Governor Ibrahim Geidam was elected deputy governor of Yobe State in 2007. In 2009, his boss, Senator Mamman Ali, died, paving the way for him as successor. In an interview with select journalists, he speaks on his challenges as governor, the Boko Haram crisis, among other issues. Abuja Bureau Chief, OKEY MUOGBO, was there. Excerpts:

The fortune of your party is dwindling nationwide and no serious measures appear to be on ground to revive it. This has led to speculations that you might be planning to dump the party for another one. How do you react to this?
Actually, many people believe that I have abandoned the party; that I am shifting to another party. I can assure you that I will be the last person to leave ANPP. I am not going anywhere; I am not going to any other party. If you see me leave ANPP for any other party, that means it is a collective decision, otherwise you will never hear that Alhaji Geidam has shifted base to another party. I am absolutely an ANPP man and I will continue to be so.

What was the motive behind the building of 200-bed hospital in Damaturu, the state capital?
The hospital has been completed. We have two options on how to put it into use. When we assumed office, we conceived the idea of building another hospital or expanding the existing one. I became governor in January 2009. The idea of the hospital was conceived by my boss (Senator Mamman Ali), who is now late. When I took over, I felt I should go ahead and complete it. Having completed it, we considered turning it into an ultra-modern hospital or making it a teaching hospital, that means that when the State University (Bukar Abba Ibrahim University) will introduce medicine, they will use it (as a teaching hospital). I will table it before the state executive council to discuss the matter with a view to converting it to a teaching hospital for the use of the university.

Your government is undertaking so many projects at the same time. How you been able to fund them when there is clear evidence that many state governments do not have enough money to even pay the salary of workers in their states?
We use our money from the Federation Accounts to execute the projects. It is a question of prudence. I want you to know that I am an accountant by profession. I was taught to be prudent. We have also been taught to do proper planning before embarking on projects. The little knowledge I got from (Accounting) from university is actually what is guiding me in becoming more prudent in the management of the scarce resources we have. I want you to realise that it is not only the statutory allocations we are receiving that we have utilised. From time to time, the Federal Government gives to each state some amount of money in the form of augmentation or sometimes, if there are savings from the Excess Crude Account, maybe on a quarterly basis or thereabout, we get money ranging from N2 to N3 billion. So, we plan for our projects in advance. Whenever we are told that such amount of money is coming to the state, we plan what to do with the money before it comes. This, we do, based on our existing budgeting provisions. We then allocate the money we are expecting from the Federation Account to these projects. The moment the money comes, we apply it to the projects. A few weeks ago, we sat at an EXCO meeting and awarded contracts valued at N20 billion. As I talk to you, we have paid our contactors and we do not owe them a kobo for all our ongoing projects. Any contractor who has any outstanding PV (Project Evaluation) for us to pay, we always pay within 48 hours. Any contract we give out, we must have a payment plan for it. The money is there. We have our projected income. We do not overshoot our expenditure. This is the secret behind achieving all the projects you see in the state.

There is also this fear that in view of the numerous projects, some of them may be abandoned due to lack of funds to complete them.
I can assure you that when you come back to the state at the end of our tenure by 2015, you will see that we have completed all the projects you are seeing on ground now, by the grace of God. We have a clear direction; there is no misplacement of priorities in whatever we are doing; we know our capacity. Insha Allah, we will achieve our objectives. Come back in 2015, you will see wonders.

How much did the state government spend in building the Bukar Abba Ibrahim University up to the level it is now?
I cannot give you the exact amount here. When I took over in 2009, there were only two classes at the university site. All those structures, hostels you saw there were built under my administration between June 2009 and date. We have not taken any loan. What we did was to set an annual budgetary allocation of N1billion for the building of the university. They have some money from the ETF (Education Trust Fund), but it is not much, about N200 million when I became governor. There is a provision for contribution from local government areas in the state for the funding of the university. So, I approached the state House of Assembly to enact a law that each local government should contribute N3 million monthly for the building of infrastructural facilities in the university. We have 17 local governments in the state. That translates to N51 million every month.

So, we give the university N51 million monthly from the local governments. The state government also meets its obligation of giving it N1 billion annually in addition to the little they receive from the ETF. This is how we have been funding the university.

The state appears to be weak in industrialisation. What are you doing in this direction?
Those industries you see in Damaturu, we met them (on ground). We inherited them from the previous administration (of Senator Bukar Abba Ibrahim). I must confess that maybe some of those industries we conceived and executed without proper feasibility studies, that is my assumption, the polythene bag company for instance, is a kind of company that if you go to places like Ibadan, Lagos, Kano, they are owned by ordinary people. It doesn’t require the usual capital to establish this type of industry. If it was my government, I wouldn’t have established it. Despite that, our position now is that some of the machines need a bit of rehabilitation. We are going to rehabilitate them and sell them to whoever is interested to run them, This is our plan, we shouldn’t run this kind of industry as a government. So, if we want to run an industry as a government, we have spring water industry, we are going to rehabilitate that because we conducted a feasibility study, when that was established. I was a permanent secretary in the ministry of commerce. It will bring the government some revenues. We are going to rehabilitate and put it into use as well as the fertilizer company. These are the only two viable industries we have, but those ones you must have seen in the industrial layout, we are setting them off. Any person interested in any of them can bid when we advertise them for sale.

Yobe state has faced some security challenges in recent times including Boko Haram attacks. What is your government doing to contain this problem?
Maintenance of security of lives and property is the responsibility of the Federal Government. The police are directly under the Federal Government. The Nigerian Army is under the Federal Government, but we are doing everything possible to talk to the Federal Government to meet up with its responsibility of ensuring the security of lives and property of our people. The only thing we are doing is that when securitymen, whether policemen or soldiers are posted to Yobe State, we give them incentives to make their work easy for them. Since we came in 2007, I can assure you that we gave them 139 Toyota Hilux 4-wheel drive. We are trying our best, we are giving security agencies maximum assistance.