Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani has told visitors that there has not been an ethno‑religious crisis in the state since he assumed office on May 29, 2023, and urged other states seeking to replicate the Kaduna Peace Model to diagnose their own security drivers before adopting it.
Sani made the remarks on Tuesday when the Implementation Monitoring Committee of the National Economic Council paid a courtesy visit to Sir Kashim Ibrahim House. He said the model’s success rests on community ownership, inclusiveness and a focus on governance rather than politics.
“When my administration came in, there was a lot of trust deficit between the government and the people. That was the first thing we addressed,” he said, adding that his government also tackled issues of justice, equity and fairness that had been exploited by “conflict entrepreneurs” hiding behind religion and ethnicity.
Sani said Kaduna’s security challenges previously comprised both ethno‑religious violence and criminality such as kidnapping and banditry, and that data showed more lives were lost to religious crises than to banditry. “From our statistics and data, we realize that we lost more lives as a result of the religious crises in Kaduna State than even banditry. And that is the reason why we sat down and looked at the situation,” he said.
He claimed the Kaduna Peace Model has ended ethno‑religious clashes in the state and significantly reduced kidnapping and banditry because it is home‑grown and community‑driven. “I make bold to say that there has never been any incidence of ethno‑religious crisis in Kaduna since I became governor,” he said.
Sani listed several development gains tied to the security improvements, saying his administration has reclaimed more than 500,000 hectares of farmland, reopened more than 100 previously abandoned schools, and brought over 150 primary health centres back into operation. He also noted that Kaduna is the only subnational entity to have upgraded all 255 primary healthcare centres to level‑2 status and that 16 of 20 previously moribund secondary health facilities have been remodelled.
On education and skills, the governor said Kaduna focuses on both formal schooling and skills acquisition. He said the state’s Institutes of Vocational and Skill Development have graduated about 4,300 trainees, all certified by the National Board for Technical Education, and that the state has reclaimed at least 300,000 of some 550,000 out‑of‑school children, according to UNICEF and Bureau of Statistics records. “Education is one of our major priorities, and that’s the reason why we always budget at least 26% of our budget to education since we came in,” he added.
Agriculture, Sani said, remains the state’s mainstay—employing 60% of the workforce and contributing 43% of Kaduna’s GDP. He said the agriculture budget rose from N1.4 billion in 2023 to about N123 billion, and that Kaduna now leads the country in maize, tomato and ginger production. The governor also highlighted a programme that distributed 900 truckloads of free fertilizer to more than 240,000 smallholder farmers last year and pledged to repeat the exercise in the coming week.
Sani urged states interested in adopting the Kaduna model to “relegate politics and focus on governance,” noting the model’s emphasis on neutrality in political, religious or geographical affiliation. He said Kaduna was the first subnational to launch a Special Agro‑Processing Zone to boost the agricultural value chain, and that several states have reached out to learn from Kaduna’s approach.
