Senator Hadejia said Nigeria can leapfrog to success
In an interview with our Correspondent, Wednesday in Abuja, Senator Hadejia Hassan Ibrahim, Senator representing Jigawa North East senatorial district in the upper chamber, has said the Nigeria can leapfrog to success.
Excerpts
What is your view on insurgency in the north east?
Insurgency and insecurity shouldn’t be looked at from that perspective yes a lot of things are happening in the northern part of the country but it essentially affects everybody. Every time there is a bomb, the victim might not necessarily be from that geopolitical area. When there is kidnapping, the kidnappers don’t know north and south and have no religious affiliation. They do what they like to achieve their aim. It is very unfortunate everybody is doing something; from setting up paramilitary agencies at the state level, this govt has donated 200 patrol vehicles to the security agencies, some governors are sitting down to negotiate with the terrorist we are trying everything.
What is important is for us to just like the senate president said, may be to convey security summit where we can invite not just service chief but reach out to people who have had similar issues all over the world, like United States and some of our neighbouring countries. We need to sit down collectively and see how we can deal with insecurity.I believe we need to change our security architecture we are responding by saving victims and providing aids. We need to be proactive, to spend more in order to prevent these things before they happen. Like in USA, they just observed the anniversary of 9, 11 when the most fundamental act of terrorism took place on the American soil. From that time till now there has been no issue of such whatsoever, apart from their own case of domestic insecurity issues. It not that people have not tried to they have set up a preventive architecture; using intelligence, technology to stop these things.
Apart from changing our security architecture, we also need to invest heavily on technology. Basic architecture in security is CCTV anywhere you go. We need to look for preventive security and need to look at technology and need to do what everybody that had this problem is doing and has to resolve it now.
Apart from insurgency, there is also the problem of the number of out of school children in the north. What is the way out?
The way out is to declare the state of emergency in that sector. If we have like 11m children that are out of school. What is the status of the 16m that are in school right now? We have intervention,; Universal Basic Education Fund, building classroom. In the north we have a teacher crisis. If you combimned the teacher gap in the north, we are talking about 5000 teachers. What is the essence of bringing children from the street and putting them in classes where there is no teacher? The whole essence of school is to learn something. We have the facility, do we have the capacity? We need to start thinking out of the box, again technology. Is it possible for one or two teachers to teach difference two or more classes at the same time? We have the infrastructure; we have 3g, 2g in every local govt that was not there before. When the fed govt started sch feeding, the enrolment increased. We have 3g, 4g in every state and the cost of these things have come down. All over the world they have used technology to develop a level playing field in education. We need go through the processes they went through. If Brazilian used 10yrs to develop their own we can leapfrog by asking them deploy that technology in our nation.
Jigawa State was known for ICT development when you were the Deputy Governor. What really happened?
There was no continuity, Jigawa blazed the trail in ICT. In 1999 to 2007 we got the first ISP licenses from Nigeria Communication Commission NCC to provide internet GSM lincence forn NCC before MTN Vmobile we have fastest internet connection in west Africa. We were doing these then because of education and health. We wanted to have situation whereby we can link up our some of our schools like they are doing in Senegal. One teacher could sit down and teach two, three classes at the same time. We set up galaxy for the purposes of distant learning and over time the federal government took over galalxy without giving Jagawa any compensation and the new government that came in abandoned most of these things. We had e’formatic in collaboration with the Singaporean IT institutes. We were offering diploma and masters’ dergree in computer. If had continued in that direction, Jigawa would not be relying on federation account. Jigawa would have been an IT hub. I still have that passion, I have nine ICT centers in my entire constituency, and that has brought access to youths. There is need for continuity, if a government takes over, it should look at what good for the people and continue with it.
What do you think should be done on the ssue of aid?
The aid that was given to IDPs in form of relief materials, drugs is their core mandate of the donors. The IDPs are not there by choice, they are ther becos thet had to be there. People are benefiting from their situation. There is also a problem of demand and supply situation. If you look at the content of the motion we are sponsoring, we are not accusing anybody. We are only saying that there should be a systematic way of receiving and distributing these aids. There should be a dedicated agencies and not NEMA, just for the north east situation, populated with expertise on drug and material that will ensure that aids gets to the targeted people. For instance, in polio vaccination, there is a monitoring measure put in place to monitor the vaccination processes. Also when transparency is introduced, it is a key way of accountability.
