OpinionPerspective

Governor Abdulfatah Sustaining Policy of Development in Kwara

By
3 Mins read
0
Share

By Oyewale Oyelola

Kwara State Governor, Alhaji AbdulFatah Ahmed since his inauguration has displayed high sense of creativity and forthrightness by innovating ways that would bring meaningful and sustainable development to the state of harmony.

 

Governor Ahmed has shown his vast knowledge of policies making by prioritizing projects that would bring about socioeconomic development and environmental protection for present and future generations of Kwarans and residents.

 

According to Brundtland Report sustainable development is the organising principle for meeting human development goals while at the same time sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the  natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depends.

 

Therefore,  a good leader will not only think about meeting the present needs of the people but devise means to improve on their standard of living and create avenue where resources will continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural systems.

 

The resourceful governor due to decrease in monthly federation allocation to the state introduced many policies and programs to make the state viable now and emerge stronger in future.

 

The chief of the policy was the establishment of Kwara State Internal Revenue Service (KW-IRS) in June 2015. Kwara State government under the leadership of Governor Ahmed set-up KW-IRS to increase Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of the state by blocking leakages and other sharp practices associated with previous revenue collection channels.

 

Furthermore, KW-IRS does not only collect revenues but also assist the state government to achieve specific economic and social policies, and stimulate voluntary compliance to ensure maximum representation of the populace in the executive decision making.

 

Evidently, the revenue service is living up to expectation by increasing Kwara state IGR from less than N500million monthly to over N2billion within two years of establishment.

 

Speaking on the success story of KW-IRS, the Executive Chairman of KW-IRS, Dr Awodun disclosed that the servicegenerated as IGR in the state for 2015 was N7.2 billion and that was an average of N600 million monthly and N17.4 billion, so moving from N7.2 billion to N17.4billion particularly in a year of recession.

 

Gov Ahmed in his bid to properly utilize fund generated by KW-IRS for the benefit of people of the state, launched Infrastructure Development Fund ‘InfraFund Kwara’, (IF-K) in 2016 to fast track the development of every part in Kwara state.

 

The governor initiated IF-K to address estimated N225 billion deficit value of infrastructure across all the 16 local government areas and spanning all sectors.  “Kwara Infrastructure Development Fund, I-FK a body saddled with the responsibility of coordinating infrastructural developments in the State. The state has earmarked savings of N500million every month into the fund to be provided by the Kwara Internal Revenue Service (KWIRS).” He said.

 

Apparently, KW-IRS is pushing N500million to IF-K monthly aside from supporting salary payment of workers in the state due to the constant shortfalls in federal allocation.

 

Findings revealed that the State government has released about N10billion to 36 contractors handling ongoing and new projects across the State about various projects across the State despite the current economic challenges.

 

The lofty idea of Governor Ahmed fondly called Maigida has turned Kwara state to construction sites as work is going on simultaneously in ongoing projects which include Geri-Alimi Diamond underpass, KWASU campus in Ilesha-Baruba and Ekiti, KWASU Post-Graduate School in Ilorin, dualisation of Michael Imodu-Ganmo road,  dualisation of Kulende-UITH-Oke Ose road among other projects across the state.

 

Kwara state is not in the league of states tagged ‘salary paying” government, as the economic recession in the country has limited some states to only pay workers’ salaries and neglected infrastructural development which is critical index to measure good governance.

 

Similarly, Governor Ahmed led administration has also set up Asphalt Company to address and ease maintenance and construction of roads in the state. The governor while commissioning the project said the plant will create jobs, boost revenue generation, as it will be leased out to contractors and other users within and outside Kwara, stressing that the plant has been tested and found to be of the highest quality.

Education sector is not left out in the sustainable development drive of current administration in state of harmony, as all state owned tertiary institutions have been reengineered and repositioned to offer quality education services to students without unnecessary interruption of academic activities. The institutions are now self-reliant and self sufficient, this have put to rest industrial disputes across the tertiary institutions in the state.

 

In agriculture, Alhaji Ahmed introduced Off-takers Demand Driven Agriculture (ODDA) scheme to revamp the agricultural sector in the State by securing and clearing 2500 hectares of land for development of Farm Estate in different parts of the State for farming activities. About 1000 farmers have been empowered and settled on the estate farms across the state.

 

The indelible imprints of Governor Abdulfatai Ahmed are visible in all sectors of the state. Although some of the innovations of the visionary and focus leader might not bring immediate gains to the populace but the achievements and foundation he is laying for modernization of Kwara State of harmony will be a reference point for future generations.
Oyewale is an Ilorin based journalist, he writes via obalola234@yahoo.com

   

0
Share

About author
Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
Articles
Related posts
Cover StoryDevelopmentOpinion

Pedestrian Bridges: Rising Symbols of Renewed Hope in Abuja

By
2 Mins read
  By Ogefila Bayo Adewale Every morning, parents watch their children leave for school along Abuja highways, their hearts race each time…
Abuja FileDevelopmentEconomyEnergyFinanceInside LagosOpinionPerspective

The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

By
6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
Abuja FileCover StoryOpinionPerspectivePolitics

Tinubu’s Reforms Deserve Continuity, Second Term Crucial — Onuigbo

By
4 Mins read
The President of Globe Legislators International, Rt. Hon. Sir Sam Onuigbo, has called on members and stakeholders of the All Progressives Congress…
Stay on the loop!

Subscribe to our latest news.

Leave a Reply

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com