How Yuguda Cost Jonathan Bauchi State in the Presidential Elections

The 2015 General Elections have come and gone, and expectedly, it has produced winners and losers. The All Progressives’ Congress (APC) created an upset and won the presidential elections and four-time presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari finally emerged victorious at the polls. Since the elections, political pundits and analysts have been analyzing the results of the elections and what caused voters to sway either this way or that way. 

One state that is of interest is Bauchi State and the way in which APC won the state with 931,598 of the votes, leaving the PDP a paltry 8.5% of the votes to pick up. What is not surprising is not that the APC won; after all, the last time the PDP won the state in the presidential polls was in 1999. However, political watchers had predicted that President Goodluck Jonathan will be able to get at least 30% of the votes not only because the state has a PDP government, but also because it is also the state of the National Chairman of the PDP, Alhaji Ahmadu Mu’azu and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Senator Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed who are political heavyweights and are very popular in the state. 

So what went wrong for the PDP and President Jonathan? 

First, the very dismal performance of Governor Isa Yuguda in his eight-year stint at the helm of the state turned the hearts of many in the state against the PDP. In his two terms, the only capital project of note executed by the governor has been the Bauchi International Airport, a N9bn project which sadly is a misplaced priority considering how few people will even be afford flights regularly. It is also not justifiable to spend such a sum on an airport that will only be used optimally for one month a year during Hajj pilgrimage when the Gombe International Airport and the Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano are within 5-hour radius and are available for airlifting of pilgrims to the Holy Land. 

Yuguda’s tenure as governor has not left the people of Bauchi State any better than when he came in. He had initially used his penchant for cash gifts and handouts as a ruse to cover his non-performance but gradually, the people became aware of the reality of his non-performance. Considering his efforts to cozy up to President Jonathan, the people of Bauchi State punished PDP by voting en masse for APC, which also cost Yuguda his Bauchi South senatorial ambition.

Not only that, Yuguda further incensed people by foisting an unknown and unpopular governorship candidate, Hon. Mohammed Auwal Jatau on the PDP. The people of the state were expecting that either Dr. Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, a respected bureaucrat who has been Head of the Civil Service of the Federation and Secretary of the Government of the Federation, or Dr. Mohammed Ali Pate, former Minister of State for Health and respected public health expert to become the candidate of the state. However, they were edged out in the primaries as Yuguda imposed Jatau, a little-known House of Representatives member from Zaki Federal Constituency and a last-minute entrant into the race on the party and against the wishes of the party. This even caused Dr. Pate to defect to the APC where he worked tirelessly to earn their victory.

This was a stark contrast to the primaries of the APC where the governor-elect, Barrister Mohammed Abubakar emerged through a free and fair primary, which wooed voters to their side. Interestingly, Abubakar is also said to have been sponsored by Yuguda. If this is true, it means that the governor was clearly engaged in anti-party activities. 

Another factor that should have contributed to the votes of President Jonathan was the voting pattern of Dass, Bogoro and Tafawa Balewa local government areas which are predominantly Christian and dominated by the Sayawa ethnic group. However, in September 2012, Governor Yuguda unilaterally moved the headquarters of Tafawa Balewa Local Government Area from Tafawa-Balewa, a predominatly Christian town to Bununu, which is predominantly Muslim. This action caused the member representing Tafawa Balewa in the Bauchi State House of Assembly, Mrs. Rifkatu Danna Samson to raise the motion on the floor of the House. However, all she earned for her troubles was Yuguda using his loyalists in the House to suspend her, which earned the House a lawsuit. 

Also, the member representing Dass/Bogoro/Tafawa-Balewa Federal Constituency at the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara threatened to defect from the PDP to the APC if the decision to reverse the change of local government headquarters was not made. Yuguda refused to budge, and Dogara made well his threat and defected. 

This also caused a mass switch in loyalty in the area to the APC as Dogara and Samson, both very popular worked tirelessly to ensure that the APC in that area. Dogara won his re-election and is now well-placed to be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives following the decision of the APC to zone the office to the North-East. 

It is quite ironic that for a governor who has been working tirelessly to be in the good books of President Jonathan and was even lobbying to have Vice-President Namadi Sambo replaced with him on the presidential ticket, all his actions worked counter to the objectives of the PDP and President Jonathan. 

However, Yuguda did not see that his actions were destructive because he had arrogated to himself absolute powers not only within the state but also within the PDP in Bauchi State. 

As the PDP continues with its post-election analysis of what went wrong, it needs not search too far to see the person that single-handedly caused their downfall in Bauchi State. 

What will Bauchi State remember Isa Yuguda for?

When Nigeria embarked on the transition to democracy in 1999, the party that swept away most of the elective offices was the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) which not only had the presidency and the majority of the National Assembly but also won 21 governorship seats.

One of the states the PDP took control of was Bauchi State in the North-East, which was created from the old North-Eastern State in 1976. The Fourth Republic ushered in for their fourth democratically elected governor in the person of Alhaji Ahmadu Mu’azu, a quantity surveyor and the present National Chairman of the PDP.

 Mu’azu’s emergence was made possible with the backing of a banker, Mallam Isa Yuguda, who held sway at the now defunct Inland Bank, headquartered in Bauchi Town. His influence helped the PDP sweep the state, for which he was duly compensated with ministerial posts, first serving as the Ministry of Transportation for two years and then as Minister of Aviation for another two years, both under the Obasanjo administration.

At the end of the second term of Mu’azu, Yuguda made known his ambitions to succeed him. However, his erstwhile protégé was not enthused with the idea and he frustrated his ambition, forcing him to decamp to the then All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP). He won the sympathy of the people of Bauchi State who felt he was betrayed by Mu’azu despite supporting him in 1999, and that combined with the massive popularity of now President-elect Muhammadu Buhari who ran in 2007 as the candidate of the ANPP, Yuguda won his election.

However, just like Mu’azu betrayed him, he has also turned around to betray the people of Bauchi State. First, he defected back to the PDP and abandoned the platform on which he was elected. He also went further to torment his then deputy governor, Alhaji Garba Gadi, a respected elder who was the ANPP candidate before he was persuaded by the party to cede his ticket to Yuguda and become his running mate. Gadi’s crime was his refusal to defect to the PDP as he insisted on being loyal to the ANPP; for this, Yuguda ensured his impeachment.

After eight years, the best known achievement of Yuguda has been superficial: a primary school, the Sa’adu Zungur Primary School which he spent N800 million constructing and the construction of an international airport for N8bn, a misplaced project considering the fact that Bauchi has an airfield which is not used at all. His excuse for the airport has been that it is needed to attract international investors and to make it easier for intending pilgrims going for Hajj to head to Saudi Arabia.

However, there is very little economic sense in having an airport that will be used optimally for only one month in a year, especially when the Kano and Gombe Airports which are also used for ferrying pilgrims to the Holy Land are within 4-hour radius of the state.

Even worse, unlike his predecessor who is best known for building roads across the state, scarcely any road has been built by the Yuguda administration. Obviously, his predecessor knows the impact of roads on the economy – a kilometer of road constructed is said to increase economic activity in an area by 23% averagely. Sadly, not even potentially economic gold mines such as Nahuta in Alkaleri Local Government Area which has a lot of illegal mining of copper, zinc, lead and limestone going on there, even on a large scale has accessible, motorable roads leading there.

One would have thought that Governor Yuguda would have constructed such a road and formalized the mining activities in the area, and other areas with economic potential in order to raise the internally-generated revenue of the state. However, his ideas for raising revenue has been limited to increasing the signage fees of the few commercial establishments in the state, which are mostly banks and led them to removing their signages for months at a time.

So at the end of eight years of the Yuguda administration, what can then be said to be his legacy? He has barely any tangible capital projects to show for it, and he has not raised the revenue profile of the state. As a matter of fact, the finances of the state are shrouded in opacity as the details of budgets passed by the state legislature of the state are not made public. As such, it is impossible to measure their execution.

This is a question that we feel Bauchi people are best placed to answer: what will you remember Yuguda for?

By Aisha Suliman