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The Man Kwarans Direly Need As Governor

3 Mins read

 

By Abdulazeez Kayode
Love it or hate it, for one to achieve something good, particularly, in the journey of life, one should prepare for the worst from those that will come out in full force to castigate, persecute and prosecute you. They would go all ways to ridicule and spread rumours about you but a focussed person will not grieve nor fear, rather, they will see it as a way of strengthening their arsenal to forge ahead.
This illustration  perfectly describes what is happening in Nigeria politics, especially Kwara.  Its always surprising seeing people taking it hard on Hon. Mashood Mustapha for showing interest in becoming the next Governor of Kwara state come 2019.
Therefore, taking them through MM’s sojourn in life may not be out of place. The peace-loving-man, MM, started nurturing his ambition to be impactful in life right from his early days and he has been consistent without losing focus, even for once.
The affable humanist called MM is today becoming one of most impactful citizens Kwara has ever produced. MM is a foresighted person who had foreseen what life holds for him; he has been guiding his dream very jealously and as such, becoming a positive life-changer not only in his constituency, but Kwara state at large.
On discovering  that so many people are living in abject poverty  with extreme hunger to such an extent that people were finding it difficult to eat thrice daily, MM made a spirited resolution to make himself available to serve the interest of the people by not giving them food alone but empowering them on how to fend for themselves.
The care-giver had for long been nurturing how to reach more people in life as he got to know that if someone really wants to have meaningful impact in the society, the best way to go about it is to be actively involved in machinery that determines the day to day activities of citizens  and policy formulation. That’s one of the key factor responsible for MM’s gubernatorial ambition.
His debut in politics started as Special Adviser to the current Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki when he was the Governor of Kwara State. For his outstanding performance as SA to the then governor Bukola Saraki, MM’s capacity to deliver on any given assignment was confirmed and he was later promoted to the rank of Commissioner in order to accelerate his administration in achieving some set goals in Ministry of Lands and Housing and Ministry  of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
The amiable son of the  Wali of Ilorin was one of the shining lights that made Bukola Saraki-led administration achieve tremendously as Governor throughout his eight years as Kwara Governor. Dr. Bukola Saraki discovered that someone like MM is a good material that needed to be encouraged, most especially his courageous attitude to face issues boldly. That was the reason he declared his full support for him to represent the State at the National Assembly as a member of the Federal House of Representatives where boldness, courage, intelligence, and ability to deliver matters a lot.
Hon. MM, started distinguishing himself  from his Campaign strategy and mobilization as an aspirant vying to represent Ilorin West/Asa federal constituency. He came up with unique strategies that has not been matched till date. MM’s street credibility and his generosity always attracted people to him. MM’s campaign train was marvellous to the extent that Dr. Bukola Saraki merged his campaign team with MM, and it went smoothly for both of them. The slogan (Gbowole) started from hefty support given to MM by the people, most especially the masses that were ready to follow his campaign train voluntarily. Kwarans are eagerly waiting to witness such supercool campaign again.
MM was declared winner by Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) amidst celebration and jubilation and he immediately switched to action with fabulous dividends of democracy from Federal House of Representative to his constituency in terms of employment opportunities, Empowerment, and community development projects. People were given appointments in the following parastatals of federal government courtesy of MM: NESREA, NIMASA, NTA, NNPC, UITH, FIRS, NETCO, NTI and many more. Also, many people were empowered in various ways: distribution of tricycles, Motorcycles, block moulding machines, grinding machines, freezers, shewing machines, etc.
He also embarked on community development projects like primary healthcare centre in Egbejila and Temidire respectively, construction of irrigation dam at Elega/Igbokedu in Otte, provisions of many transformers, construction of many motorized boreholes and many other programmes and projects, just to mention few.
In 2015 when Dr. Bukola Saraki seriously needed someone with tested capacity to spearhead Buhari/Osinbajo campaign in Kwara State, MM was given the assignment as Campaign Coordinator and he delivered Kwara to Buhari/Osinbajo.
Today,  without an iota of doubt, Kwarans are in dire need of that person whose antecedents has spoken well of him, a brilliant and intelligent man like Hon. Moshood Mustapha who has the capacity to take Kwara to the next level of socioeconomic growth and development and more importantly, where all Kwarans will be stakeholders in Kwara’s project!
Abdulazeez is a Media aide to Hon Moshood Mustapha

   

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).
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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….
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