Mutfwang: Plateau Remains Relatively Safer Than Most States In Nigeria

Governor, Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State, in this interview in Jos, the state capital, points to vivid achievements that can be credited to his government in the past two years. SerikiAdinoyi brings excerpts:

What is your assessment of the last two years of your administration in Plateau State?

First, I must place my gratitude to the people of Plateau state for the support and believing in our transformative leadership since we came into government in 2023.

We have restored hope and confidence in governance and we have brought inclusive development across all segments of the state without sentiment. We have also enjoyed a tremendous relationship with the media, and I want to thank you for your sense of patriotism, so far deployed. Some of the reportage have demonstrated that you are actually stakeholders to the Plateau project. The essence of the media is not to destroy, it’s to build, and therefore, what you report should add value to the state, being a critical contribution to our progress.

Let me go back memory lane; when we took over on May 29, 2023 we were not oblivious of the challenges we were going to confront. The first was of course, the issue of security. Those who have followed us would remember that we convened a security council meeting two days after we were sworn in, and to our chagrin we found that none had been held for close to a year.

We immediately swung into action, trying to appraise the security situation, and see how we can re-motivate the security agencies, and it’s unfortunate that the security challenge has not abated as we had hoped. But one thing we have done is that sometimes it’s difficult for people to appreciate what government has done when these challenges continue but, I assure you that we will not relent, we are reviewing our strategy to ensure lives and property are safeguarded in the state.

But I want you to know that if we hadn’t done the much we had done with the intelligence at our disposal, Plateau State would be a different place today. There are so many details we cannot unveil, but I’m glad to tell you that Plateau State is relatively safer than most states.

At the moment, we do not have any local government that is completely a no-go area unlike some states. What we have are very opportunistic attackers that come in, and then disappear. We don’t have a resident camp of bandits on the Plateau except situations that had arisen in Wase Local Government Area. But I’m glad to tell you that we’ve been able to push back and we’ve been able to substantially regain ground in Wase. That’s why today, the grazing reserve in Wase is available for investment.

What new strategies are you deploying to confront the security challenges?

We have continued to re-double our efforts to make sure that we stem this tide, and I’m sure that with the efforts, we are putting in place, we’re going to see significant improvements not too long from now. One thing I must say is that we brought Operation Rainbow back to the frontier of security operations. Today, there are people who are complaining about the operations of Operation Rainbow, and I believe that if Operation Rainbow was not functioning, they would not complain against it. But it has been a good compliment to the security agencies on ground, and going forward, we can only strengthen it and not take it out.

More than the issues of security which has beclouded the progress we have made, is that what we promised the people of Plateau State is leadership. We promised that we’re going to lead, we are not going to be political.

As a matter of fact, I used to tell people that I’m not a politician. I’m in politics, but I’m not a politician. I’m in politics because that is the only platform by which you can come into governance, in our country, and my aim is not just to be in office for the sake of it, but to be able to provide leadership that will take Plateau State to the level where we all dream it to be. A state where it’s economically buoyant, economically self-sufficient, in a state that can compete with other states in Nigeria, even beyond the shores of this country.

How would you say that your government has been different from what had been seen in the past?

Going by the leadership that we promised, we have brought hope to our people. We’ve brought hope that they can expect something tangible, that government and governance is not an avenue for wishful thinking or deceit, that governance is for the benefit of the people, and I think that if you ask me what our achievements are, one that I can readily point out is that we have brought hope back to the people of Plateau State.

Over the last two years, by the grace of God, we’ve done the much we could have done within the constraints of resources at our disposal. I recall that when we came in, we found a backlog of four and a half months of unpaid salaries, and what we did immediately was to rejig the state finances, and reach out to our creditors, and we were able to resolve the issue of unpaid salaries within a few months. I believe within the first two months, we were able to fix that situation, and I’ve often said it, that payment of salary is a duty; it’s a responsibility, and therefore we don’t count it as an achievement; we have only done what we were supposed to do. If all we were elected for, was to pay salaries, then I think it’s not worth it, anybody can do that.

But I’m glad that we’re able to stabilize that situation, and I’m also glad that when the issue of minimum wage came on board, we were among the states that was able to start the implementation, and so I believe that with the new minimum wage, our civil servants today will testify to you that the work environment has improved for them.

We met a situation where ministries, departments, and agencies were conducting a lot of government business outside government offices, and it was pathetic where our Permanent Secretaries were going to business centers to conduct business activities. But we’ve been able to give hope back to the service.

Some of them have not gone for any training for a couple of years before we came on board, and today, I believe that there’s a revival going on. We are not there yet, but there is work in progress. We have dealt into how to improve the lives of our people.

With the removal of fuel subsidy, what has your government done to alleviate the impact on the people?

One of the key policy decisions of the Federal Government when we came on board was the removal of the fuel subsidy, and of course, it left a gap in the standard of living in purchasing power of people and government, and what we did immediately was to see how we can ameliorate that situation, and that’s why we’ve made tremendous investments in the transport sector.

We decided to improve public transportation by subsidizing it. Instead of giving people palliatives, we thought that this kind of palliative would count. At the end of every month, an average user of our subsidized public transport was going save about N50,000 monthly, and for us, that is a very more transparent way of makiing more cash available to people because those savings can be deployed elsewhere.

And that’s why we also made sure that we worked on the railway system. Globally, the railway is one of the cheapest sources of transportation. We had to collaborate with the Nigerian Railway Corporation we had some feats, but I am glad that despite some of the challenges we’ve had in that sector we’ve been able to bring it back into use, and I am sure that in the last week or two people have been using the train service effectively.

An MOU was signed with the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria to be able to designate the Jos Airport as a Cargo International Airport, and therefore, in the next year, we’re going to be making investments to make sure that, that airport fits into that purpose so that from here it will become a regional hub for cargo aviation.

What is the secret of the visible improvement in infrastructure across the state despite other competing demands?

I’m glad to inform you that aside the ones you see in the state capital, there are more in the Local Government Areas. The Director of Press and Public Affairs can give you the details of all the road constructions going on in virtually every local government on the Plateau.

The interesting thing is that we are not awarding new contracts, particularly in the local governments. We are only trying to complete the well-thought-out projects under the last PDP government of our father, Da Jonah Jang. Most of those contracts were awarded during his era but were not followed through, and we believe that governance is a continuum.

There is no need to discriminate who started which project, as long as it’s for the benefit of the people of the state, and that’s why we’ve been able to mobilize most of those contractors to go back to site.

We are confident that, by the grace of God, between now and early next year, we are going to see tremendous impact in terms of the road infrastructure. We are looking at it from different angles. Some of it are from the World Bank projects we inherited. But we need to manage them well in order to get the desired impact.

What is the state of the state’s economy vis-à-vis the need to develop its agricultural sector?

Of course, we are looking at other sectors. We haven’t left them to lie fallow. But we are looking at how to improve the Plateau economy. We can’t talk about the economy without talking agriculture, which is the main economic driver for us. We discovered that we’ve been doing agriculture with just primitive sense.

Our agriculture is still at a very primitive subsistence level, and even though we know that we farm a lot, all the farming we’ve been doing is far below the capacity of what we should be doing. Therefore, we’ve gone about setting up the critical infrastructure for improvement, and advancement in agriculture.

We’ve reorganized the sector. One of the things we did was to split the ministry into two because we discovered that it’s such a large ministry; if you are dealing with crops and also dealing with livestock, it’s quite huge. We’ve been able to separate the two so that we can focus critically on them.

The thing is that God has blessed us so much that whether it is about crops or livestock, we have a natural advantage, and we want to take full advantage of that.

In the crop sector, we are doing a lot now to be able to improve our flagship agricultural product; the Irish potatoes. Now we have christened it Plateau Potatoes.

We have given ourselves two years to develop such capacity that will dominate that particular sector and make sure that we raise it to international standards. We are trying to fix it from the point of view of seedlings, to the farming method, to the harvest, to the storage, and the entire value chain around it.

You start from seedlings, and the seedlings we have in potatoes are 15 to 20 generation seedlings, and therefore, they are not of good quality. They can’t give you the good output, and to compound that, what you are doing is to harvest maybe three to four tons, you know, per hectare, when the global standard is a minimum of ten tons per hectare.

That’s why we had to also plead with the African Development Bank that had given us a facility to develop the tissue culture lab.

Those of you with a scientific mindset, you know, the value of a tissue culture lab. It’s important for the propagation of seeds, and that project was messed up before we came in. We’ve been able to secure a one year, addition from the African Development Bank, and I’m sure when we do it, it’s going to be a game changer.

But more than that, we are having international collaboration; the biggest seed company in Nigeria, in the world, Agrico of the Netherlands came to visit us and we are discussing collaboration, and so there’s every hope in that sector in order to be able to key into.

To become a major player into the crop sector, that’s why we set up the Plateau Commodities Marketing Company, last week, there was a launch of a similar project in Lagos state, you know, Lagos is bigger than us, but then they launched it with about N500 billion.

Now we are hoping that, with what we have started will eventually also become a key player so that we’re intervening in the market.

For storage, we are looking at how under one of the World Bank projects, RAAP, we can build markets in Shendam, Mangu, and Jingri. These as aggregation centers will ultimately dovetail into a bigger market that will become an international market of daily patronage on the Plateau, and so we are working on these strategies to be able to improve our economy.