MY BAUCHI LEGACIES - GOV. YUGUDA

A banker-turned politician, Alhaji Isa Yuguda, is the Governor of Bauchi State - a state famed for its tourist attractions. In this interview, the Governor, who is one of the prominent supporters of President Goodluck Jonathan in Northern Nigeria, describes how he is rebuilding the tourist potentials of Bauchi, his efforts in giving the state a modern look and responds to the political uprising that once challenged the unity of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the state. While giving a framework for financial management of public resources, he also articulates the reservations of Nigerian Governors on the controversial Sovereign Wealth Fund. Excerpts:

How far would you say you have gone 100 days into your second tenure as governor?

With gratitude to the Almighty Creator, I can say that we have continued to build on what we  started. We have completed some of our projects and have continued on those that we believe will take longer than four years especially the road constructions.

Also we have found time to do some stock taking and evaluate ourselves to see where we have gone wrong and where we need corrections and also in terms of manpower as to whether we have been able to put square pegs in square holes. We are appraising ourselves to know what things we have done right and what we have done wrong with a view to correcting them. So far, it's just a postmortem and then a continuation of those projects that have not been finished.

You know Bauchi is one of the biggest states in the country. In fact, one to three of the local governments have the size of some states in the country. In terms of population too they are very large but unfortunately they are very rural because these roads have not been able to penetrate them so I have to build them because those governors that came since the independence didn't do so.

Managing public finance
So everything depends on how you plan. Its better we get started and if it takes you to complete it in 10 years, it's better than abandoning it.

Considering the demands on maintaining security and the payment of the new National Minimum Wage, how are you able to carry out these?

Managing public finance is different from managing the balance sheet of a conglomerate because public financing is not about chasing profit but in the pursuit of the security of lives and property. It is the pursuit of fulfilling the promise you made to your people in terms of road construction, schools, quality education, quality healthcare, etc.

But, be as it may, it all boils down to planning because we have to sit down and plan so many scenarios as the manager; the best case scenario and then the worst case scenario and then the middle-of-the road scenario and then see how you can then align your project in such a way that at best, this is what you are going to achieve. That is, you key into what the Federal Government is going to budget and the benchmark for a barrel of oil and you know what percentage you normally get in terms of sharing formula.

If the Federal Government says its $40 per barrel, you know the expected revenue every month and then you can compute how much will come into your own purse. Based on that, you will also look at how much you are generating internally in terms of internally generated revenue.

In addition to that, there is another component because the budget equation as you know is that revenue is equal to capital plus recurrent expenditure. So, in budgeting, you are either budgeting for a balanced budget or you are budgeting for a deficit where you would have to borrow.

At the same time, I try as much as possible to cut costs and then also improve on my own revenue generation though it has not been very encouraging because the government can only tax somebody who earns income and not somebody who doesn't.

Meanwhile, we inherited a lot of battered infrastructure, in fact, comatose infrastructure. I am not saying this because I want to give my predecessors a bad name,  these are the realities and we should learn to say the truth. Only the truth can set Nigeria free from the problems we are in.

So we try to manage our cash flow because we inherited a lot of domestic debts; debts to unpaid contractors for road projects, and even some of the federal roads which the state funded.

So it's a question of proper cash flow management and knowing exactly what you want and my own prayer is that by the time I finish this tenure, at worst, I will not leave Bauchi with any debt and all the projects that I start, I must complete. That is why, for now, I have told my new team that no new projects. Even the local governments I tell them; 'manage your portfolio and projects'.

Ours was the first state in the country that was to pass the Procurement Law, and we have done (passed) the Fiscal Responsibility Law,  Debt Management Law and set up a debt management office. I have set up the anti-corruption body and I have anti-corruption units in all the ministries.

So, we are about to strengthen that unit now so that it will fully function as a law like the way EFCC functions, because we realize that corruption is one of the things that has continually eaten deep into the economy like a cancer. So with those things in place, we are very lucky and most of the development partners appreciate this and quite a number of them have come in to lend support because of some of these laws that we have in place especially the fiscal responsibility law.

The USAID has put in over N300m in the health sector, DFID, the same thing, the Canadian CIDA and many others. In fact, we have a lot of response in the health sector. Unless you get there, you will not be able to appreciate it. Only this year, USAID donated hospital items worth over N82m, so, you can see, any where they see transparency, they move there and render support.

What is your vision  for Bauchi by the time you would be leaving office in 2015?

There are some basic things, human needs that at least we are going to leave behind. One, we are going to leave behind a good educational system because we have almost rehabilitated 80 per cent of our secondary schools. We still have some of the primary schools that we inherited; some of the kids are still reading under trees but there is nothing we can do, the money is not there to finish everything at the same time but little by little, by the time we finish, we are building thousands of classrooms.

We are rehabilitating and building new ones. And we have a furniture company which I believe can compete with any furniture company in Nigeria today and I can even boast to say in the world. Today, they are producing 200 twin desks every day. So we want to have at least school environments where learning is conducive. We inherited a classroom of an average of 200-400 students within, when ordinarily, this shouldn't be. So we are reducing the numbers to thirty to forty.

Best primary schools
We have the best primary schools here in Nigeria. And when the vice president went to commission them, they had about 80 classrooms, all of them fully furnished with computer labs, clinic, small mini-market and the football pitch.

Those are the standards that we want to bring in almost all the schools to standardize them. There is no school today in Bauchi where a pupil does not have a text book in any of the core subjects.

We have already told the school managers that these textbooks are not for sale, in fact, they are customized with Bauchi State government logo. And we directed that they should be properly managed and secured so that generations after generations, class after class will make use of those textbooks until when you have some of the books edited.

We ordered laboratory equipment for 82 secondary schools. There was none that had biology, physics or chemistry labs in the state. Now we are just at the verge of opening a university; a Bauchi state university. We have a team of 9 consulting professors working on it. The buildings are finished and everything is completed. It's just about the recruitment of the key staff, the vice chancellor, registrar and other principal officers.

Apart from that, we have succeeded in getting a teaching hospital established in Bauchi. We donated our specialist hospital to the federal government and it is now a teaching hospital. And then we made a very strong case with the Federal Ministry of Education to establish a faculty of medicine because we are the only zone that has only one teaching hospital and we are about the biggest zone, in terms of land mass and even in terms of population but we have only one teaching hospital.

For someone who is in Taraba, who is bordering Obudu cattle ranch, it will take him about 4 or 5 days to get to Maiduguri. So we felt that, Bauchi being a central location, should have a teaching hospital and the federal government gladly granted the approval and took over the teaching hospital and it is one of the five centres of excellence in the country today and the federal government has deployed a lot of staff and equipment to standardize the hospital.

This was a so called specialist hospital that never had a generating set or even water, you won't believe it. As I'm talking now, you may think that I am just creating stories but there was no water in that hospital. We had to sink boreholes and also try to get the water mains that was blocked as a result of road construction.

Biggest dialysis centre
So we had to upgrade that place and today, that hospital has the biggest dialysis centre in Nigeria because we have about fourteen dialysis machines and they are dialyzing patients 24 hours. We built and commissioned it and we have the latest machines. Today, many people from all over the north come to Bauchi for dialysis. So, we have that as a legacy that we are leaving behind, the university recruited 23 medical students last year.

This year we hope they will continue and now at least, those opportunities that the zone used to lack in terms of getting chances for their students to be admitted in the catchment areas to read medicine, at least now we have spaces for them to read medicine.

We have just made provision for the construction of an international airport and we have advertised for the construction of the airport and the specialist hospital. For the 200 bed specialist hospital, we have already borrowed the money and it has been approved by the House of Assembly.

We have already borrowed the money for the building of the airport and we have also started repaying the money, it is going to last for the next three years. So we are smoothing our cash flow and are making sure that we cut or cloth according to our size.

So the money for the airport is there and we are not going to start something that we will not finish. In the airport, we are going to integrate a fire-fighting school. You will be shocked to know that in Nigeria, there is no school that trains firefighters.

The only centre that trained fire fighters was in Bauchi but the facilities were allowed to decay so the whole of Nigeria, if you want to train fire fighters you have to go to Cameroun, Ghana, etc. so we intend to integrate the firefighting school and we have already told NCAA and they were very excited.

We know that once we finish, Nigeria will have no problem with domestic or bush firefighting as we will train not only aviation firefighters.

Bauchi is a tourist state; we have a park that has different kinds of animals, very close to Bauchi; Sumo Park. The animals which were donated to Bauchi by the Namibian government have multiplied in hundreds, we have giraffes and zebras and they are multiplying because that environment is so friendly to them. We have the Yankari Games Reserve. I was there recently and we are completing the entire rehabilitation of the holiday resort.

I inherited the resort from my predecessor and he did borrow money to start the project but he did not go beyond DPC lintel level. Now we have completed almost everything.

We have the animals and the warm springs to be seen. It is a very nice place and the facilities are state of the art. There is 24 hours power, and I would want to partner with the private sector; and I am talking with some of our entrepreneurs who will come and take over the park because it is not all about Bauchi getting the revenue; it is for Nigeria because if we invest in tourism, it alone can bring a lot of revenue.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are living examples of these. So we are a tourist haven and tourism alone can help us generate ten times what oil generates for us. So we want to complete the specialist hospital and I assure you its going to be one of the best in Nigeria. I go out, see things and intend to replicate what I have seen. It is a 200 bed hospital; I don't want to bite more than I can chew. I will have all the facilities that you can think of.

How far would you say you have gone 100 days into your second tenure as governor?

With gratitude to the Almighty Creator, I can say that we have continued to build on what we  started. We have completed some of our projects and have continued on those that we believe will take longer than four years especially the road constructions.

Also we have found time to do some stock taking and evaluate ourselves to see where we have gone wrong and where we need corrections and also in terms of manpower as to whether we have been able to put square pegs in square holes. We are appraising ourselves to know what things we have done right and what we have done wrong with a view to correcting them. So far, it's just a postmortem and then a continuation of those projects that have not been finished.

You know Bauchi is one of the biggest states in the country. In fact, one to three of the local governments have the size of some states in the country. In terms of population too they are very large but unfortunately they are very rural because these roads have not been able to penetrate them so I have to build them because those governors that came since the independence didn't do so.

Managing public finance
So everything depends on how you plan. Its better we get started and if it takes you to complete it in 10 years, it's better than abandoning it.

Considering the demands on maintaining security and the payment of the new National Minimum Wage, how are you able to carry out these?

Managing public finance is different from managing the balance sheet of a conglomerate because public financing is not about chasing profit but in the pursuit of the security of lives and property. It is the pursuit of fulfilling the promise you made to your people in terms of road construction, schools, quality education, quality healthcare, etc.

But, be as it may, it all boils down to planning because we have to sit down and plan so many scenarios as the manager; the best case scenario and then the worst case scenario and then the middle-of-the road scenario and then see how you can then align your project in such a way that at best, this is what you are going to achieve.

That is, you key into what the Federal Government is going to budget and the benchmark for a barrel of oil and you know what percentage you normally get in terms of sharing formula.

If the Federal Government says its $40 per barrel, you know the expected revenue every month and then you can compute how much will come into your own purse. Based on that, you will also look at how much you are generating internally in terms of internally generated revenue.

In addition to that, there is another component because the budget equation as you know is that revenue is equal to capital plus recurrent expenditure. So, in budgeting, you are either budgeting for a balanced budget or you are budge

ting for a deficit where you would have to borrow.

At the same time, I try as much as possible to cut costs and then also improve on my own revenue generation though it has not been very encouraging because the government can only tax somebody who earns income and not somebody who doesn't.

Meanwhile, we inherited a lot of battered infrastructure, in fact, comatose infrastructure. I am not saying this because I want to give my predecessors a bad name,  these are the realities and we should learn to say the truth. Only the truth can set Nigeria free from the problems we are in.

So we try to manage our cash flow because we inherited a lot of domestic debts; debts to unpaid contractors for road projects, and even some of the federal roads which the state funded.

So it's a question of proper cash flow management and knowing exactly what you want and my own prayer is that by the time I finish this tenure, at worst, I will not leave Bauchi with any debt and all the projects that I start, I must complete. That is why, for now, I have told my new team that no new projects. Even the local governments I tell them; 'manage your portfolio and projects'.

Ours was the first state in the country that was to pass the Procurement Law, and we have done (passed) the Fiscal Responsibility Law,  Debt Management Law and set up a debt management office. I have set up the anti-corruption body and I have anti-corruption units in all the ministries.

So, we are about to strengthen that unit now so that it will fully function as a law like the way EFCC functions, because we realize that corruption is one of the things that has continually eaten deep into the economy like a cancer.

So with those things in place, we are very lucky and most of the development partners appreciate this and quite a number of them have come in to lend support because of some of these laws that we have in place especially the fiscal responsibility law.

The USAID has put in over N300m in the health sector, DFID, the same thing, the Canadian CIDA and many others. In fact, we have a lot of response in the health sector. Unless you get there, you will not be able to appreciate it. Only this year, USAID donated hospital items worth over N82m, so, you can see, any where they see transparency, they move there and render support.

What is your vision  for Bauchi by the time you would be leaving office in 2015?

There are some basic things, human needs that at least we are going to leave behind. One, we are going to leave behind a good educational system because we have almost rehabilitated 80 per cent of our secondary schools.

We still have some of the primary schools that we inherited; some of the kids are still reading under trees but there is nothing we can do, the money is not there to finish everything at the same time but little by little, by the time we finish, we are building thousands of classrooms. We are rehabilitating and building new ones.

And we have a furniture company which I believe can compete with any furniture company in Nigeria today and I can even boast to say in the world. Today, they are producing 200 twin desks every day. So we want to have at least school environments where learning is conducive. We inherited a classroom of an average of 200-400 students within, when ordinarily, this shouldn't be. So we are reducing the numbers to thirty to forty.

Best primary schools
We have the best primary schools here in Nigeria. And when the vice president went to commission them, they had about 80 classrooms, all of them fully furnished with computer labs, clinic, small mini-market and the football pitch.

Those are the standards that we want to bring in almost all the schools to standardize them. There is no school today in Bauchi where a pupil does not have a text book in any of the core subjects.

We have already told the school managers that these textbooks are not for sale, in fact, they are customized with Bauchi State government logo. And we directed that they should be properly managed and secured so that generations after generations, class after class will make use of those textbooks until when you have some of the books edited.

We ordered laboratory equipment for 82 secondary schools. There was none that had biology, physics or chemistry labs in the state. Now we are just at the verge of opening a university; a Bauchi state university. We have a team of 9 consulting professors working on it. The buildings are finished and everything is completed. It's just about the recruitment of the key staff, the vice chancellor, registrar and other principal officers.

Apart from that, we have succeeded in getting a teaching hospital established in Bauchi. We donated our specialist hospital to the federal government and it is now a teaching hospital. And then we made a very strong case with the Federal Ministry of Education to establish a faculty of medicine because we are the only zone that has only one teaching hospital and we are about the biggest zone, in terms of land mass and even in terms of population but we have only one teaching hospital.

For someone who is in Taraba, who is bordering Obudu cattle ranch, it will take him about 4 or 5 days to get to Maiduguri. So we felt that, Bauchi being a central location, should have a teaching hospital and the federal government gladly granted the approval and took over the teaching hospital and it is one of the five centres of excellence in the country today and the federal government has deployed a lot of staff and equipment to standardize the hospital.

This was a so called specialist hospital that never had a generating set or even water, you won't believe it. As I'm talking now, you may think that I am just creating stories but there was no water in that hospital. We had to sink boreholes and also try to get the water mains that was blocked as a result of road construction.

Biggest dialysis centre
So we had to upgrade that place and today, that hospital has the biggest dialysis centre in Nigeria because we have about fourteen dialysis machines and they are dialyzing patients 24 hours. We built and commissioned it and we have the latest machines. Today, many people from all over the north come to Bauchi for dialysis. So, we have that as a legacy that we are leaving behind, the university recruited 23 medical students last year.

This year we hope they will continue and now at least, those opportunities that the zone used to lack in terms of getting chances for their students to be admitted in the catchment areas to read medicine, at least now we have spaces for them to read medicine.

We have just made provision for the construction of an international airport and we have advertised for the construction of the airport and the specialist hospital. For the 200 bed specialist hospital, we have already borrowed the money and it has been approved by the House of Assembly.

We have already borrowed the money for the building of the airport and we have also started repaying the money, it is going to last for the next three years. So we are smoothing our cash flow and are making sure that we cut or cloth according to our size.

So the money for the airport is there and we are not going to start something that we will not finish. In the airport, we are going to integrate a fire-fighting school. You will be shocked to know that in Nigeria, there is no school that trains firefighters.

The only centre that trained fire fighters was in Bauchi but the facilities were allowed to decay so the whole of Nigeria, if you want to train fire fighters you have to go to Cameroun, Ghana, etc. so we intend to integrate the firefighting school and we have already told NCAA and they were very excited.

We know that once we finish, Nigeria will have no problem with domestic or bush firefighting as we will train not only aviation firefighters.

Bauchi is a tourist state; we have a park that has different kinds of animals, very close to Bauchi; Sumo Park. The animals which were donated to Bauchi by the Namibian government have multiplied in hundreds, we have giraffes and zebras and they are multiplying because that environment is so friendly to them. We have the Yankari Games Reserve. I was there recently and we are completing the entire rehabilitation of the holiday resort.

I inherited the resort from my predecessor and he did borrow money to start the project but he did not go beyond DPC lintel level. Now we have completed almost everything.

We have the animals and the warm springs to be seen. It is a very nice place and the facilities are state of the art. There is 24 hours power, and I would want to partner with the private sector; and I am talking with some of our entrepreneurs who will come and take over the park because it is not all about Bauchi getting the revenue; it is for Nigeria because if we invest in tourism, it alone can bring a lot of revenue.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are living examples of these. So we are a tourist haven and tourism alone can help us generate ten times what oil generates for us. So we want to complete the specialist hospital and I assure you its going to be one of the best in Nigeria. I go out, see things and intend to replicate what I have seen. It is a 200 bed hospital; I don't want to bite more than I can chew. I will have all the facilities that you can think of.