2023 Gubernatorial: Dr Ardo Declares Interest, says He’s coming to the rescue of Adamawa state

Former lecturer at the Nigerian Defence Academy,  and Adamawa PDP Chieftain Dr. Umar Ardo in a lengthy piece declared his intention to salvage Adamawa State by joining the race for the gubernatorial seat in the coming 2023 general elections.

Kindly read through his peace which he titled ‘BEING A DECLARATION ADDRESS TO CONTEST THE GOVERNORSHIP OFFICE OF ADAMAWA STATE IN 2023, YOLA, THURSDAY, 13th May, 2021’.

Like most states of Nigeria, Adamawa State is today
facing visible developmental challenges, expressed amongst the populace
by severe economic insecurity and extreme poverty, hunger and
deprivation, illiteracy and ignorance, communal distrusts and violence,

• 
  Health Conditions

  Ways to Avoid Diabetes
• 
  Top Stories

  Pope Francis dismisses rumors that he may step down soon
• 
  Pregnancy

  Do Durian Fruit Have a Cure for Infertility?

insurgency and institutional collapse, etc. The situation is basically
an issue of leadership failure at governmental level. All through the
years, on account of poor, corrupt, inept and venal leaderships,
successive governments have failed to optimize our potentials to develop
our society, in spite of our enormous human and material endowments.
Our state is a huge reservoir of talents, skills and assets that if
properly organized and harnessed, along with the solid and agricultural
reserves of our ecology, Adamawa state can conquer the basic
developmental needs of its entire people. Yet, we have failed to achieve
this feat; and unless this failure syndrome is halted and reversed, our
people and upcoming children would have no future to look forward to!
And halting and reversing the drift is doable. It is the solemn duty of
each and every one of us then to act and do it. On our part, we have
again volunteered to mobilize all like-minds in the state, those who
believe in this task, to come achieve this goal for our people and
rescue the state.

Our vision for Adamawa state
is fundamentally grounded on the principles of African values of honesty
and of being our brothers’ keepers. Because our state is a land of
potentially unlimited opportunities, endowed immeasurably in human and
material resources, optimal utilization of our God-given talents,
skills, huge labour force and natural assets is key to creating a
knowledge-and-labour-based-society, in which those who work hard
succeed, and the weak and old amongst us protected and cared for; and,
by respecting our differences and working together as a team, our
diverse communities grow stronger and our prosperity, unity and success
become assured, thereby drawing our people together and enthroning
politics of inclusion, tolerance and compassion, under rule of law. This
is the vision for all Adamawa indigenes to mirror, believing that it is
a vision whose time has come.

Our primary
mission is to get everybody in the service of Adamawa State offer the
needed commitments essential for the realization of our vision – by
action, by example and by sacrifice, and to remain throughout the
article of faith in the conduct of all public servants in the state.

Our priority objectives are:-
a)
To Conquer Hunger – ensuring that every Adamawa indigene in the state,
male and female, young and old, will have enjoyable food to eat and not
ever go hungry;
b) To Conquer Disease – ensuring that every Adamawa
indigene in the state, male and female, young and old, will have access
to proper Medicare for all ailments;
c) To Conquer Illiteracy and
Ignorance – ensuring that every Adamawa school-age child in the state
will have access to high-quality education, from primary to tertiary
levels;
d) To Conquer Unemployment – ensuring that every indigene of
the state, specifically our youths whose focal duty and responsibility
will be to develop society with their intellect and physical strengths
in innovation, invention, production, construction, management, etc., is
gainfully or self-employed and contributing to the material development
of society; and
e) To Conquer Infrastructural deficit – ensuring the
provision of basic public infrastructure such as portable water,
schools, hospitals, roads, railways, electricity, forestation, etc.
By
any standard, this is a revolutionary feat to achieve – and is
achievable! For with the rich aptitudes and talents in our populations
and our abundant untapped natural resources, Adamawa State can seize the
positives of good leadership and get these talents expressed and those
resources harnessed. It just needs an honest and visionary leadership to
organize the state and lead by example, by action and by sacrifice. As a
team, we must collectively commit ourselves to entrenching and
sustaining such leadership in our state.

Our
vision, mission and objectives can be achieved by means of ethical
orientation that inculcates guiding principles and values in our people,
and by systemic innovation and practical approach to issues.
i. Guiding Principles and Values
Every
public servant in the state (be they elective, appointive or
bureaucratic) will be guided by the following three-key principles:-
? Creating opportunity for all indigenes;
? Demanding responsibility from every indigene; and
? Forging strong and virile communal spirit among all indigenes.
To attain this, every public servant must subscribe to the following three-key values:-
? Sincerity of purpose;
? Clarity of goal; and
? Dedication to duty.
Our past and present neglected these, but we must all learn from them because they are critical to shaping our future.

ii. Systemic Innovation and Practical Approach
This technique in achieving our objectives will be premised on accurate and meticulous planning and organizing. To this end:-

• The solution to each and every problem of the state shall be amply
  dependent on innovation and creativity, and not necessarily on
  convention. To this end, every person entrusted with responsibility will
  be expected to come forth with innovative and creative skills and ideas
  in the resolution of the given issue at hand. The human capital that
  people bring to the workplace – skills, knowledge, and ideas – will
  drive innovation, productivity improvements and growth;
• Every
  Adamawa indigene shall be registered and given an identity. We shall
  adopt GridCode as State Addressing Scheme by which every inch of land in
  the state is measured, calculated and given a code address. This way,
  not only the existence of every indigene, their addresses and potentials
  (including their biometrics and DNAs) is known, but so also the extent
  and rates of our landscape and its mineral contents. Once this data is
  generated, then by it the material value of the state is already raised
  by at least 1/4 off the ground. Planning and organizing thus become easy
  and simplified;
• Going concurrently with the identity scheme will
  be biometric automation of the state work force in the service of
  government, unemployed and employable, skilled and unskilled labour
  force reservoir. This will give the exact statistics of the labour
  force, skilled and unskilled, at the disposal of the state to be able to
  plan where and how to put to use every available labour – to build the
  schools, railways, roads, dams, canals, industrial parks, plant economic
  trees, etc. thereby creating value out of every talent, skill and
  physical energy in the state. This shall enrich and utilize our vast
  talents, skills and physical energies in such a manner that no person is
  redundant and no area of human endevour necessary for economic and
  social progress of our communities is left untouched. This way every
  able-bodied person will be contributing to the improvement of the state
  and also earning income from his/her inputs;
• Initiate large-scale
  state-sponsored Public-Private-Partnership-Driven mechanized commercial
  farming, thorough harnessing and expansion of the produce of our vast
  economic trees, exploring and exploiting our massive solid mineral
  deposits and establishing several Agro-allied industries across the
  state to process these produces. We will thus establish by law – 1.
  Economic Trees Promotion, Development and Protection Authority; 2.
  Agricultural, Industrial, Economic Trees and Solid Minerals Revenue
  Derivation Agency. These two agencies shall constitute key pivots in our
  wealth creation and distribution scheme and revenue generation and
  developmental drive;

•  In the agro-allied sector, get established
  industries for rice milling, wheat-flour making, tomato puree, cassava
  farms and starch industries, tannery and shoe-making, animal feeds
  plants and fish processing, poultry and egg farms, pig farms, meat
  industries, milk and fruit canning industries, dairy farming, starch
  manufacturing, farm implements production, etc. Then, in the area of
  economic trees – Shea butter, locust beans, tangerines, gum Arabic,
  etc.;
• In the building-related sector, get set up and revive burnt
  bricks industries, cement industry, plywood and veneer sheets
  manufacturing and base sawmill industries. Other areas to be covered
  will include industries for the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC),
  insulated wire and cable-making, glassware manufacture, paper-making
  mills, ceramic-making, wire and nail plants;
• Get set up textile
  mill and soap and detergent industries, cotton farms and cottages,
  variety of textile and bags manufacturing plants;
• Most of our
  people depend on cattle, sheep, goats and pigs for meat, milk, ghee,
  cheese, hair, honey, butter, manure, incense, animal blood, poultry
  products, hides and skins. In the villages, farmers use cattle bulls for
  carting, plowing, and hauling. Thousands of people wholly or partly
  make their livings from selling, milking, butchering, or transporting
  herds. Cattle and animal owners, thus play an important role in the
  economy and nutrition of our communities. With its value-chain, it is
  potentially a multi-trillion naira industry. We therefore need to
  establish ranches, prohibit open oscillating grazing that has been the
  source of communal conflicts in the state, and facilitate the
  establishment of wide range of animal feeds industries and water
  treatment plants to develop animal-related industrial bases in the
  state. This will cover all types of animal – cattle, sheep, goats, pigs,
  poultry, etc. This way, beyond creating wealth through animal husbandry
  and its value chain, we would also be halting the perennial conflicts
  between farmers and herders, thus entrenching peaceful coexistence
  amongst our peoples;
• To facilitate the promotion of such strong
  economy we need to rescue the ecology. The rate at which desert
  encroachment is ravaging our state is alarming, and no viable economy,
  least of all agro-allied based economy, can be developed and sustained
  under such a condition. Hence, in addition to the planting of economic
  trees, we will also embark on a massive tree-planting initiative to push
  back the encroaching desert in a synchronized reforestation programme.
  Every indigene of voting age in the state will therefore be required to
  plant and nurture at least two trees around his or her domains. A
  Saturday will be officially set aside every month for this purpose. Only
  the sick or 70 years and above will be exempted by choice. Every public
  servant in the state will be expected to have at least one tree in
  addition to the compulsory two required of all indigenes. Incentives
  will also be given to any person with more than three trees. Any child
  below voting age who plants and nurtures two trees or more will be
  rewarded with a price, the details of which will be determined after due
  assessments. Of course the law prohibiting cutting down of trees will
  be firmly enforced, while making available adequate alternatives of
  cooking fuel for all households in the state. Adamawa must return to its
  natural green ecosystem; and
• In order to maximize our advantage in
  the agricultural sector and turn our zone into agronomic hub of the
  country, we need to initiate the formation of Agricultural Community of
  Benue Valley States (ACOBEVAS) comprising Adamawa, Gombe, Taraba, Benue,
  Nasarawa and Kogi states. Indeed, the ecology of these six states is
  most conducive for farming, fishing and animal husbandry. The objective
  is to cooperate by putting the strengths, skills, lands, labour and
  resources of member states together and develop the Benue Valley region
  into an agricultural base, and list our state (and zone) among the
  wealthy states of the federation. I am confident that we are capable of
  achieving such a feat if we put our minds to it.

Essentially,
our aim is to create economic value for our society and end its
reliance on Federal Allocation. With any drastic fall in oil prices as a
result of world politics, the Coronavirus Pandemic, constitutional
change in the revenue allocation formula or any unforeseen eventuality
that stops the oil money from coming in (as we are witnessing
currently), Adamawa state is doomed! As the current internally generated
revenue is nothing to write home about, the state is left steeped in
loans and debts that mortgaged our future. And with incompetent, corrupt
and obtuse leadership in place with little or no initiatives, Adamawa
state will soon drift to a complete collapse. This is how bad it can be.
We cannot and should not allow things continue this way. The
Coronavirus Pandemic and the economic recession have shown how weak our
society is, and how dishonest and feeble our leaderships have been.
Politically, we must then as a people, change our attitude by
transcending the inadequacies of our societal prejudices, overcoming our
shortcomings and limitations, harnessing our abilities and potentials,
and creating for our state responsible and responsive leaderships at all
levels of governance.

If we have to survive and grow in this
highly competitive world then we must stand up and seriously work for
that survival in our own interest and that of our children. This is what
I beg of all Adamawa indigenes, for our sake and for the sake of our
children, and our children’s children. On our part we commit ourselves
once again to leading this all-important drive and I pray that Adamawa
people will understand its significance, key in to achieve the purpose
and save our future.

Thank you, God bless Adamawa State, God bless our efforts and happy Sallah.