Two years into the administration of Governor Uba Sani, Kaduna State presents a portrait both hopeful and troubling, one marked by flashes of progress and deep, systemic voids. As someone who has travelled across the state over the past fourteen months, excluding the security-challenged Birnin Gwari axis, I have witnessed a mix of infrastructural ambition and policy ambiguity, a government at work but often without a coherent compass. The central question that now demands honest engagement is not what has been done, but what matters. And more importantly: what endures.
The first and perhaps most noticeable shift under Uba Sani’s leadership has been the relative peace that Kaduna has enjoyed compared to the previous eight years. For a state that was fast descending into a theatre of ethno-religious polarization and bloodshed, this is not a minor achievement. Dialogue, restraint, and a more consultative approach to governance appear to have replaced the abrasive, divisive tone that once defined public discourse. If we must begin our assessment somewhere, let it be here, because peace, while often undervalued in development narratives, is the very condition for everything else.
But peace is only the foundation. It is not, in itself, a development strategy. And this is where the administration begins to falter. Development is not the sum total of visible infrastructure projects or headline-grabbing interventions. It is the quiet, consistent improvement in the capacity of institutions to deliver outcomes that citizens value – education that builds the mind, healthcare that saves lives, transportation that connects opportunity, and public administration that empowers rather than suffocates.
In education, the governor’s intention to tackle the crisis of out-of-school children is commendable. It speaks to a social concern that too many political actors gloss over. But the goal, though noble, is monumental in its demands, financial, logistical, cultural, and institutional. It is not enough to push children into schools; we must ask a more urgent question: what are they learning?
Far too often, Kaduna’s public schools still operate as holding spaces rather than learning environments. Classrooms are overcrowded, teachers under-trained, and materials outdated. While the politics of enrollment may be easier to manage and report, the economics of learning is far more difficult, and more essential. As Lant Pritchett has long warned, the global south suffers not from a lack of schooling, but from a “learning crisis,” where students move through formal systems with little to show in literacy, numeracy, or cognitive skills.
We must aspire not only to universal education but to meaningful education, and for that, Kaduna needs a philosophical foundation. Singapore’s model offers useful guidance: a system built on meritocracy, teacher quality, and education aligned with economic strategy. Dubai, through Vision 2021 and its Knowledge and Human Development Authority, measures education not just by pass rates, but by 21st-century competencies like collaboration, creativity, and digital fluency. What is Kaduna’s educational philosophy? Is there even one? Or are we merely expanding a dysfunctional system with no vision of the future learner in mind?
Healthcare suffers from a similar syndrome. There has been a proliferation of hospitals and primary health care centers, many of which are either poorly staffed, under-equipped, or unsustainably maintained. There is a tendency in Nigerian governance to equate construction with reform, to confuse the visible with the valuable. Yet public health, like education, thrives not on brick and mortar but on systems and services. Access, affordability, availability, and sustainability—these are the four dimensions that matter. And across the state, citizens still grapple with clinics that have no doctors, facilities with no drugs, and institutions with no funds. The reality is that many rural communities still rely on traditional healers, not out of preference, but due to the sheer absence of options.
Here again, the state’s development model appears to mimic rather than innovate. The term isomorphic mimicry, coined in development literature, refers to the tendency of states to adopt the forms of functional institutions without adopting their functionality. The previous administration was notorious for this – producing policies that dazzled on paper but bore little resemblance to the lived realities of citizens. There is a danger that this government, despite its calmer rhetoric, may fall into the same trap: premature load-bearing, where fragile systems are burdened with complex tasks they are ill-prepared to perform. This is not how sustainable development is built.
Governor Uba Sani’s administration must begin to move away from a “spider model” of governance, centralized, hierarchical, and slow, to a “starfish model”, adaptive, decentralized, and empowering. This is especially vital for sectors like education and health where local conditions vary dramatically and top-down policies rarely reach the last mile. Teachers need autonomy; local health centers need budgets they can control; communities need mechanisms for feedback and redress. Without this shift, reforms will remain cosmetic.
There is also the larger question of strategy. Development is not a checklist, it is a discipline. Kaduna today lacks a clearly articulated, long-term development strategy rooted in the state’s socio-economic context, cultural landscape, and political realities. There is little evidence of systems thinking, of adaptive planning, or of institutional learning. We see projects, but we don’t see purpose. We hear announcements, but not alignment. A government without strategic coherence will always be playing catch-up, reacting to crises rather than shaping the future.
And yet, the opportunity remains. Governor Sani still has time to define his legacy not through what he builds, but through what he builds that lasts. It is time to surround himself not with cheerleaders, but with thinkers, planners, reformers, and dissenters. The philosopher Karl Popper once said, “All life is problem-solving.” But not all governance is. Some governance is problem-hiding, or worse, problem-creating. Kaduna can no longer afford that luxury.
To govern well in today’s world is not to perform; it is to solve. Not to impress, but to impact. Not to announce, but to deliver. The people of Kaduna deserve more than good intentions—they deserve competent execution, thoughtful strategy, and human-centred systems that put learning before schooling, care before clinics, and substance before style.
As we move into the second half of Uba Sani’s first term, the onus is on his administration to define what truly matters and then to build it, not for applause, but for posterity.
