We are making progress on all fronts.
In our boarding secondary schools, we have enhanced money for their
feeding so that they can get better quality food and we conducted an
experiment of taking out the feeding from the hands of the principals
and contracting it out to restaurants and caterers. This is because when
you give the principal the money, you are making the principal a cook.
He has to go and organise food from the market and that is not his job.
Using Queen Amina College as an example of where we have started, the
students are so happy because the quality of food has improved. We are
spending N180 per day on each student. We are even looking at improving
that if our finances increase.
We are taking steps to block loopholes
in salary payment by requesting every employee of the state to open an
account with a Deposit Money Bank so that they can have a Bank
Verification Number. You cannot cheat on the BVN and that is the final
thing that we are doing and I am very grateful to the public servants of
Kaduna State for their patience because they have gone through this
over and over again. After all this verification and the real staff have
been separated from the ghost workers, the people in account and
personnel will remove the real staff and put back the ghost workers
again just to cause confusion. It is a continuous battle because those
that created these ghost workers are beneficiaries of huge amounts of
money every month.
Why the persistence on the issue of salaries?
We have had issues with payment of
salaries not because we don’t have the money like other states, but
because of arrangement issues. People in the system have been
sabotaging our efforts. I don’t want to go into details but we have set
strategies to deal with that. Another area we have a big problem with,
is the local government payroll. Their records are much worse. We sorted
out the state’s much earlier because those people that complained that
they had not been paid salaries were mostly teachers and local
government employees.
We are focusing now on the local
government. We are doing a census of teachers so that we can know for
sure who our teachers are. We are deploying technology to know if the
teachers come to school or not. By God’s grace, before the end of the
year, many of these issues will be sorted out and things will begin to
work better. One thing that we know for sure is that we need to employ
more teachers.
Is there a time limit to the ongoing verification exercise of workers?
The reason why I don’t want to say when
it will end is practical. First of all, as an employer, you need to
check the numbers of your employees from time to time and it is normal.
It does not mean that after this verification exercise, we will stop or
not do it again. Our hope is that the verification will uncover all the
loopholes. We are dealing with crooks and staunch criminals that don’t
want to give up the revenue from the ghost workers. So as we block one
area of abuse, they open another.
Last week, the Trade Union
Congress and the Nigerian Labour Congress expressed worry over a form
that was designed by the state government asking workers whether they
intend to be members of the unions or not. Why did you decide to make
unionism optional in Kaduna State?
When we came into office, I wasn’t paid
for three months. When I finally got an alert of three months’ salary, I
asked a very simple question, ‘Thank you for the pay, but where is my
payslip, since it is normal to have a payslip that will show you your
basic salary and allowances, deductions for tax and any loan and so on?’
It took about three to four months before the Accountant General could
organise our payslips. Thus, because of the absence of payslips, if the
money they paid a worker last month was higher or lower than that of
this month, then there was no explanation for it and there would be
problems.
A worker complained that N2,000 was
deducted as union dues from his salary. Imagine if all workers had such
complaints; we have 87,000 employees in the state and local governments.
It is a lot of money when you multiply N2000 by 87,000; you will have
almost N170m. We called the unions and asked why the deduction and they
told us that it was automatic. In fact, I asked why the government
should be collecting check-off dues for trade unions? Do we charge them
fee for collections? Thus we asked the Attorney General to go and check
the law and give us an opinion. She came back and said it was compulsory
for every employer to deduct union dues and remit to the union; as was
the law. But she went on to say that the membership of the trade union
was not automatic but voluntary. We then invited the trade unions and
informed them that we would not be deducting the money of our staff
until we know those who were members of the union and those that were
not.
Personally, I would support trade
unions. However, the law is clear; you have to legally declare that you
are a member before we can deduct your money. That was how our argument
with the TUC and the NLC started.
There is always a need to have a
boundary between the union and the government. These are some of the
things we are battling with. It is not that we are against the unions,
but we are just doing the right thing. The unions are very supportive of
us. Throughout the verification exercise, they stood by us and we
appreciate that but that does not mean we should do what is unlawful or
what is wrong. We met with them when they complained about this. They
said the law made membership of the union compulsory. We asked them to
write us and quote the section of the law that said that and they never
came back. I think when they checked, they discovered that the Attorney
General was right.
This is the basis on which we said that
in the final verification exercise, we would have a box and ask workers
to tick the box if they were members of any trade union or not.
After we printed the forms, the unions
sent in their representatives who asked why we did not make it a
negative question. Something like, ‘tick the box if you don’t want to be
a member of trade union.’ I would have been happy to do it but we had
already printed a hundred thousand forms and they had cost us a few
millions. My point is that we try to accommodate everybody in the
framework of the law.
How do issues get political and ethnic colouration in your state?
This is something I find both disturbing
and disappointing. In any argument and situation, if you have your
facts and you are right, you don’t need to refer to religion. Religion
doesn’t win arguments for you. What I have found in life is that the
moment a person introduces religion in any situation, I know they are
wrong because if you are right, have facts and can justify your
position, why bring God into it? God will judge us on the day of
judgment. People only revert to religion and ethnicity when they have
run out of convincing arguments. What I find in Kaduna State is that
people can bring religion into everything. I think more than any state
in Nigeria, Kaduna state has suffered more in terms of religious and
ethnic divisions and that should be a lesson for us but what I found out
is that the elite have one weapon and that is religion and it is sad.
But, unfortunately for them they have not studied me. If anyone has
studied my career at the FCT, they would know that playing the religious
card with me will fail all the time, because the moment you play that
card, I know you are an adversary that needs to be put down and I will
not look back until I am done with you.
One of your policies that
has generated a lot of controversy is the religious preaching bill. What
does the government want to achieve when it becomes law and how are you
going to tackle the anxiety that it has generated among the people?
Kaduna State, more than any state in
Nigeria, if you take out the Yobe, Borno and Adamawa axis, which
suffered from Boko Haram insurgency, has suffered the most from death
and destruction of property due to misuse and abuse of religion. More
people have been killed in Kaduna from the words that people have said.
And if you go back in history to when the Maitasine incident happened;
he was a Cameroonian that came to Nigeria and started preaching. The
Emir of Kano had him deported back to Cameroon. After that, he managed
to smuggle himself back again and continued preaching. He was preaching a
version of Islam that was intolerant, a version that called other
Muslims pagans and so on. But in spite of what he was preaching, he
acquired followers and we all know what happened. Military operation had
to be mounted to flush them out. Those that escaped from the Maitasine
crisis moved to Borno State and started the Kalakato sect, which again
led to many deaths and destruction in the early 1990s. All these came
from people that were not trained in religious matters, people that woke
up and started preaching and acquiring followers and inevitably their
sects grew in large numbers to threaten communities and there were
clashes.
That was also how Muhammed Yusuf
started. He was a student of Sheik Jaafar Adam in Kano. They fell out
because Jaafar felt that some of the views he was expressing were
extreme and intolerant. He went and started his own sect and we all know
what happened and we are still dealing with it.
Thus, when you have such things
happening in your country, I think as leaders, we have to sit down and
examine ourselves and the society and see what we can do to prevent it.
In my opinion, it is the lack of
regulation of religion that led to all these circles of death and
destruction. Just recently, we had the Shi’ite problem in Zaria,
following a similar pattern.
I believe that before you start
preaching in any religion, you should have gone through a system of
education, training and some kind of certification. Even those that deal
with the physical life get certified, let alone those that deal with
the spiritual life. We initiated this bill from the Kaduna State
Security Council, based on reports of new sects emerging in Kaduna
State.
Are there recent cases?
There is one around Makarfi called Gausiyya, they do their Zuhr
prayer around 11am, different from other Muslims. This is how this
thing starts and if you don’t resolve it quickly, it grows into
something else.
A woman in Makarfi said Prophet Muhammad
(SAW) was speaking to her and sick people started going to her for
their healing. The husband of this woman was busy collecting N1,000 as
consultancy fee before people could see his wife. We had to take steps
to end that movement because before you know it, people would start
coming from far and wide and this woman would become our next problem.
It was the report of two or three of
these that compelled us in the security council to ask the question,
whether or not there was a law that regulates preaching. Then we were
told there was a law; since 1984 after the Maitasine problems, the
administration passed the law. It was subsequently amended several
times to increase the fine and the imprisonment term. This is a living
problem and we know it. Christian priests, the ones I know, go to
seminary and spend so many years there, study under a more experienced
Reverend to learn what to say and what not to say.
Religious leaders don’t preach hatred;
they preach peace, tolerance and love. But today in my religion of
Islam, anybody can wake up and start a sect; there is no control. In
those days, from Islamiyya School, if you chose that line, you needed to
study more books. After that, you would go to the East (Borno area) for
more studies and training. Then from there, you would go to a mosque
and begin to call people to prayer before you become an imam in any
mosque. Before you became an imam of a Friday mosque, the community must
agree that you were well learned and competent. But now, everyone can
build a mosque, put up loudspeakers, call himself an imam and start
disturbing people at night.
A priest that has gone through thorough
teachings and training would not go and ask people to cause trouble and
kill each other. They are trained men of God. In Christendom today, we
all know that some people would drink something overnight and wake up
the next day and claim they are apostles, that God had spoken to them.
You could not disproof that because you were not there with him and he
would start to collect followers. When he begins to preach hatred, what
can you do? Is it the society we want? This is the question. The logic
behind this law is to strengthen the 1984 laws so as to regulate and
ensure that those that are given the opportunity to preach at least know
what they are doing, they have a level of responsibility to develop the
society rather than divide it. This is our goal; we don’t have anything
against any religion or anybody.
What about freedom of religion?
Some people have argued that there is
freedom of religion, of course; Section 38 is very clear: We must not
have a state religion, every Nigerian is allowed to practise their faith
or even if they do not have any religion at all. However, those that
are quoting Section 38 of the constitution conveniently forget Section
45 which says that you can regulate any human right if it would affect
the right of others. You can practise your religion but you can’t do it
in a way that abuses the right of another. There is nothing in this law
that is not in conformity with the constitution, or there is nothing new
about it other than expanding the scope and after we sent the bill to
the House of Assembly, I saw an article that alerted us of what we did
not include: Blocking of federal highways, but that is in the Penal
Code. It is good to have put it there because every Friday you see most
mosques blocking roads. Why? We had to call them to a meeting to have a
system that police would be there to guard and also control the traffic.
In my opinion, this is a law that we need not only in Kaduna State but
almost all states in Nigeria and I want to assure you that, I just came
back from the National Economic Council meeting, and a handful of the
governors asked me to send them our own law because they thought they
also needed it in their state. Everybody is watching to see how we will
handle our own. We sent it to the state assembly in October 2015 because
some people are saying we sent it because of the Shi’ite problem. No!
It was the state assembly that kept on looking at it and saying this one
‘na hot potato’ until now. But, on a very serious note, we don’t have
any ulterior motive other than to put a framework that would ensure that
Kaduna State people live in peace with everyone practising their
religion and disallowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to come and say he
can preach.
What will be the major role of the government in this?
We do not regulate as such, we have
formed two committees that would issue the licence. It is not the
government that will issue the licence. It is a committee of Christian
umbrella bodies and Muslim umbrella bodies. We will just have an
inter-ministerial committee to be checking once in a while and be
keeping records because we want to know who is preaching here and who is
doing what there. For us, the reaction was just disproportionate and
many of the people that are talking about the law have never even read
it. If you read that law, it is very short; it is 16 sections. I tell
people who disagree with the bill to read it and tell me what they don’t
like about it. Don’t tell me you don’t like the entire law because we
know we have a problem and I am the governor and I need a solution.
Don’t say the solution is not to have the law; we need the law but tell
me what you don’t like, then we can discuss it. We want to find a
solution that brings peace. We are not fixed in our position, what we
are fixed about is that Kaduna State people must live in peace and
everyone must be allowed to practise their religion without hindrance.
We took an oath of office to do that. Apart from that, every other thing
can be discussed. Are you telling me it is okay for someone to put up
speakers in the night and start making a noise, be it Islam or
Christianity, disturbing people? Is that okay? Which chapter in the two
holy books says that Jesus or Muhammad (SAW) did that. Are we not trying
to copy them? Are they not the perfections of both our religions? Jesus
said, ‘Give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.’
Government is the Caesar.
We have informed the Christian
Association of Nigeria and the Jama’atu Nasril Islam that if they have
problems with any section, if there is anything to be done, and if they
don’t want the government to be involved, we will remove it, but they
must regulate.
What is your take on the
assumption by some in the state that hold that the bill is aimed at
stopping the practice of Christianity and Islam in the state?
I have not seen anyone talking about
Islam actually. Most of the people that say I would die, as if I would
not die, are people who call themselves Christian clergy. Of course, I
will die. If that apostle is truly an apostle, he should mention the day
I will die. There is nothing in that law that prevents or infringes the
practice of religion. It seeks to ensure that those that preach
religion are qualified, trained and certified by their peers to do it.
And some sections of the media have made it as if the law was drafted
against Christianity. It is most irresponsible and I have nothing to say
except to leave the matter to God.
