-wise, as bandits and terrorists attack in Birnin Gwari and other areas are commonplace, I will like to ask you, to what extent will you take responsibility for the security issues?

Look, I am the governor of the state and the people elected me to ensure that their lives and properties are safe and secure. So, to that extent, I take responsibility and I will do the best that I can but I must repeat for the avoidance of any doubt that I don’t control the police, I don’t control the Armed Forces of Nigeria and I don’t control the security agencies. What we do as state government is to provide logistics and support and supplement what they get from the federal government. For instance, when I came into office in 2015, we found out that the last time the police command in Kaduna State got overhead was in September 2014. They were not paid any overhead, so, we have to be running the police. You go to a police station and a DPO does not have a paper to write the complaint. So, we have to provide money from the state resources to cover that, does the federal government budget for that? Yes, it does. Does the money get to the divisions and the commands? They don’t. Is it my problem? Is it my responsibility? No, but as a governor, I have to make sure that this police station runs. We build police stations, we provide vehicles for them, and we have provided over 270 vehicles to security agencies twice. When we first came into office, and in 2018 and we are planning to do so again before we leave office. This is because these vehicles are used and they don’t last as long as they should. So, we provide logistics, we have a network of informants and we pay them money to give us information and we provide the information to the action agencies. But if I say that there is a bandit here, I am sure that there is a bandit camp here, and the military doesn’t go in or the Air Force does not bomb the camp or the police do not go in, what can I do? I cannot come out to say that the federal government is not doing what it should do but really, this is the problem. We are chief security officers in name but we have no control over the coercive forces or give them orders to do what they have to do. They have to get clearance from Abuja, that is why the buck stops at the President’s desk and then when the president gave them a deadline to get rid of these people, we saw a massive improvement. In the last three to four months, we saw incredible improvement everywhere in the state. In Birnin Gwari, and others have almost been cleared of bandits. We still have cases once in a while, but not what they used to be. There are three local governments now that we are having issues but the military, the police, and the Air Force have been doing an excellent job in the last four months. But that was only because the president said, you have to end this before the end of December. The president did not say that two years ago, it would have perhaps been a different case altogether. Yes, we feel bad, and we feel responsible but our hands are tied to a certain extent.

Kaduna State is heavily indebted, does that match the investment on the ground, bearing also in mind the humongous increment in Internally Generated Revenue?

The investment that we started in the last seven years totals about $4.3bn, much more than 2.8 and the results are there. Our focus is to bring in investors, create jobs, private sector good paying jobs for our young people and I think in that area, we have achieved our objectives and put the state on the right path, despite the challenges of insecurity. When we came into office, Kaduna State was the second most indebted state in the country as far as foreign debt is concerned. It was close to $300m. In our time we increased that by another $350m to $500m. We have to borrow because we took office when the country and the world are going through challenges of recession and the only way we can develop the infrastructure that we need to support our investment is to improve our schools and health systems, so, that people will be educated and healthy productive members of the society, is to borrow. But we borrowed a long-term from the World Bank. We borrowed at a very low-interest rate and we invested in the infrastructure needed to attract these investors which is why they keep coming despite the headlines and the security concerns. Anyone that visits Kaduna, the capital of the state, or visits Zaria and Kafachan, the three metropolitan centres of the state where more than 60 percent of the population live, will see the results of our investment. We believe that we have put the state on the right path to attract more investors. There is now a real estate boom in Kaduna, there are people that are relocating from Abuja to Kaduna to live here and work in Abuja by taking the train every morning. We believe that we have put the state on the right path. We did not borrow to consume, we did not borrow to pay salaries, and we didn’t borrow to run the government. We use our internally generated revenue, our revenue from the federation account, and this loan to develop the state and the development is very clear. We have put the state on a firm footing for the future.

Under APC the value of the naira in the foreign exchange market kissed the earth, and the amount for subsidy skyrocketed, why should Nigerians vote for your party in the coming elections?

Look, what you are seeing happening, whether it is a fuel subsidy, electricity subsidy, or foreign exchange subsidy, these subsidies have been with us for some time. The PDP also had that problem, it is just that we don’t talk about what they have done. So, it is a problem and the problem is not the APC government, I think the problem is Nigerians who are not willing to face the truth. What is the truth about petroleum? We have a queue, people are paying between N300/litre, in fact, up to N500/litre in parts of the country and they have to queue for hours to get it. Why? Because of this unsustainable and broken-down subsidy regime that we have chosen to maintain for the past 50 years. It has not worked, it is not an APC problem, it is a Nigerian problem because today, if president Buhari said, to remove subsidies, the NLC will be out of the street protesting, we had that under president Obasanjo’s administration, we had it two or three times, any time fuel price was slightly increased. We need a national conversation to tell each other the truth. How can we subsidy fuel by N6trn in a year while, our national education budget and federal, state, and local government are not up to N2trn? The national health budget, I am talking about recurrent now, is less than 2 trillion nairas. Which country spends three times what it spends on infrastructure subsidizing petrol? More than three times what it spends on education and health. It is a choice we have to make as a people, it is not about APC or anything. The fact that this fuel subsidy is not sustainable is the reason why all the presidential candidates had said that they will remove the subsidy. So, what are we waiting for, already the price is N300 to N500? It is a national conversation, not a partisan one.