Dr Bukar Shuaib, doyen of Nigerian vets 20 years on (II)
I was privileged to share the same vehicle with them that fine July morning. 1979 was my second year with the authority, where I was posted as an admin officer in the General Manager’s office. I also served as secretary to a number of committees, including the South Chad Irrigation Project (SCIP) Launching Committee. The beautifully […]
I was privileged to share the same vehicle with them that fine July morning. 1979 was my second year with the authority, where I was posted as an admin officer in the General Manager’s office. I also served as secretary to a number of committees, including the South Chad Irrigation Project (SCIP) Launching Committee.
The beautifully tarred 80km road from Maiduguri to Dikwa, with the 22km detour to New Marte, had been completed a year earlier, and it took us less than an hour to reach the project headquarters. Throughout the short journey, AJKG Imam, the General Manager, was debriefing Dr Shuaib on how the launch went, particularly the Head of State’s impression of the project’s laid-down infrastructure and its future.
Upon reaching New Marte, we took a tour of the resplendent crop fields, the canals, and the pumping station, areas shown to the Head of State, and went through the settlements of Kirenowa, Logomani, Ala, and the rest. At stops, here and there, Dr Shuaib mingled with the farmers to ask one or two questions, perhaps relishing his field days of the 1950s. That was typical Bukar Shuaib, closely monitoring projects that were close to his heart, even when he was officially outside the ambit of the FMAWR.
He had a deep abiding interest in the progress of the basin authorities, particularly CBDA, SRBDA and Hadejia-Jama’are River Basin Development Authorities that he considered most viable, whose waters, if properly harnessed, would have contributed immensely to the food security of the country. I guess many officials who served in these authorities, and probably in other organs of the FMAWR, would have similar stories to tell of Dr Shuaib’s intense engagements with them. Fortunately, he never strayed far afield. He was destined not to remain in Rome for long. When Shehu Shagari became president in 1979, he appointed Bukar Shuaib as the National Security Adviser (NSA).
It was one of the exceptional times when a civilian occupied that office. It turned out to be a fortuitous turn of events, as President Shagari, at the time, wanted the NSA to focus on food security, which Dr Shuaib was well attuned to. The president’s party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), focused on agriculture, with the Green Revolution as its war cry, and Dr Shuaib became pivotal to the scheme. The Green Revolution was a well-thought-out scheme, building on the previous government’s Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), but the politicians made a mess of its implementation.
Dr Shuaib came out of it all with his reputation unscathed, and when the military struck on the last day of 1983, the new government, headed by General Muhammadu Buhari, appointed Dr Shuaib as Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources. It was a return to the well-trodden turf, working with many of the staff that he had known over the decades. There was excitement in the ministry. Work built up to a frenetic pace across all the organs of the ministry. It was said that Dr Shuaib saw the River Basin Development Authorities (RBDAs) as the principal vehicles for executing federal government initiatives and was said to have channelled the bulk of the FMAWR’s budget to them to enhance grassroots implementation and federal influence in state-level farming operations.
No doubt, during that period, the federal government’s presence in the agricultural sector across the states was greatly enhanced. His tenure was destined to be short, as internal disagreement within the military high command led to a change of leadership in the government in August 1985. A palace coup took place, led by General Ibrahim Babangida, and in the ensuing fallout, Dr Shuaib lost his ministerial perch.
Nevertheless, he remained a close adviser on agriculture to succeeding governments. The federal government continued to draw on his talents and wide-ranging international connections. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr Shuaib continued to chair several committees related to agriculture and the environment. He was Chairman of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency from its inception in 1988 until it assumed a ministerial status in the 1990s. He was the Chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Agricultural Research until 1999.
Earlier, he had served as a member, and later as Chairman, of the Board of Trustees of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, and the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA), Abidjan. Further away, Dr Shuaib was a permanent fixture at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), where he served as a member representing Nigeria for many years and, on occasion, as its chairman. At the West African level, Dr Shuaib was deeply involved in bringing together the subregional heads of states to form both the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), with headquarters in N’Djamena and the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), with headquarters in Niamey. He represented Nigeria in these regional organisations for many years, as well.
In his twilight years, Dr Shuaib relocated permanently to his residence near the Custom Bridge in Maiduguri, spending quality time with his childhood friends and classmates, which included Ambassador Bukar Kolo, Dr Musa Goni, Engr Tata Askira, Bukar Marte and Prof Umaru Shehu. He was easily accessible, kept an open door for all who needed his counsel, and readily allowed anyone who asked to tap into his vast network.