The enormity of the challenges he inherited from his predecessor, Plateau State’s Governor Caleb Mutfwang has been battling to restore order in the North Central state since he assumed office three months ago. In this interview with reporters in Jos, the Plateau State capital, he speaks on how the administration has been doing to bring the state back on track.
Before we came into government, we had observed that Plateau State was in dire need of resuscitation. But, since we came on board, we have discovered that the situation is worse than we thought. Since we came on board three months ago, we discovered that there is no sector of life on the Plateau that does not need critical intervention. During the electioneering campaign, we were under the impression that the state had a debt overhang of about N200 billion. But, to our greatest surprise, we discovered that it had gotten up to 300 billion. We found that the civil service, which is the engine room of the government, was practically on its knees.
I say this not again just to blackmail people, but I can tell you we found a situation where even government documents were being typed in business centres, photocopied in business centres. This is because things as simple as paper were not available in the offices. We met a salary burden of five months which accumulated to well over 11 billion and we met workers on strike. So, it was a very grim situation that confronted us when we took over. And as you know, even before we came in, a reign of terror was suddenly unleashed on the state, particularly in Mangu and Riyom local governments. What we did upon coming on board was to tackle the issue of security headlong and one of the things we did immediately was to put out the true narrative for the world to know that there was no Plateau community fighting another community.
It was an insurgency and a reign of terrorism and we thought that it was necessary to put that in perspective so that the security agencies would be up and doing to get to the root of the problem.