By Nasir Dambatta
“Our vision is to make Kaduna the Leading Economic Hub in the North. We want to create a business cluster that will drive competition in the Northern Region” – Gov Uba Sani
It is now glaring that
Kaduna State’s Governor, Uba Sani, has become an exemplary silver-lining in rekindling Nigeria’s economic revival hopes and aspirations. It is now on record that he has smartly taken ten (10) actions that no Nigerian governor under the current dispensation has taken yet.
Let us start from the number-one. By signing into law, the first-ever Executive Order for saving over 2 million poor people of the State, especially rural folks from the pangs of poverty and hardship, he has set a unique example. Similarly, rural renewal as a development mantra has always been associated with the Kaduna Governor
Number two? He is also the first Northwest Governor to launch the Social Registre programme to ensure the dividends of democracy go round in his domain. Long before now, economic experts have lamented the rate at which successive Nigerian governments have initiated policies that tended to exclude the vast majority of the populace from access to important amenities. The Social Registre was hailed as a springboard for giving a new lease of life to the socio-economic fortunes of citizens who have long been sidelined, not just in Kaduna State but Nigeria as a whole.
Number three is his effective and efficient use inclusiveness as a matter of policy. Quite recently, Senator Uba Sani has revealed that in the coming days, over 4,000 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will access N4.2 billion intervention funds. Others, already dentified by the Kaduna State Government, including vulnerable persons who have been included in the ongoing financial inclusion programme will also benefit from the N4.2billion palliative, which is meant to ease the pains of fuel subsidy removal and rising inflation.
Senator Uba Sani’s Kaduna is, therefore, leading in both feasible and practical policies exclusively for the vulnerable, underserved people, making it easier for them to reap from the financial services sector
“We have been able to organize about 4,200 SMEs in Kaduna State and in the next one week we have decided to support them with palliatives worth about N4.2billion, which will also go directly to vulnerable households and some small businesses that we have captured”, the governor reiterated in a recent national television interview.
Number four is the intervention that saw 1.5 million people being keyed into the financial sector in the aftermath of final endorsement of the Executive Order on Financial Inclusion in the State.
Is the government single-handedly networking this intervention? No, he revealed that the initiative was actually a joint effort by stakeholders, namely the organized labour, market women,
people living with disabilities; small-holder farmers, religious and community leaders.
Number six is getting the Labour Unions to remain supportive of the administration’s economic policies and programmes and it has been quite helpful. This also means the governor runs a truly open government.
Number seven? Kaduna has remained one State in the Northwest that has always given the citizens, cutting across gender, religious and cultural affinities the opportunity to make input in its budget estimates.
Number eight: To further strengthen the ligament of economic security, the administration gave N22Billion to agriculture. Significantly, this is the first of its kind in the entire history of Kaduna, mainly because it came directly from the people themselves.
Number nine is the first of its kind in Nigeria. And that is he latest policy of operation crush poverty, popularly known as “A Kori Talauci”, an economic intervention strategy, pioneered by the current administration in Kaduna and cannot be found anywhere in Nigeria.
Number ten is yet another first-of-its kind action that came in the heels of Unveiling his cabinet. It would be recalled that
seven months ago, while swearing-in 14 commissioners that would form his new cabinet, following their successful screening by the State House of Assembly, the governor announced plans to set up a Security Trust Fund.
Indeed, he explained that arrangements had already reached advanced stage for the establishment of a Trust Fund for the poor and vulnerable in the State, even as a committee to guide the entire process was about to be set up.
Clearly, these are policies and programmes that can be found only in Kaduna State and nowhere else in Nigeria.
