New Nigerian Newspapers Online Edition

PATRICK MAIGARI had two terms in the Kaduna State House of Assembly. Now he is the chairman of Kajuru local government council. He spoke to ZITUNG B. AGOG on his vision of the local government area. Excerpts:

NNS: You were a two-term legislator in the Kaduna State House of Assembly and now you are chairman of your local government. How do you feel being in this office?

Well, I thank God for the sustenance. Here, the challenges are enormous. I can clearly see the difference between being a legislator and being in the executive arm of government. There are lots of challenges here begging for your attention.

One of the challenges is the peasants whose lot you now have the responsibility to improve. How have you tried to impact on their lives?

Sincerely speaking, these peasants are my concern. First, they have been the ones that have sustained my being in power both in the legislature and they gave me the last or present mandate to come home and improve their lives. Because of that and at every point in time and whenever I wake up, the person I think of is the man on the streets. What I keep thinking about often is what I should do to make life worth living for him. Because of that I have tried to put up programmes targeted at the masses and one of them is on food security. You will agree with me that food security has become a global problem. I have mobilized back my tractors and refurbished them. I assured you that each ward of this local government area will have one tractor to use during this rainy season. Infact, some of them have started working.

I have developed a plan and worked out a strategy to ensure that fertilizers reach every peasant farmer in Kajuru local government this year. Infact every nook and cranny and every one who calls himself a farmer should be able to access, even if it is one bag of fertilizer. We have also in place a strategy to enrich all our polling units in Kajuru local government area. In line with this, we have inaugurated committees which are now operating at the ward level. They are busy mobilizing funds from the farmers who want to purchase fertilizers.

One experience I have had is that as soon as fertilizer sales are launched you will hear that the commodity is exhausted. Here in Kajuru, there is going to be a change. We are going to take one to three months selling our fertilizers as we are ensuring that only genuine rural farmers get the commodity. Of the seventy per cent of the fertilizer we were instructed to release, we are releasing fifty per cent of it and the rest later. The rest will be released only after our monitoring teams to the wards have returned with the report on the performance of the first batch. And for sure, our strategy has taken care of any case of diversion or any other misdeeds as the perpetrators will have only themselves to blame. I have used this forum and would like to use it again to inform middle men that we do not have a bag of fertilizer for them. So they should steer clear of Kajuru as all our fertilizers are for our farmers and our farmers should benefit from that, by the grace of God.

That things have always failed has not been for lack of good policies or plans or even strategies. Most of it has been as a result of lack of willpower. What strategy do you have to ensure that even the committees carry out their tasks with zeal towards ensuring that fertilizer reaches the common farmer?

Yes, aside from the local government committee which I am chairing, I have also a committee of seven men. The local government committee will monitor what is happening concerning the sales of the commodity at the local government and wards while the seven man committee is one with neutral persons; people of integrity, they are the ones to ascertain whether or not the fertilizer reaches the common man.

Food security is a global phenomenon as you have noted and considering this elaborate plan of yours for this rainy season, do you support food importation?

For importation in the interim, yes and this is because of the crisis situation in our land now. It should be for a period of no longer than three months because what we are farming now should not take longer than that before some of them start maturing for harvest. Any period more than three months, I don’t think it’s for the good of this country.

The problem calls for collective effort. What, with your elaborate arrangement, do you think Kajuru local government area should be able to contribute to combat the problem of food security?

I will not want to beat my chest, but any one who lives anywhere around Kasuwan Magani even up to Kaduna knows that about 50 per cent of the food consumed in these areas up to Kaduna is food cultivated in Kajuru local government area. And what we are trying to do now is to improve on that so that we can become first among equals. Every week on Thursdays at the market of Kasuwan Magani, you find hundreds of bags of rice. You have hundreds of thousands of bags of ground nuts coming out of that market also. In fact, Kajuru local government area contributes much to the crops output of Kaduna State and we are saying that we want to improve on that. I also use this forum to inform NGOs interested in this aspect of food security that we in Kajuru have all the land and we have all the co-operative groups that are ready to partner with such NGOs so as to ensure that we bring our nation out of this situation that we have found ourselves.

I think it’s important at this point to look critically at your fertilizer policy in Kajuru local government. Would you be amazed if, in the process of monitoring fertilizer sales, you find out that there are actually people who in the true sense of it cannot afford one bag of fertilizer?

Well, I wouldn’t be surprised because you will even find someone who will tell you that he does not have even a single grain in his barn or house, but that is why we have been encouraging our people to form co-operatives with which it is easier to access any form of assistance rather than as an individual. This is also why government is encouraging people to form co-operative groups to be able to access the variety of loans now available. These loans are there in various banks in many forms and as a local government council, we are prepared to give guarantee for such loans that promote well-being and agriculture.