By Samuel Aruwan

In its first year in office, the Kaduna State Government, led by Malam Nasir El-Rufai, has demonstrated the substantive meaning of change. His electoral mandate is being implemented as a conscientious exercise in building new foundations on which to erect a sustainable future for Kaduna State.



Change is not about new faces in Government House, or fresh appointees doing the same old things. It is about giving a new direction, making tough choices and delivering the social goods the people need. Explaining the motivations of his policies, El-Rufai said that “our programme is structured to ensure that poverty does not stifle a child’s ability to gain decent basic education or kill a pregnant mother during childbirth, and that young people have the skills and access to finance to actualize their agency in creating jobs or in doing well where they are employed. We seek to reduce the possibility that pregnancy becomes a multiple, sometimes fatal ordeal for father, mother and infant. We seek to stand by the hardworking and the honest, to promote initiative and to reward merit without religious or ethnic preference”. Anchored on a new style that is devoid of ostentation, Malam El-Rufai is providing leadership distinguished by personal example and sacrifice.

The tone was set in his inauguration speech where he announced that he and Deputy-Governor Barnabas Yusuf Bala would donate 50% of their salary and allowances to the state. This was to underline the need for everyone to be prepared for the sacrifices ahead. Having inherited a state government that spent most of its revenues on public servants and political appointees, El-Rufai was determined to change this. He affirmed a commitment to reorienting government spending away from catering for the few to delivering the needs of the many. As he told the honourable members of the Kaduna State House of Assembly, can a government elected by majority vote turn around to focus public spending on a few? Can a polity be properly described as a democracy if its resources are consistently gulped by a tiny minority?

Shrinking Government; cutting costs.

El-Rufai answered these questions by shrinking the size of government. He merged and restructured ministries, reducing them from 19 to 13. Where the previous government had 24 commissioners, he appointed only 13, attaching their portfolios to the nomination papers he forwarded to the legislature. He moved on to tackling the issues of fraud and waste, cutting overheads in the Executive Branch to 40% and initiating the biometric verification of civil servants and pensioners. The verification exercise has helped to reduce the monthly wage bill to N2.2bn from the N2.7bn it was in May 2015. By October 2015, 2,484 ghost pensioners were removed from the payroll, and that is saving the state N1.3bn every year. With N14.3bn in inherited pension arrears, the case for verifying pensioners makes itself. (To be continued)

Source: Legacy Reporters

Another round of propaganda