If you have been a keen observer of the leadership style of the government of Kaduna State, you must be having lots of headaches and fevers that is aside the fear of Covid-19. In Kaduna, since 2015 when the dictatorship of Malam Nasiru El Rufai came to power Hobbes’s philosophical perspective of the life of man being solitary, poor, nasty,, brutish and short has found expression. Never before have the governed been so brutishly treated by a government they supposedly voted to power even in a jaundiced democracy as ours. Let us examine governance in Kaduna State against what the 1999 Constitution as Amended clearly outlines thus ” The security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government “. In Kaduna State, that purpose has all been lost in the recklessness that passes for governance. Kaduna is a scourged political and economic landscape as things currently stamd. Juxtaposing what passes for governance against what is to be expected of a decent and sane leadership one wonders why the population in Kaduna State should be passing through these horrendous times.

Since May of 2015, for anyone who has been a resident of Kaduna State, such is living as if under an army of occupation. It has been a relentless assault against the population who may have in good faith voted to bring what has now turned out to be a dictatorship.to power. It is still very much unclear where the dictatorship is taking Kaduna State. One fact thought is clear enough which is that the dictatorship is sacrificing the SECURITY and WELFARE of the people of Kaduna State on the altar of economic considerations. Many of us are unsure if our governor requires further educating about the very fact that the population forms the foundation and the building blocks of a democracy. Tragically our governor and the co-travellers in his government are treating the population in Kaduna as if of a captured territory.. The current government in KADUNA has neither provided SECURITY nor WELFARE for the population in KADUNA. All along since 2015 it has been one assault on the population in one form or the other. The main enemy of this government has been it’s workforce which was why the assault started from there first. The governor opined that there that there were too many Districts which he reduced to just a handfull without caring why they were created in the first place by a previous government. This created a vacuum in leadership in many parts of the State which Fulani jihadists and terrorist quickly moved in to exploit.

Turning around and shedding crocodile tears over insecurity in Kaduna State is very clearly an absurdity. Instances of El Rufai’s assault on the hapless population have been documented in earlier essays. El Rufsi is not done yet with the assault on the population of KADUNA State as in the latest assault, what remains of the Civil Service is again being visited with what the government call staff rationalization involving staff on salary grades 14 and those who are 50 years of age and above. It is being alleged that all security men, drivers and ward attendants in all the State’s public hospitals have been handed letters of termination of their appointments. Workers on salary grade levels 01-06 are said to be reduced to contract level staff. A further information has it that all Local Councils have been directed to cut their staff strength to not more than 50. A friend told me he heard some people at a Burkutu joint in Kabala West rueing this latest assault and suggesting that the dictatorship should have simply gone ahead to scrap the entire Kaduna State Civil Service if that was to give him peace of mind. The dictator may be living under the illusion that whatever pains and hardship he is inflicting on the very fabric of the population in Kaduna State will stand the taste of time.

A concerned citizen of this State now deceased about 2 years ago once adviced the dictator to look up on the walls of the Chamber of the Government House and to count the number of governors who held sway in Kaduna in time past and be admonished that he will just as those before him have his portrait hang on the same wall of the Chamber as former governor Ina few years time. I join those praying that he will live long enough to see his legacy as governor of Kaduna State being upturned by a people friendly governor. There can be no doubt that El Rufai’s legacies as governor of Kaduna State will some day go up in smoke. You can bet this for it is as sure as sunshine.

Can there be any moral justification for what is playing out in Kaduna State in the name of governance? How can the reckless mass sack of workers be justified without paying their benefits? How does the dictatorship expect those sacked to pull through such an uncertain future as he is dispatching them into? It is common knowledge that the motivation for what is playing out is the desire to save money for the so-called Urban Renewal projects which in any case are concentrated in only 4 of the 23 Local Government Areas. The US 350 million dollars loan has gone the way of all other loans and so the population must be squeezed to to make up for the much needed funding. What remains of the loan d the payment. Someone said that he heard the dictator boasting the other day during a Media chat that since Kaduna State generates as much as N 50 billion Naira as internally generated revenue that the State can survive without the monthly handouts from the Federation Account. How untrue? Recall that the dictatorship has not been able to settle the entitlements of the dismissed traditional rulers, teachers and civil servants laid off during his first term. Put simply, the dictatorship is using the population as means to the ends he has in mind. El Rufai is going to leave behind him. A legacy so grotesque and contorted he will hate to be associated with it. It must be acknowledged that he has built some roads concentrated mostly in Kaduna North LGA but byway of a general assessment his 8 years as Kaduna State governor will go into the books as a major misadventure. This brings me to remembering late Wada Nass a one time Special Duties Minister who once commented that then President Olusegun Obasanjo had made more than enough enemies to last him his whole life. Much in the same manner El Rufai will go down in infamy for this brutish style of leadership.

Let us now consider the ramifications of the mass sacking of civil servants from the Civil Service of Kaduna State especially against the background of the very serious insecurity not limited to Kaduna to State alone. The law of natural justice requires that if an employer is desirous of dispensing with the services of an employee such is required to pay the employee’s outstanding claims. This provision is allien to the books and thinking of the dictatorship. Our governor is not content with sacking very poorly paid civil servants, he goes further to disposes them of their little plots of lands as well as farmlands in outlying areas of Kaduna so he can hand over same to so-called private land developers. If the so-called private land developers are serious investors why are they riding on the back of government to acquire land when they can negotiate for such lands directly with the owners?

The Kaduna State Geographically Information Service (KADGIS) is his frontline hunting dog. The moral question arises as to how the sacked civil servants are going to make a living without work and without their farmlands. The only employment available may well be to join any of the kidnapping cartels occupying the ungovern spaces. One way or the other insecurity is set to become worse.

Can we in anyway expect anything better from the leadership of this country at the highest level when the President placed his personal wellbeing well and above that of the nation? Did he not make the choice of abandoning the rest of us here in this hell (Nigeria) for the comfort of the United Kingdom when almost everywhere is burning? What are we to expect from these kind of leaders?

One need not be a clairvoyant to know that a greater calamity is going to befall this contraption when the food supply situation in the country becomes terrible. As this post is being read, most farmers in the rural areas who cultivate the land have been displaced by either Fulani jihadists or kidnapping cartels. Where the peasant farmers cannot go to their farmlands, how will the food supplied to the urban areas be sustained? If the peasant farmers cannot feed themselves who then supplies the urban areas. The worse case scenario is that the roof will ultimately colapse on our heads. The terrorists gangs wrecking havoc on our villages will themselves be starved out and we shall all return to the starting point because we voted for a totally inept government.

To God Be The Glory.