by Tony Akowe

Darius Dickson Ishaku, an architect and Governor
of Taraba State, was elected on the platform of the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He has the
ambition of turning the fortunes of the state
around despite the lean resources available in
what he termed a rescue agenda. In this interview
with Tony Akowe, he speaks on his efforts to
deliver dividends of democracy to the people of
the state and lots more.


PEACE and stability is a prerequisite for any
development. Taraba State used to be one of the
states with lots of crisis. How did you solve this
problem to ensure the peace that in the state?
It is right that I inherited a state with crisis in
different facets. There was war virtually
everywhere. There was inter-tribal war, religious
war, those based on sentiments and political crisis.
I had to initiate policies that will bring about peace.
What I did was to reach out to all the different
people. I reached out to the traditional leaders,
visited stakeholders, community leaders, talked to
political leaders and became aggressive in
preaching peace. I even gave some examples of
what peace will bring for us and what lack of it has
denied us. I reached out to the religious leaders
and thank God that they all keyed in and reached
out aggressively and helped me gravely in
preaching the message of peace to the people. We
made sure that anywhere we found breakdown of
law and order, we take a decisive action against
those involved. By the grace of God, we started
eliminating them gradually and today, I can tell you
that we have a relative calm in the state and peace
has returned and development is beginning to
spring up. I must tell you that I inherited a very
poor civil service in the state. We are completely
reorganizing it and retraining them because they’re
the engine room of governance. But what I
inherited was terribly poor. One thing I discovered
is that a lot of people believe that they are engaged
in government to collect salaries and not to work.
During your campaign, you promised the people
that you were coming to rescue the state with what
you called the rescue agenda. How far have you
gone in implementing that agenda?
The rescue agenda is on course and we thank God
for the opportunity to serve our people. We came
up with what I called the green book which
stipulates the rescue agenda we have. The agenda
is to attack all areas of the state. However, because
of the lack of resources, we had to prioritise so
that we can concentrate on certain areas of health,
agriculture and education. We hope to work on
these areas for two years before shifting to other
areas depending on the resources available.
However, that does not mean that we cannot
intercede in other areas needing quick attention
such as infrastructure, roads, water. We will attack
these areas depending on the seriousness of the
need. But we have started in the area of health
because our health system has seriously decayed. I
did not meet any functional hospital except the
Specialist Hospital in Jalingo. That Specialist
Hospital didn’t even have equipment to diagnose
and treat people. Fortunately, we made it
functional. But in other parts of the state, there are
no functional hospitals. So, once somebody is sick
even for a simple ailment, they have to rush him to
Jalingo and I think that is a very bad situation. I
decided to take one hospital per zone. They are all
located in the three senatorial districts and we are
hoping that by December, work will start on them.
We’ve refurbished the old tea factory, removed the
obsolete machines and replaced them with brand
new ones and right now, it is working very well.
Like many other states, in what area do you think
that Taraba State has comparative advantage that
you intend to use to your advantage?
Taraba is blessed. In agriculture, I can boast of
feeding the whole country with rice. We have a
very huge rice project in Gashok. As I am talking to
you right now, we would have been eating that
rice, but for the problem we had with the investor
and his American partner. The foreign partner
moved out and has refused to come back despite
my intervention and the Nigerian investor is
looking for another partner to join hands and
continue the project. That is a very huge rice farm
lying in the Benue valley. We are working very hard
and I am sure that before the end of this year, we
should be able to resolve all the obstacles in that
area. Taraba can also comfortably supply the
whole country with sugar. We are working
assiduously on that and has given a company
about 10,000 hectare of land, but we are yet to
agree on the modalities because the perception of
the company is different from our thinking. They
want 100 percent mechanized farming with no
benefit for our people, but I disagree completely
with that. That has stalled the whole project for
about nine months now. But we are getting to the
end of the disagreement and they have calmed
down and we think that should take off before the
end of December. But the problem with sugar is
that it takes three years to plant and get matured
before you have enough to feed the plant. But we
are going on with that. Corn is another area where
we have advantages if you go to areas like Baisa,
you will plant corn for about four times a year and
they don’t even need fertilizers there. That is the
one we are exploiting now to bring in investors. All
these are giant farms with multinationals that are
coming. I am hoping that by next year, we should
be able to produce things like corn and rice and
selling them. Sugar may be a little bit delayed. The
other front which we will aggressively pursue by
next year is coffee. We have the monopoly of tea
and coffee because they are some of the plant that
can only be grown on the highland. I want to
pursue coffee aggressively and I hope to be in
Kenya by the end of November because I
understand that they have a very good model. In
October, I was in India and went to virtually all the
tea farms in there to see what they are doing
correctly that we are not doing.

Money from oil has fallen drastically and states are
finding it difficult to function. You have very
ambitious plans which require huge resources.
Where will you get the money from?
In fact, people have asked me this same question
over and over again. Where do you get the
resources to do even what you have done in one
year? I do very simple planning and allotment of
resources. We have very lean resources and what
that means is that we must manage it well. When I
became governor, I discovered that we have a lot
of leakages, particularly in salaries. One person
could be collecting about 40 people’s salaries. We
have been able to reduce these leakages
substantially. I wish I could eliminate it completely.
That has helped me free money that I am now
investing in infrastructure and other areas. The
other thing is I do not believe that government has
any business in business because all the
companies set up by the state government in the
past have all gone under; including the tea factory I
am talking to you about. It is my intention to
privatize most of it since it is working well now so
that the private sector can take over the place
while we use the funds we have for other things.
What we are doing right now is attracting investors
from the private sector as many as possible.
Maybe the state government will hold about 20
percent shares.

Tourism is a money spinner across the globe and
Taraba state is believed to have one of the greatest
tourist potentials in the country. What is the
government doing to harness this?
We are not only rich in tourism, but also in mineral
resources because we have one of the country’s
biggest deposits of mineral resources in the
country. We even have far more mineral resources
than tourism and agriculture. We have a lot of
potentials in tourism especially in the Mambilla
Plateau where the weather is temperate. It has a
lot of beautiful sceneries that are still in their
natural state. We have the largest park in the
country, the Gamshaka Gumti Park with lots of wild
animals that are as good, if not better than that of
Kenya. But the problem is that our tourism is not
developed. We are working towards that, but the
problem we had when I came in was that the place
was always being invaded by armed robbers. So,
you can imagine tourists going into areas where
armed robbers are daily terrorizing people. We
had to move in the military and I am happy to note
that it has gone down. Tourism takes a lot of time
and resources to develop and a lot of things have
to come together. One is a functional airport. You
cannot have an airport anywhere in the Mambilla.
The only place you might is in Maisamari because
we are over 2000 meters above sea level. As I
speak with you now, the road to Gembu is virtually
cut off at Likitaba and it is a federal road. The
federal government is telling us not to intervene.
So, the people who want to build dam can’t even go
on the existing road.

We are aware that Mambilla Hydropower project is
one huge project being located in the state by the
federal government which is expected to open up
the state. What are your expectations from this
project?
Mambilla Hydropower project is going to be the
biggest power project in Africa and not just in
Nigeria because it is going to have 3,050
megawatts which is more than the power we are
generating now. So, we are going to almost double
the power that Nigeria is producing now. It is going
to take between five to seven years to complete. I
am happy that Mr. President has taken the bold
step of awarding this contract and I am working
assiduously to clear the encumbrances which are
the act of getting to the site. As I speak to you now,
the federal government has done nothing in terms
of remuneration and compensation for the people
and getting the site cleared of encumbrances. Right
now, I can’t take you to the site of the project
because the access is not there. There is no road
to where the dam will be built. People are still
living in the valley of the dam as we speak. There is
a Bible College right where the dam is going to be
built. Will you just come and start the dam and
clear the people? The people must be sensitized
and made aware of what is coming. I am going to
resettle 150,000 people in five different local
governments. The area of this dam is bigger than
the area of Lagos State. When people talk about the
dam, they talk as if you will just drive there and
start work. It is not done like that; processes of
compensation takes a long time, the same thing
with sensitization.

Due to this talk about the Mambilla project and
opening up the state, the first thing I did when I
came on board was to open the Taraba airport.
Before you cannot access Jalingo by flight, but
right now, you have Overland on Mondays,
Wednesday and Fridays and we are hoping that by
December, it will be a daily flight. All the engineers
and contractors that will come to the state should
have easy access. It is one hour flight from Abuja
to Jalingo and it takes you six hours from Jalingo to
go up the mountain. The airport is supposed to be
a cargo airport and so, we are looking at
expanding it so that from there, we can export
agricultural produce. If I package beef, it needs to
be in the market immediately. The same applies to
fruits and other agricultural produce. So, the first
step to opening up the state was to reopen the
airport which is working now.
Your party, the PDP is in crisis and this seems to
have defied any solution so far. What is your take
on this?

The crisis in the PDP is sponsored from outside.
But we are working hard to make sure we end the
crisis. Nigerians have approached us that we have
to solve this problem in the PDP because you need
a vibrant opposition in any democracy; a
democracy that does not have a strong opposition
is running for tyranny and dictatorship. Whether
you believe it or not, we have Presidents in Africa
that have stayed in office for 40, 50 years because
they don’t have vibrant opposition. You must, as a
necessity have a vibrant opposition. We copied the
American constitution, but left out the vital parts.
As a governor, the police is not under me. That
doesn’t make sense. In the US, they have the
federal, state and local police. If we want to copy,
we should have copied everything. If I had my own
police, I would have gotten that peace in the state
far earlier than now.


That brings us to the issue of restructuring
A lot of people are talking about restructuring. We
will get there, but first, you have to have vibrant
parties. The restructuring should start from the
parties. I was in the University of Minnesota when
Obama was campaigning, in lauding the present
Vice President and Clinton. After their
presentation, the Professor asked me what I
thought and I told him that they are all equally
matched to be President. But out of the four
people I brought out, Obama beat all the rules and
became President and Biden became Vice
President. After eight years, Mrs. Clinton is coming
up and she could have easily become president. I
am trying to show you that there was a shifting
from the party up to the level of Presidential
candidate when they had their best. That is what
we should be learning in Nigeria. By the time you
have a governorship candidate, you should ensure
that he is the best candidate so that the people
going for the final selection process should be the
best to rule that state and the country and any of
them should be the best to rule. So, it is not only
the country that should be restructured.

The
parties also should be restructured because if they
have the system already in place, it will help the
country to come out with better people. Nigeria is
blessed with intelligent people, but getting there is
like passing through the eye of the needle. So, the
good people don’t want to bother themselves
because they know they won’t get there. I want to
assure you that the problem in the PDP will soon
be a thing of the past. I will also assure you that
the PDP as it is now will not be the PDP that used
to be because the PDP has learnt her lessons. The
PDP has suffered and the PDP that will evolve will
be a better PDP and a party prone to serve the
country.
What is your relationship with the opposition in the
state?
We have opposition in the state. But if you ask me,
I will say they are bad opposition. They are not
opposition that criticise based on facts or based on
showing government better ways of doing things.


They are opposition for the mere fact that they
want to smear the names of people and insult
people for the sake of it. Most of the time, I don’t
bother to listen to them. For example, the APC
chairman once came out criticising government
because of somebody who was removed from
office, saying the man was removed for voting APC.
How would the Head of Service know who voted
for which party? This was a corrupt school
principal who was found guilty by a panel that
recommended his dismissal, but the Head of
Service pleaded that he be demoted instead and he
was demoted and sent to a smaller school. They
just went on air without verifying anything. These
are the kind of opposition we have in the state. I
will say that we have a lot to learn about politics in
this country. I am governor because I am desirous
of making a change in my state and I believe that in
the last one year, I have made the change and I am
working harder to make more changes so that in
years to come, people will say there was Darius
Ishaku who came, saw and conquered.
Governorship is not given by allocation, but how
you convince the people to vote for you.
The activities of herdsmen have been a major
problem across the country including your state.
How are you dealing with this situation?
I solved my problem in a simple manner. The
indigenous cattle herders are not the problem. The
problem is the invading herdsmen. The indigenous
cattle herders have lived with our people in a
peaceful manner. Our people ask them to come to
their farm during the dry season to eat the left
over, excrete there to provide the natural manure
for the soil and go away during the rainy season
while the farmer takes over his farm. But the
invading herdsmen are the ones coming with AK47
killing all the people in the farm and take over their
farm. But I have sensitized our people, appealed to
them and we have tried to address the problem of
cattle that strayed into people’s farms without
getting into war. I have told them that they don’t
have to kill somebody if your farm produce is
being eaten up. In some cases, we compensate
people so that we do not go to war with one
another and where we need to discipline people
for deliberately going into a farm and destroy it,
we do so. When people see that justice is being
done, they become calm. They go to war when they
see that justice is not being done and their right is
not being protected. We have had horrible
examples where invading herdsmen cleared over
100 people in Dore village. We managed it by
evacuating the people, give them relief materials
and arrest those we could arrest and punish them.

We also appeased them not to revenge. Justice has
to be on the front burner because once there is no
justice, you are inviting chaos. When the poor man
feels that his right has been denied him, what do
you want him to do, especially when you take away
his farm land?