Malam Inuwa Waya, a former Kano State gubernatorial aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) , has been a household name in Kano politics. A dominant factor who took the political scene by storm, in this interview with MUHAMMAD KABIR, speaks on several issues, which bothered on the APC and the need for Nigerians to develop nationalistic spirit and support President Bola Tinubu’s reforms

You contested in the Kano State governorship election in 2023 on the platform of the APC. What were the circumstances surrounding the primary election?
The primaries took place in a very calm atmosphere and a conducive atmosphere. It was done legally and legitimate. Everything about it was fine. Many people asked me the circumstances that led to my withdrawal at the 11th hour, particularly when they realized that my campaign was effective. It was well received. We garnered popularity. We did everything possible to bring people on board and to sell the idea of the party, the All Progressives Congress. So, everybody was surprised that I withdrew at the 11th hour.
Actually, what happened was that we had a caucus meeting with the then-governor of Kano State, who is now the chairman of APC, Dr. Abdullah Umar Ganduje. The current chairman of Kano State APC, Abdullah Abbas, and elder statesman, Aliko Koki and a host of others, and they asked me, in the spirit of oneness, in the spirit of togetherness, if I would agree to concede, to withdraw, for Executive Governor, who was then the Deputy Governor of Kano State, because I believe that as someone who was in the system, it would be better if he was given the chance to continue. And if I allowed it to go, I as the most popular candidate, then the party will be able to go into full-blown primary elections without any rumbles. So, in the spirit of togetherness and party cohesion, I withdrew,and I gave my support to Dr. Nasir Yusuf Gawuna, a gentleman.
Again, I would like to add that even after I withdrew, I supported the party from beginning to the end. I supported the governorship election. I supported the campaign of President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. I donated my well-furnished and well-equipped office to the gubernatorial and presidential campaign. I also became the chairperson of the fund-raising dinner for our governorship candidate. We generously donated a substantial amount of money towards our campaign. I volunteered my people, my team, my group, and my supporters to every campaign that took place, both for the state assembly, for the governorship, for the House of Reps, and for the presidential election.

Now that elections are over, we have noticed that you are not visible. What are exactly your plans?
Well, my belief is that once elections are over, it is time for governance. And you have to allow those that are elected, especially from your own party, to fulfill their election promises made to the people. And what we are doing now is to support the government to achieve their laudable objectives. And I’m still a member of the party, APC. It’s not easy for me to defect to another party. I believe in principles and ideologies and unless there are compelling circumstances, I see no reason why I should move to another party. I’m not ruling out, but I am saying that unless if there is something, that happens. But for now, I am okay and I’m happy. I’m a loyal party member. And, I contribute my own little quarter in whatever way possible. We have noticed that during your campaign, you prioritized education with a focus on eradicating youth and poverty.

In your own view, what are the ways to improve the quality of education and provide good job opportunities for our teaming youths?
Well, I’m concerned with the youth, because we always say the youth are the leaders of tomorrow. And if the youth are the leaders of tomorrow, you have to prepare them from today. You have to create an enabling environment, an enabling atmosphere, where the youth will be brought up, trained and educated for the good of not only themselves, not only to their families, but to the entire society. And that was why in my own campaign, I took it as a serious business to make sure that education was brought in focus, to make sure that political violence, political thuggery, especially for our youth, has been our focal point.
We wanted to enlighten. In fact, we create a movement for the enlightenment of our youth to be more focused on education, not to be used by selfish politicians, not to be dragged into hooliganism and political thuggery. We advise them to be protective to the society, to go to school, to find a work to do, to find a vocational training. And there are a lot of things that needs to be done to make sure that our youth, our teaming youth, are fully engaged and trained as the leaders of tomorrow. Government must create an enabling atmosphere for that.

During your campaign, we noticed that you engaged in distribution of uniform and learning materials to the students in primary and secondary schools. What was the idea behind that?
Yes, the idea behind that was to make sure that the children of the poor, the children of not so educated, were given the opportunity and the encouragement for them to go to school. We realized based on the research we conducted that children of the poor don’t go to school, because they don’t have uniforms, because they don’t have school materials, dictionaries, books, textbooks, and so on and so forth. That was why we took it upon ourselves to sew uniforms, both for girls and for boys, and also to buy dictionaries, pencils, rulers, sharpeners, pens, exercise books, textbooks, and other writing materials, and distribute to different categories of schools, from the primary schools to secondary schools, from Islamia to even the Western educational, and also to vocational training schools.

But don’t you think that that is the responsibility of the elected government leaders?
Yes, I agree with you that education is not only the responsibility of the government, but it is the right of every child, boy or girl, to be educated by the government. That is an undeniable right. But we have to come out to support the government. We have to come out to make sure that our children are well educated. We have to complement the efforts of government. Government is doing its own, but good-spirited individuals like us must also do. Government needs to do more. That is obvious. And I’m not particularly pinpointing a particular government, but in general, government must do more to improve the quality and quantity of education. Especially in Kano State, we have almost, from the statistics, 1.9 million children out of school, and that is a cause for concern. There’s a lot of drug consumption.
The statistics that were given by the NDLEA, Kano Command, shows that quite a number of youths are engaged in illicit drug consumption and peddling. So, government must do a lot, not only to create classrooms, renovate classrooms, but also to improve the quality of teaching by training teachers, by recruiting teachers that are qualified, also getting them involved in refresher training.

Let’s look at the current hardship we are facing. Many young Nigerians are seeking for better opportunities abroad. How do you think the Nigerian government can improve providing job opportunities at the private sector so that our youth will not go outside the country looking for better opportunities?
Regarding our youth always seeking for greener postures outside the shores of Nigeria, it is a very serious issue and we must collectively seek to address the matter. First of all, I will tell you that our youth suffer a lot in the process of getting out. Some of them are smuggled in buses, in motorcycles, in sacks and bags, and then they now get to be crated and transported by sea under deplorable and inhuman conditions. That is not fit for a human being. Some of them perish in the sea on transit. Those that manage to arrive, sometimes arrive at the wrong destination and disappear for life. And those who manage to arrive in the country of their choice, arrive there and meet a very challenging condition and then they begin to be involved in other vices. In an attempt to make it, they meet wrong people, they meet criminals in those societies.

Why would they work with criminals?
Because they are illegal immigrants, they have no status that is recognized by law. So, they become involved in criminal activities. They do not realize that those countries that they are going also have their own challenges. They have youth unemployment; they have youth criminality. Their prisons are filled up with a number of youths. The United Kingdom, for instance, today is even looking for other countries to negotiate a prisoner transfer in Europe. They are talking of Estonia and they are talking of some other European countries, whether they can use prisoners to complete their sentences. Today in the UK, some crimes or misdemeanors, as we call them in law, are not even punishable by imprisonment. They ask you to take a warning and tag you and put you in the register and then ask you to go on suspended sentence because the prison is full to the brink because of criminals. The same thing in the United States of America.
President Trump is arranging with El Salvador, a Latin American country, to transfer prisoners to that country. There is a big problem, explosion in terms of economy in those countries. They have, as I said, a high rate of unemployment. As a result of crisis, there is a crisis in Europe, there is war between Ukraine and Russia that is adversely affecting the economy of Europe. It is entrenched in the Middle East, in Asia, there is a lot of conflict. There is conflict in Sudan, there is conflict in Yemen, there is conflict in Syria, there is conflict in Iraq. Everywhere there is war between Israel, Lebanon and Palestine. So where will our youths now go to get greener postures? We have to begin to understand the reality. All those areas that they are going, they have their own problems. And our youth going there are only adding to the problems.
I can tell you; you take the statistics. If you take the number of the youth, black youth, that are in prisons in America, in Britain, in Bangkok, in China, in Hong Kong, and indeed in every country where our youths are going, you will see that 70% of the total number of black people in prison are Nigerians. And that is a big problem for us. It’s a major source of pressure. There is attrition.
It is no longer fashionable for our youth to go out of the shores of Nigeria to look for a greener pasture. Because it is not there. They ended up in crime, robbery, fraud, computer fraud, identity fraud, aggravated identity theft, and ended up in prison. We have to be serious about that. It is no longer rosy out there. We must look inward and make sure that the youths are sufficiently engaged in the country to be able to be productive and contribute their own quota for the economic growth and development of this country.
We must also introduce an elaborate arrangement similar to the one they do in the Philippines, for instance. In the Philippines, because a lot of Philippines, especially youth boys and girls, go out to work outside the shores of the Philippines. There is a system in place to make sure that all those youth that are going out are trained to understand the international community. To understand their responsibilities as ambassadors of the Philippines outside that country. They also were informed of what to expect and how to manage themselves if at all they are successful in going out. And the country creates an interface between the Philippine government and other countries to make sure that if it is teachers, the country has control of the number of teachers that go out from the Philippines to any other country. Even if they have that status and they have that control, there is a robust system in place. That is the kind of system that I want us to start looking at.
We have to expand our commercial system of commercial attachments to make sure that all those children and youths outside the country are meaningfully engaged in their respective countries. I know for sure, Nigeria is doing well to address the problems of our people outside the country. That is sure. I know the government is doing its best. I know the Foreign Affairs Minister, who himself is a youth, Ambassador Yusuf Tugga, is doing everything possible to make sure that Nigeria is fully engaged and our people that are there are addressed. But we need to look at it holistically to come up with a robust system to do that. Now that you talk extensively about international countries.

Could you tell us what are they doing differently that Nigeria cannot do it?
There is nothing extraordinarily different from what other countries are doing. I think our problem here is that we need value reorientation. First of all, we need to go back to the roots. We have to love our country. We have to love our nation.

Why do you call it nationalism?
It is very important. Nigeria first. When you hear President Trump say America first, he is telling Americans that your country first, before any other country. So, we must begin to think of Nigeria first. That is the basis of nationalism. Secondly, we must be able to make sure that we put into practice that sense of nationalism. That brings me to what is called patriotism. You must be a patriotic citizen. You must do everything to make sure that you are doing it for the benefit of your country, for the benefit of the state. These two are very, very important. Once we have that, you will see that the value, Nigerian value in human beings, Nigerianization in human beings is beginning to manifest and to come out.
We must be our brother’s keepers. We do not sit and exclusively blame government for the problems of the country. The problems start from you, and the change must equally start from you. Change begins with me. Then you go on, you go on. We have all the ingredients necessary to make a nation. And we must adhere to those principles. Yes, Nigeria is a young country. Yes, Nigeria is a young democracy, but we have to accept, we have to move fast. The world is moving astronomically. Things are changing. We are living in times of artificial intelligence. Robots are now replacing human beings. And humans must begin to think of their future in this earth, to harness their progress. And we Nigerians, we must kick into this system. Organize ourselves. Organize our economy. Be honest. Be transparent. Love one another. Obey law and order. Because it’s very important. Any society that does not respect law and order is a perished society. Any society that cannot enforce and observe the enforcement of law and order is in deep trouble.