Full Speech Of Dr. Umar Ardo As He Emerges As SDP’s Governorship Candidate In Adamawa

THE RESCUE AGENDA FOR ADAMAWA STATE

BY

Umar Ardo, Ph.D

BEING AN ACCEPTANCE TEXT AS NOMINATED FLAGBEARER TO CONTEST THE GOVERNORSHIP OF ADAMAWA STATE ON THE PLATFORM OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, YOLA, MONDAY, 30^TH MAY, 2022

1. Introduction

I would like to first and foremost thank most sincerely each and every participant to this historic occasion for the honour done me personally and done to my great political party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), by your esteem attendance of this ceremony. I thank my fellow members and leaders of the SDP who in the first place gave me the opportunity; I also thank on behalf of my fellow candidates at the legislative arm who are in this race with me, our great delegates who endorsed us as their candidates; I thank the Resident Electoral Commissioner of Adamawa State and members of the INEC team who took out their precious time to supervise this  great event; I thank the leadership of IPAC for its solidarity presence here; and most importantly I thank my fellow great indigenes of Adamawa state to whom I will soon submit myself for their valuable votes of confidence to lead this potentially great state. To all of you, please accept my hearty salutations.

As you now all witnessed, I have just been entrusted with the governorship candidacy of our party. But I must quickly say that this honour done me is also coming with enormous responsibilities to win the governorship office and to effectively discharge the duties thereto upon victory. It is not by any means an easy task. Changing society for the better has all through history been a tedious and difficult mission. But the challenge must be taken, knowing that with sincere leadership, clear path and committed resolve society can always change for good. We have seen this happen in several climes across the world. I believe we can do it here too. From the mass of talented, energetic and patriotic Adamawa indigenes, young and old, at home and abroad, I am confident of taking up this challenge and build the team to achieve our developmental goals. Hence, with full gratitude to God Almighty, I humbly accept the nomination and pray that we succeed in the task ahead.

2. The Key Issues

Like most of Nigeria, our state is facing visible developmental challenges, expressed by severe economic insecurity and extreme poverty, illiteracy and ignorance, hunger and deprivation, diseases and epidemics, communal distrusts and violence, banditry and kidnappings, insurgency and institutional collapse, etc. This terrible state of affairs is basically as a result of governmental failure. All through the years, on account of poor, corrupt, inept and poor leaderships, successive governments have failed to optimize our potentials to develop our society, in spite of our enormous human and material resources.

Thus, the reality of life in Adamawa state today is that, beyond the general horrible state of insecurity to lives and property, most of our people are living in abject poverty. Many go to bed on empty stomachs. A large number of parents stay awake late into the night thinking of how to feed their families the next day; how to pay the children’s school fees already due; how to settle the landlord their housing rents. Many also are frightened by the mere thought of illness either of themselves or members of their families for reason that they cannot afford to pay hospital bills. For most of our people illness is a ticket to early death. Today, all over the state, people die prematurely simply because of poor and unaffordable health care delivery system!

For most of our people, electricity and portable water remain unaffordable luxuries. Children drop out of schools because their parents cannot afford to pay their school fees; many even go without school altogether. Graduates and school leavers roam the streets unemployed and without jobs. All over our communities youths have gone wayward, left their homes, turned to thuggery, gone into crime and drugs, insurgency, banditry and kidnapping, sent to jail or killed while society watch helplessly. People, like Jibril Timdore whose pregnant wife and four kids were slain in Anambra, and Alhaji Alfa Binyeri whose son was slain after even paying ransom to bandits, become victims of crimes and criminals without hope of ever getting justice. Workers are paid salaries and emoluments that cannot meet their basic monthly needs. Civil servants, teachers, journalists, nurses, judges, judicial staff, laborers, etc., who served the state creditably and honestly, yet their benefits cannot afford them decent and respectable life after retirement.

What all this means is that life for most citizens of our state is simply a daily misery. How can we then not have high rates of crimes in corruption, revolts, violence, banditry, kidnappings, insurgency, ‘Yan shila, communal conflicts, etc.? Adamawa state therefore needs to be rescued from this endemic failure syndrome. And this is what the SDP team has come to offer the state – rescuing our people!

Let me therefore crave your indulgence to use this occasion to outline our rescue plan for the state. Suffice it to say that the entire agenda is premised on organizing and channelling the huge reservoir of talents, skills and assets that abound in the state to harness the massive solid and agricultural reserves of our ecology to conquer the basic developmental needs of our entire people by means of sincere, honest and enlightened leadership built on rule of law, justice, equity and fairness to all. And until we do that, our people and upcoming children would continue languishing in illiteracy, in poverty, in conflict and in misery. Any regime that cannot do that for its citizens has no business being in office. And with all due respect, the present government in the state has failed to not just solve these problems but over the years even aggravated them through poor and wrong policy options and choices, huge debt load, corruption and incompetence.

3. Our Vision

Our vision for Adamawa state is fundamentally grounded on the principles of African values of honesty and of being our brothers’ keepers. Because our state is a land of potentially unlimited opportunities, endowed with human and material resources, optimal utilization of our God-given talents, skills, huge labour force and natural assets we can create  a knowledge-and-labour-based-society in which those who work hard succeed, the weak and old amongst us cared for; and, by respecting our differences, our diverse communities grow stronger and our prosperity, unity and success become assured, enthroning politics of inclusion, tolerance and compassion, under rule of law.

4. Our Mission

Our primary mission is to get everybody in the service of Adamawa State give the needed commitments essential for the realization of our vision – by example, by action and by sacrifice, and to remain throughout the article of faith in the conduct of all public service of the state.

5. Our Key Objectives

Our key objectives are:-

1. To Conquer Hunger – ensuring that every Adamawa indigene in the state, male and female, young and old, will have enough quality food to eat and not ever go hungry;
2. To Conquer Disease – ensuring that every Adamawa indigene in the state, male and female, young and old, will have access to proper Medicare for all ailments;
3. To Conquer Illiteracy and Ignorance – ensuring that every Adamawa school-age child in the state will have access to high-quality education, from primary to tertiary levels;
4. To Conquer Unemployment – ensuring that every indigene of the state, specifically our youths whose focal duty and responsibility will be to develop society with their intellect and physical strengths in innovation, invention, production, construction, management, etc., is gainfully or self-employed and contributing to the material development of society; and
5. To Conquer Infrastructural deficit – ensuring the provision of basic public infrastructure such as portable water, schools, hospitals, electricity, roads, dams, railways, sanitation, forestation, etc.   

We plan to achieve these five key objectives through focusing on the following five priority programs;-

1. Creating wealth for the state and reducing poverty;
   1. Investing in Human development through capacity building;
   1. Providing security of life and property and stamping out crime;
   1. Providing Physical infrastructure and social services; and
   1. Instituting greater commitment to ethics, transparency and accountability in public service.

i. Creating Wealth for Adamawa

Given that Adamawa state has excellent vegetation, we plan to initiate large-scale state-sponsored Public-Private-Partnership-Driven mechanized commercial farming, thorough harnessing and expanding the produce of our vast economic trees, exploring and exploiting our massive solid mineral deposits and facilitating for the establishments of several Agro-allied industries across the state to process these produces. These shall constitute key pivots in our wealth creation and distribution scheme and revenue generation and developmental drive.

In addition to the agro-allied sector, and the area of economic trees, such as Shea butter, locust beans, tangerines, gum Arabic, etc., animal husbandry shall also be a key priority. As established by research, most of our people depend on cattle, sheep, goats and pigs for meat, milk, cheese, hair, honey, butter, manure, incense, hides, skins and poultry product. In the villages, farmers use cattle bulls for carting, ploughing and hauling. Thousands of people wholly or partly make their livings from selling, milking, butchering, or transporting herds. Cattle and animal owners thus play an important role in the economy and nutrition of our communities. With its value-chain, it is potentially a multi-trillion naira industry. We will therefore establish ranches, prohibit open grazing that has been the source of communal conflicts in the state, and facilitate the establishment of wide range of animal feeds industries and water treatment plants to develop animal-related industrial base in the state. This will cover all types of animal – cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry, etc. This way, beyond creating wealth through animal husbandry and its value chain, we would also be halting the perennial poverty-induced crimes and insecurity, and end conflicts between farmers and herders, thus entrenching peaceful coexistence in our communities.

ii. Human Development

Our commitment to sustainable human capacity development is premised on the reality that today’s world is essentially knowledge based and driven, and will remain increasingly so in time to come. This then calls for a holistic fight on illiteracy and ignorance by investing heavily in education, in research and technology, in expanding access to schools, re-introduction of mass literacy programs, training and retraining of our professionals and bureaucrats. We will also evolve range of policies and methods that will train our people, male and female, to be enterprising self-entrepreneurs; our educated youths into skilled pools of engineers, architects, accountants, ITCs to stimulate creativity and innovation in the skills and talents of our mass populace into large producers, consumers and service providers.

iii. Security for Adamawa

Our vision recognizes that a safe, secure and peaceful atmosphere is indispensable for the attainment of its goals. As shown above, most of our security problems are clearly a product of negative socio-economic circumstances. We will therefore adopt a two pronged multi-spectrum strategy to address our security challenges drawing from experience garnered from on-going and previous efforts. On the one hand, we will systematically tackle the sociological root causes of crime and other security challenges which include unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, real and perceived neglect and marginalization, through our developmental programs as conceived in our priorities outlined above. On the other hand, working closely with the Federal Government, our first strategy will be complemented with efforts to upgrade the professional capacity of our national security operatives and institutions through a deliberate program of training, equipping and enhancing motivation of national security agencies in the state. In this regard, the welfare and logistics needs of our security forces in the state will receive particular attention as incentives to greater commitment to professionalism. We will also intensify the manning of our international borders to guard against the infiltration into our state of elements with criminal tendencies from other countries. We will equally examine the possibility of enacting an Edict that will involve our Traditional, Community and Religious Leaders in the security architecture of the state. 

iv. Physical Infrastructure and Social Services

Our key priorities in this regard are:-

1. Set up a panel to comprehensively assess the level and extent of destructions of lives and property wrecked on our people during the Boko Haram invasions of the state with a view to compensating our people of their losses;  
2. Reconstructing destroyed infrastructure and constructing others for economic and social growth;
3. Providing portable water, effective Health Care Delivery Scheme and power supply to our communities;
4. Providing free and compulsory primary to tertiary education to every school-age child, and rejuvenate adult-education;
5. Examine the feasibility of constructing internal railway lines within the state to stimulate and enhance rapid economic development,  quick transformation and modernization of our communities;
6. Generating gainful employment for our populace in agriculture, industry, construction, solid minerals and technology; and
7. Establishing functional Micro-credit Banks to advance Micro-lending to the poor.

v. Transparency and Accountability

We can only achieve these goals with commitment, transparency and full accountability by all government functionaries. We shall therefore put all government policies and programs at the public domain for scrutiny, and strengthen the financial regulations mechanism and strict compliance with laid down due process in the execution of government business. While we will strive to work closely with anti-corruption agencies, we are however going to lead by example. We will endeavour to build and promote honesty in our polity and see government funds and property as sacred trusts in our care for which we are accountable. We will not steal a single kobo from state treasury, and we will not allow any body to do so. We shall also endeavour to recover all stolen public monies from government coffers. All workers’ emoluments – salaries, allowances, pensions and any other entitlements – shall be paid as and when due. In addition, we will review upwards the wages of our civil servants to raise the earnings power of our workers and thus discourage the propensity to steal and be corrupt. This way, we will make the era of free-for-all thievery of public funds a thing of the past. We will review our pension policy towards evolving a Contributory Pension Scheme. We will allow Local Government Councils their full autonomy, with their full statutory financial allocations. We will abolish the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs which has been used by successive state governments to siphon their federal allocations. We will instead create a Local Government Bureau made up of a nominee from each Local Government responsible for monitoring, evaluating and reporting all Local Government activities. We will equally review the positions and functions of Development Areas with a view to assigning them definite and specific roles in the state’s developmental scheme.

6. Achieving Objectives:Our Modus Operendi

Our vision, mission and objectives outlined above can only be achieved by means of ethical orientation that inculcates guiding principles and values in our people, and by systemic innovation and practical approach to issues.

1. Guiding Principles and Values

Every public servant in the state (be they elective, appointive or bureaucratic) will be guided by the following three-key principles:-

1. Creating opportunity for all indigenes;
2. Demanding responsibility from every indigene; and
3. Forging strong and virile communal spirit among all indigenes.

To attain this, every public servant must subscribe to the following three-key values:-

1. Sincerity of purpose;
2. Clarity of goal; and
3. Dedication to duty.

ii. Systemic Innovation and Practical Approach

This technique in achieving our objectives will be premised on meticulous planning and organizing. To this end:-

1. The solution to each and every problem of the state shall be amply dependent on innovation and creativity, and not necessarily on convention. Every person entrusted with responsibility will be expected to come forth with innovative and creative skills and ideas in the resolution of the given issue at hand;
2. Every Adamawa indigene shall be registered and given an identity. We shall adopt GridCode as State Addressing Scheme by which every inch of land in the state is measured, calculated and given a code address. This way, not only the existence of every indigene, their addresses and potentials (including their biometrics and DNAs) is known, but so also the extent and rates of our landscape and its mineral contents. Once this data is generated, then by it the value of the state is already raised by at least 1/4 off the ground. Planning, organizing and providing social services thus become easy and simplified;
3. Going concurrently with the identity scheme will be biometric automation of the state work force in the service of government, and skilled and unskilled labour force reservoir. This will give the exact statistics of the labour force, skilled and unskilled, at the disposal of the state to plan where and how to put to use every available labour – to build the schools, roads, railways, dams, industrial parks, plant economic trees, etc. thereby creating value out of every talent, skill and physical energy in the state. This shall enhance the utilization of our vast talents, skills and physical energies in such a manner that no person in the state is redundant and no area of human endevour necessary for economic and social progress of our communities is left untouched. This way every able-bodied person will be contributing to the improvement of the state and also earning income from his/her inputs;
4. To facilitate the promotion of such strong economy we need to rescue the ecology. The rate at which desert encroachment is ravaging our state is alarming, and no viable economy, least of all agro-allied based economy, can be developed and sustained under such a condition. Hence, in addition to the planting of economic trees, we will also embark on a massive tree-planting initiative to push back the encroaching desert in a synchronized reforestation program. Every indigene of voting age in the state will be required to plant and nurture at least two trees around his or her domains. A Saturday will be officially set aside every month for this purpose. Only the sick or 70 years and above will be exempted by choice. Every public servant in the state will be expected to have at least one tree in addition to the compulsory two required of all indigenes. Incentives will also be given to any person with more than two trees. Any child below voting age who plants and nurtures two trees or more will be rewarded with a price, the details of which will be determined after due assessments. Of course the law prohibiting cutting down of trees will be firmly enforced, while making available adequate alternatives of cooking fuel for all households in the state. Adamawa will be returned to its natural green ecosystem; and
5. In order to maximize our advantage in the agricultural sector and turn our zone into agronomic hub of the country, we intend to initiate the formation of Agricultural Community of Benue Valley States (ACOBEVAS) comprising Adamawa, Gombe, Taraba, Benue, Nasarawa and Kogi states.  Indeed, the ecology of these six states is most conducive for farming, fishing and animal husbandry. The objective is to cooperate by putting the strengths, skills, lands, labour and resources of member states together and develop the Benue Valley region into an agricultural base, and list our state (and zone) among the wealthy states of the federation.

7. Conclusion

Unarguably, a thorough implementation of the mission and key priorities above will raise the standard of living of our people and enhance their material wellbeing. With this, a standard in governance is created and a pace in development is set for the state. Thenceforth, our people will not ever accept less. We promise to create this standard and set this pace. Henceforth, everything we do in my public life will be about applying these visions, values, goals and objectives. I believe this is the path Adamawa must take as we forge ahead into the 21^st century within a united, indivisible and indissoluble Federal Republic of Nigeria. And this is the path and standard we intend to achieve for our state. If we are to survive and grow in this highly competitive world then we must stand up and seriously work for our interest and that of our children.

May God Almighty bless our efforts, bless the Social Democratic Party, bless Adamawa State and bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Thank you for your kind attention.