There’s No Substitute For Loyalty To Your Boss - Borno Dep Gov

DibalWhile some deputy governors in the country today are finding it difficult to work with their bosses, the Borno State deputy governor, Alhaji Adamu Shettima Dibal, is getting on smoothly with his own. How? He says “There is no substitute for loyalty.” In this interview with JAMES BWALA, the deputy governor spoke on issues of loyalty as well as sundry others. Excerpts:

What motivated you into politics?
I was in business and specifically, I was into shipping for the better part of the period I was in Lagos. Apparently, because of the kind of family we were born into and the kind of society where we were doing business, it turned out that while we were working and earning our daily bread, we were actually practicing politics. And so, by 2002 when I ventured into partisan politics, it was a kind of home coming. Though, I had participated in politics, it was not to vie for any elective post. In 1979, during the Second Republic, I was a young Presiding Officer, and during the SDP/NRC era, I assisted some friends that were vying for some; but of course, 2002 was a kind of home coming. It was the same people that we had been mingling with that turned out to be our supporters and it was our good people, the elders, the religious leaders and the traditional rulers that asked us to come and join partisan politics.

As the Deputy Governor of Borno State, what can you consider as the achievement of the administration in the last five years?
Basically, I believe that we have achieved virtually all of the things that we promised to do for the people of Borno State. You know, what we have been able to achieve as a government I am sure that it is by the grace of God Almighty. It is a team work, the governor himself, my humble self, the SSG, Commissioners, and all those that make-up our team. If you can cast your mind to 2003 when we came in, it was indeed a sorry state at that time and the coming of the governor was like that of a messiah. I am happy that I have been a part of the positive development.

From 2003 to date, several reports were carried out on deputy governors and their bosses, with many of them having one problem or the other, but certainly not in your case. Instead, you were an example being given as one of a supportive deputy governors, how did you achieve this cordiality with the governor?
Well, it may not be the first time that I have heard such remarks, but we thank God that everything is going on well. I have always said that I am a very lucky person, I am lucky in the sense that my boss was born and brought up in a kind of family setting similar to and he is all along looking after us as his own younger brothers and sisters and we, of course, have been looking at him from that angle, not only as a boss but as a big brother from whose wealth of experience we could always tap. And so, everything has been very smooth, very educative and very successful and we give thanks to God. If my friends from the media see us as being very supportive, then I would say that we should give credit to God and also the governor whom we are working for and who has given us the opportunity, and the people of Borno State.

History has shown that dealing with people has never been easy particularly when one is in a leadership position, where one has to attend to people’s needs. We want to know if you ever thought of resigning as deputy governor owing to pressure from the people and work?
Well, I cannot precisely say no; this is a public office and, of course, there are times that the pressure may be unbearable. You know a lot of requests are being made , a lot of responsibilities and so on. Somebody who is, maybe a thousand miles away from you, each time his wife has a miscarriage, thinks of you and if he has access to you, he would always want you to attend to him. Yes, sometimes it can be very tiring and very demanding, but, of course, if I compare that with my private life when I was in business, the only difference is that here, I am trying to offer my service to the good people of our state while in the other I was trying to make some money. But I think the two are almost the same in terms of demand. I was coming from an organization that was also very demanding, very tiring and very tasking. As a Muslim, whatever comes your way, I believe, is meant by God. So the challenge might be there, but not to the point of wanting to resign.

What lesson would you like people to learn from your education and political background?
I think I would want to advise strongly those our brothers and sisters who would like to go into business or politics to be patient and try at all times to learn more and talk less. When I came in 2003, I had never worked in a public office before, and so too was my governor. He had been in private business, but we had had contact with a lot of people and we had also worked for the state government and the federal government. But I believe that one should be prayerful and one should also be patient and submissive to the will of Allah and, of course, to his immediate constituency. So, if you are a deputy governor, you have to be supportive of your governor at all times, you cannot be the commander-in-chief because there is only one captain in a ship, therefore, the governor is the commander-in-chief of the state. You are there to support and deputize for him, you are what some people call “a spare tire”. It takes much to arrive at certain junctions of life.

With this cordial relationship between you and the governor, are you not seeing yourself as a governor-in waiting to succeed him?
I am telling you, I have not been thinking about that. One thing that I know is that the mandate given to us by the good people of Borno State is still very much there, and the road is still too long for anybody to be thinking of succession. We still have about three years or there about, and so, as far as I am concerned, it is the delivery of the dividends of democracy to the people of Borno State that elected us into office that we are bothered about.And if I may quote my governor, well, he said, “Whoever is trying to succeed him; it is not yet time.” He said if you are a commissioner, you should do your work very well, if you are a chairman, go and chair well and whoever you are, you should go and give your best to the people of Borno State. When it is time, the stakeholders would sit down with him and go back to the score board and see who is capable of directing the affairs of the state and continue where he must have stopped, and I think that is my feeling too.

How can you describe the leadership qualities of the governor?
Well, I want to say that he is a politician to the core. When you talk about master tactician in terms of politics, a Professor Emeritus in politics, then you are talking about Senator (Dr.) Ali Modu Sheriff. I remember he was elected as a Senator three times and, of course, he has contributed immensely in his own way in trying to democratize Nigeria and indeed the state. If you cast your mind back to the time of the Zero Party, SDP/NRC and so on, you will agree with me that he has been a very active politician in addition to the fact that he was a business man. He is one man that would always want the dividends of democracy to get down to the grassroots. He would want everybody to have a taste of the good side of democracy, and that is why sometimes he would leave the state capital and go down to the grassroots to talk and listen to the people to see if at all they are feeling the impact of government. He is a workaholic, he hardly sleeps. Working with him, one must be up and doing because he has no time for non-performers when it comes to politics and administration.

What would you say are your fulfillment in this government?
Well, I would say that if anything, I believe that when it is time for students of history to write about Borno as a state and look at Nigeria as one united country, I am sure that they would come across my name somewhere hidden, and I am sure they would look at it and say, yes, there was a time somebody called Dibal was deputy governor to Senator (Dr.) Ali Modu Sheriff, and that they were able to achieve much. As a person, I do not believe that I have any legacy other than trying to make sure that I’m always there for the governor to assist him at all times. You know they do say loyalty should not be 99.9 per cent.

(Major) Al Mustapha would always tell you that loyalty must be 100 per cent, once you take one small fraction out, then it is no longer loyalty, it must be 100 per cent and that has been my motto, that has been me, that has been the man Dibal. To always be down to earth, to always be loyal and I thank God that sometimes my governor would look at me and smile and tell me the kind of words I would like to hear. The People of Southern Borno are looking at you as their representative, what would you say that you have been able to achieve for them? I believe, like I always say, that as a people, we have been able to achieve peace. Borno, as a state, has been a home of peace and hospitality and so too the people of Southern Borno. And I would say that the political stakeholders of the entire Southern Borno have been very supportive, they have been very prayerful and as people, we have been able to move forward. If for anything, I am sure the people we are working with would tell you that we have some credibility. Some kind of credibility has been injected into the polity and somebody would now look at you from Southern Borno and say yes, you are one person I can rely on, that is very important. It is the key word here; it is the ingredient to existence in any human endeavour. It is important for one person to turn back and look at you to say yes you are one person I can rely upon; you are indeed a dependable person.

What would be the hope of Borno State after you might have left office?
Well, when I cast my mind on 2003 when we took office, we met a state that was almost inexistent, so to say, and now look at it today, I have cause to smile, I know that we have been able to open up the state; we started from ground zero and met a debt of about N10 billion, which we were able to offset with time. Let me also tell you that all that we were able to achieve as dividends of democracy in terms of housing, in terms of road construction, in terms of drainages and what have you were done owing to Governor Sheriff’s stringent utilization of the little resources at our disposal without even receiving a kobo as loan from any bank within or outside the country. All that you see have been achieved using the merger resources accruable to the state, and my Governor has said that if for any reason we are able to achieve something in the last five years, then he would dedicate the remaining part of the tenure to making sure that when we are done, things would even be better than now.

What advice do you have for Borno youths, particularly those who are looking up to you as their role model?
I always look for that from the youths of Borno State . We are indeed a very lucky people, because it is not enough for you to come from a very wealthy environment without sound morality or good upbringing. I believe that we from this part of Nigeria are blessed with the kind of rich culture and morality in upbringing. I believe that all of us in the state are one people and we work as family. I tell you that anywhere you see a man from Borno State, you can see from his face that this or that man is indeed from Borno State. I have met with some of my friends from the southern part of the country and even outside the country and they have testified to this. Of course, we are indeed lucky that our parents and grandparents gave us much training in terms of living with your neighbor, living with your family and living with yourself, and so on and so forth, this is one thing you can find in every family in Borno State. You will find out that anybody that is in this part of Nigeria has this kind of humble beginning, this kind of unique upbringing from his family, be it a Muslim familyor Christian family and even those that came from other states to stay in Borno State and that is why we have this for our motto, “Home of Peace and Hospitality”. This is one thing that we found in ourselves as a people, it is not something that we imported. We were born into it, and we have a duty to move it further from where our parents must had left it.