Gombe State’s anti-social Kalare phenomenon was a tough insecurity challenge in the state until the Governor Ibrahim Dankwmabo administration came on the scene. The state’s Commissioner for Youth Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation, Alhaji Mijinyawa Sani Labaran, tells HUSSAINI JIRGI how this menace and other challenges were caged under one year
What are the key objectives of the Dankwambo’s administration in the area of empowerment and curtailing youth restiveness in Gombe State?
The mandate of the Gombe State Ministry of Youth Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation is to empower the youth and alleviate poverty, taking into account the social dislocation and the apparent youth restiveness that has bedevilled our state for so long without any meaningful and practical action taken in the past to deal with the menace.
On assumption of office, Governor Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo, was categorical that the issue of youth empowerment and poverty alleviation will be in the front burner.
He decided first to deal with the youth empowerment as the cornerstone for dealing with the social disorder that has become prevalent in the state. What we did was that we took into account the result of the last census which signified that sixty five percent of our population are youth mainly. If you take this into consideration, it becomes obvious that the situation is indeed alarming and frightening. Alarming in the sense that some of the youth are graduates of different fields but are not employed.
Once you have attained an educational level like these youth and you find yourself out of a job that becomes a problem to the society.
This problem has a multiplier effect such that others willing to enrol into schools misconstrue this as discouraging. What we did was to categorise the youths into the educated and the non-educated. What we mean by the educated are those who have reached certain levels of education, maybe at Bsc., BA and whatever level – and those that graduated with HND and NCE. All of these we call graduates whom we categorise as such. Then we have others that are not educated; not that they are not educated completely; those that were opportuned to be in schools but along the line they dropped out.
We call this as non-educated because they don’t have anything to show that they are educated. And of course, we have those that were not even opportuned to be in schools and they don’t know anything as far as education is concerned.
For the first category of the educated, the governor decided and directed that we should extract their own respective CV’s and send to the ministries and other organs of government to explore openings for them commensurate with their line of speciality or training as the case may be. In the Ministry of Housing for instance, you will see that we have sent in Architects, builders; when you go to the Ministry of Works also you will see civil engineers, electrical engineers and so on.
So we have a database of the unemployed graduates here in Gombe State and it is from this data that we fill in openings in our manpower need. In his wisdom also, the governor has directed that a total of one thousand teachers be employed based on the declaration of state of emergency in the education sector by the governor in response to the dilapidation and complete mess in which we met the education sector on our assumption of office.
One obvious advantage of the database I spoke about is that most of those that have NCE have automatically been injected into an already emergency area where their services are badly and urgently needed.
On the other category of non-educated, you may wish to recall that sometimes back, we graduated 320 trainees that were trained on different skills. At the point of graduation, they were issued with free tool kits so that when you learn how to be a tailor. Then we give all that is required for you to open your own shop and become independent.
The governor too, as a follow up, graciously approved the issuance of the disbursement of N200,000 to each trainee as interest free soft loan which is repayable due to the flexibility of the conditions attached to the disbursement even though we are yet to disburse simply because we have to? put in place strong monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.
What is the level of acceptance of the programme?
This can be seen in the total absence of anti-social elements on our streets or in our politics. When people talk about an appreciable drop in criminality, hooliganism and thuggery, they are referring to is the effectiveness of the youth empowerment measures that have been initiated and religiously implemented by the Dankwambo administration.
The programme has received a resounding acceptance by the people of the state because the entire effort is meant to address a topical security issue that has worried every stakeholder in the state. If you can recall how this issue of youth restiveness dented the image of the state in the past.
Alhamdulillahi, all this is in the past. We have youths that are changed now, we have youth that are having a sense of belonging, courtesy of the governor who rationalised the issues and initiated practical solutions that have worked. You can only understand the importance of the actions taken if you quantify the encomiums that are daily been showered on our governor – not just by the people of Gombe who bore the brunt but by even visitors to the state who were confronted by the meanness of the situation.
Do you foresee a role for the private sector in this?
Well, it depends on what role the private sector sees for itself. But I can tell you that we have showcased this training in Abuja. The World Bank invited all the states, we had the second meeting also in Ilorin where it was agreed that our model has to be adopted. Some of our sister states used to come here from time to time to learn not just the methodology but the whole concept, how to make it work and to change the attitudinal behaviour of their youth to avail themselves to such opportunities.
What was the situation like in the state before government’s intervention?
The issue of the so-called Kalare, the youth anti-social elements is a well-known security challenge and at that time. Gombe had become notorious for the wrong reasons. It reached a stage where reference is being made nationally to the Kalare issue in terms that were very unpalatable. Gombe at that time was synonymous with a major insecurity catastrophe that was seen as capable of spreading to all parts of the country. At its peak, not even a Commissioner could freely stay put in the office to attend to the issues of governance due mainly to the activities of the Kalare. It was that bad.
You were the supervising commissioner when the anti-Kalare measures were being implemented. What were the challenges?
To change somebody that has derailed at that level within a while cannot be an easy thing. That must have explained why some people were postulating that it will be impossible to rein in the Kalare. But you remember in the course of this interview I made mention of the inviolability of leadership in effective governance. When a leader is purposeful, committed and downright competent, there is nothing he cannot achieve. It is this same leadership by example of our governor that has helped us surmount the cogs in the wheel that would have ordinarily dragged us back
What measures are you taking to deal with beneficiaries who see government lifelines as their share of the national cake?
This is a problem that we have experienced in the course of our relating with the people. As at now, we have some 1,200 tricycles ready for distribution and we are putting finishing touches for setting the date for distributing them. But you see we will route them through a leasing company where proper documentation will be made.
We see it as a revolving fund but some people see it as a share of the proverbial national cake. The leasing company is to ensure that through proper documentation and monitoring, all the beneficiaries live up to their own commitment so that others too will benefit until a wider segment of the state eventually benefits in line with the plan to fight poverty. Our idea is to put in a mechanism to recover and keep track.
So much for youth empowerment. What plans do you have for the larger society, the elderly and the other vulnerable groups?
We have a special programme we call conditional cash transfer. This programme means that we have a survey throughout the state and we say okay let us take the elderly, the less privileged in the society to first empower them. So, that conditional cash transfer, what a participant will get in a month is just N15,000. Five Thousand of this goes to the participant while Ten Thousand Naira goes to the participant’s account in the bank which you cannot access. You have to have somebody who is a dependant.
After the six months of the programme, we will be making a savings of sixty thousand naira for a participant in his own bank account. We will subject the appointed dependant to a skill acquisition at the Ultra-modern Skill Acquisition Centres where we are training our own youths. We subject an appointed dependant of a particular trainee to a training of six months.
So in the next six months after the graduation we must have saved N120,000 for the trainee. Then what we have to do we graduate the dependant so that he can be assisting the participant and that will be the end of that and then we get additional ones. This is a special programme for men, women, the elderly and the disabled. We have a total of 2500 of these trainees that would benefit.