EXPANDING THE FRONTIERS OF DEMOCRACY IN JIGAWA STATE:---

EXPANDING THE FRONTIERS OF DEMOCRACY IN JIGAWA STATE: A CALL FOR EXPANSION OF THE DISCOURSE

By

Muazu Mohammed Yusif
Department of Political Science,
Bayero University, Kano
August, 2007

When governments in developing countries are withdrawing social protection for their citizens in order to appease the market-oriented international community, the Governor of Jigawa state, Alhaji Sule Lamido, is reversing that trend of history by bringing back the idea of social protection for physically deformed citizens of Jigawa state.

This is contained in his inaugural address titled ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Democracy in Jigawa State’, where the governor articulated social justice to be the eradication of poverty by introducing welfare services to the most neglected sections of the people.

Like philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, the recognition of social protection of the weakest by Sule Lamido is an admission that democracy needs solidarity of people directed to reason for overall development of the society.

Therefore, ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Democracy’ is a political and ideological doctrine which the NEPU – PRP oriented governor needs to develop further in order to capture and improve other emerging needy groups in Jigawa state.

Like in other major cities in the developing world, especially in Africa, the trend in Jigawa state is a growing mass of unemployed youths who are graduates of post primary schools and tertiary institutions. These are emerging great and strong forces that any foresighted leader cannot dismiss and ignore as these could become great agents of either constructive or destructive changes.

Jigawa state is still a predominantly rural area with peasant solidarity still intact. Therefore, the menace of these emerging forces is not felt like in Lagos, Nairobi, Abidjan, and even Kano but still, especially at the political front, they could be noticed in Hadejia, Gwaram, Gumel, Ringim, Birnin Kudu and other towns in Jigawa State.

These new groups are now the ones shaping the political terrain of violence or peace in Jigawa State. As youths who have no employment, they are finding solace in partisan politics instead of directing their energies to productive activities.

Thus, instead of productive industry growing and expanding, only the ‘patronage’ industry is booming. The former civilian governor has sown and promoted this dangerous patronage system, all at the expense of the progress of the economy.

Furthermore, the patronage economy not only did not move Jigawa forward but has resulted in virtual decline of everything good with Jigawa state – economic, social, and educational and other indices.

The latest Central Bank of Nigeria report placed Jigawa state as the poorest state in Nigeria. What else do we expect in a predominantly peasant economy which lacks access and network with modern economic system and is fortified and re-imposed by a patronage system?

Yes. There is a large stratum of poor peasants characterized by a ‘Prussian’ model of farm production, in the sense of each owing a small patch of land which is not enough to produce his food needs for the year. This implies that this group of peasants need social protection to live reasonable life.

Whereas, there are small numbers of rich peasants (kulaks), educated elites from various profession and institutions of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, big businessmen and politicians but except perhaps the ‘kulaks’, these classes or forces are not living and investing in the economy of Jigawa state.

In view of the above, there is need of the government of Jigawa state to extend the social protection policy and to redefine the scope and the strategy. The new targets would naturally be the unemployed youths and the poor peasants (including the women who are not identified as independent groups because their economy is in their homes).

The redefinition of the policy is a political technology. The governor has to bring his NEPU – PRP past and values in framing and planning a talakawa/human development. There are evidences of this inclination in the inaugural speech referred to above but they need to be widened and popularised. Doing so would enrich Nigerian politics, ideologically.

The specificity of the Lamido doctrines of development may be articulated in such a way that theory and practice become the same and indistinguishable.

However, there is much that can be learned from the practices of NEPU and the PRP governments in Kano and Kaduna states which the governor was a participant and made a lot of input.


Proposing a policy line requires a lot of information to evaluate the possibilities and the consequences. But in broad sense, the details may be worked out such that social protection is redefined and situated within a wider frame work of modernisation and development of Jigawa state.

In this context, the unemployed, the poor peasants and the beggars will benefit from these programmes and the unemployed youth in particular would be stopped from moving to higher level of frustration and aggression when they metamorphose into street boys in our major towns. Peasants would be transformed into modern big and petty capitalist and workers.

As every economic change will produce its own contradictions, the government of Jigawa state may create legal previsions to regulate change, now and in future.