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The Governorship candidate of the relatively non-present African Democratic Congress (ADC), Sokoto State, Manir Mohammad Dan’iya, recently sought to make his presence felt in Sokoto political circles by framing the present water challenge in the metropolis as evidence of Governor Ahmad Aliyu’s ineffectiveness in addressing the people’s need for water across the state. His comment, rather than eliciting support for his governorship chase, so-called, has incited the people of the state against him and his party. He seems to have fired a shot that only injured his ambition because the Sokoto electorate has not had a better deal than it is currently enjoying with Aliyu.
Daniya’s remarks framing water scarcity in Sokoto metropolis as evidence of “governance failure” under Governor Ahmad Aliyu deserve a direct and factual response because the facts require no defence. What they require is context, and context is precisely what Daniya’s criticism failed to provide.
Sokoto’s water crisis is not a creation of the Aliyu administration. It is a structural, decades-old inheritance rooted in the state’s topography, ageing infrastructure, and the failure of successive governments, especially Aliyu’s immediate predecessor, to address the problem at its root rather than patch it at the surface. To lay this history at the feet of a governor barely three years into office, while ignoring the machinery he met on the ground floor and has since had to rebuild, is not analysis but political opportunism. No reasonable person will take it as advocacy.
If transparency means governing in the open, publishing what has been spent, showing where the money went, and inviting citizens and even political rivals to inspect the results, then Governor Aliyu’s water interventions are precisely that. His investments in the state water sector are public, verifiable, and itemised records, not just a slogan to woo the electorate.
Upon assumption of office, the Aliyu administration did not wait for a crisis to announce itself before acting. It immediately constituted an emergency committee dedicated to Sokoto’s water supply challenges, chaired at the highest levels of government, including the Deputy Governor himself. That is not the posture of a government hiding from a problem but the intentional posture of a government that named and identified the problem publicly on day one, and went about solving it.
Within the administration’s first hundred days, roughly 42 boreholes across Sokoto metropolis and its environs were renovated and restored to functionality. This is the kind of unglamorous, ground-level intervention that does not make for dramatic press conferences but makes an immediate difference to a household fetching water at dawn.
However, the centrepiece of the Aliyu administration’s water strategy is not a promise but a contract, publicly awarded at a cost of over N14.1 billion, covering six major water production stations across the metropolis. These include Tamaje, Old Airport, Gagi, Mana, Runjin Sambo, and Rugar Liman. These are not abstract projects but on-the-ground projects that are verifiable. The Tamaje Water Scheme has already been completed and commissioned, and is currently delivering three million gallons daily on its own. It is expected that, with the full water project network operationalised across all six stations, at which work is at advanced stages of completion, some 40 million gallons of water per day will be pumped into Sokoto city and its surrounding communities. That figure alone would represent one of the most significant single expansions of urban water capacity in the state’s recent history.
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Governor Aliyu has publicly and repeatedly acknowledged that his water infrastructure plan builds on a foundation laid by former Governor Aliyu Wamakko. This was work that had stalled for years under the administration Daniya served as Deputy Governor. Rather than abandon a dormant project for political convenience, or claim false originality, the Aliyu government chose the harder, less flattering path of completing what Daniya’s administration abandoned. If indeed Daniya is seriously searching for what constitutes “governance failure,” he should be directed to explain to the people why a ten-year-old water vision sat idle until the Aliyu administration revived it.
It is also worth noting that the Aliyu administration has publicly committed to restoring all 72 dams across Sokoto State to functionality. This is a target that extends water security beyond the capital to the rural communities. This means that the problem is already being addressed not as a campaign promise but as an action of transformative leadership that aims to improve the quality of life of residents of the state irrespective of where they reside. So, Aliyu’s intervention in the water sector is not confined to Sokoto metropolis. It is a statewide undertaking, openly stated and openly tracked.
Perhaps most tellingly, the Aliyu administration’s own commissioner for water resources has publicly and repeatedly acknowledged, on record, the obsolete equipment inherited, the vandalism of infrastructure by hoodlums, the high cost of diesel, and the absence of reliable electricity. All these factors slow progress. A government engaged in a cover-up will not narrate its own obstacles in detail. As a public administrator and someone who has been involved in political leadership of the state, transparency does not translate to the absence of problems, but to the willingness to name them in public, not bury them.
Daniya talks of federation allocations and demands they be measured against visible impact. It is fair enough that he holds that standard. But he is refusing to apply it honestly. A N14 billion, publicly awarded, partially completed, and independently commissioned water infrastructure project, witnessed by dignitaries, former governors, and a sitting governor from another state who described it as a reflection of people-centred governance, is precisely the kind of visible impact that Daniya demands. It will be gratifying if Daniya can also look back and point to any public water project executed by the government he was part of, with an equal amount of impact, financial accountability and transparency. Daniya could be accused of deception when he invokes the standard of visibility and then looks away from the most visible water project that Sokoto State has seen in more than a decade.
What Daniya is offering Sokoto people, as a governorship candidate, is instead a rhetorical framing: just to throw “governance failure” at Aliyu without an alternative plan, a costed and verified proposal, or an account of what a Dan’iya administration inherited and did differently when he held executive office in the state. Criticism without a record to stand on is not oversight but campaign noise.
Governor Aliyu’s water agenda may not be perfect, and none is. However, no honest observer would claim water scarcity in Sokoto metropolis is fully resolved. Six production stations were awarded, and one has been completed, commissioned and is working. Others remain work in progress. That is a legitimate basis for scrutiny. But scrutiny and mischaracterisation are not the same thing. To call a government that has publicly contracted, partially delivered, and openly narrated its water challenges “opaque” or “failed” is not holding power accountable but inciting the public to refuse to see what Ahmad Aliyu has already built in front of them.
Sokoto’s water future will not be secured by campaign slogans from the roadside. It will be secured by the kind of dam-by-dam, borehole-by-borehole, station-by-station work already being executed by Aliyu. These are undeniably work in motion, undeniably itemised, and undeniably public. All these are there for Daniya to verify. But he won’t because the reality will confound him and imperil his campaign.
