An All Progressives Congress (APC) governorship aspirant in Benue State, Dr. Jeffrey Kuraun, is a geologist in the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) with over 20 years post qualification experience in upstream oil and gas, and mining industry. He’s a philanthropist, a youth mobiliser and founder of Jeffrey Kuraun Foundation (JKF).
He had worked as senior seismologist at United Geophysical and as Business Development Manager at ANS Energy Services and Standards & Baldwin. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology & Mining from the University of Jos and a Master of Science degree in Field & Well Management (Engineering) now Petroleum Production Engineering, from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom. He is an active member of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE), Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). He won the 1st prize in the Nigerian Mining and Geoscience Society/Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited award for the BSc thesis in Geoscience in Nigerian universities. He also holds a Master Class Certificate in Business Administration from London Graduate School and honorary Doctorate in Business Management, Specialising in Oil and Gas from Commonwealth University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of Nigeria. He has served in several technical committees and participated in many professional training programmes, seminars and workshops, locally and abroad.
Kuraun served as an external examiner with WAEC) and participated in both national and international subject panel meetings for curriculum development, item writing and moderation of workshops, including a review of the West African Senior Secondary Certificate of Education syllabus in Mining.
In this exclusive interview with THERESA MOSES, he talks about 2023 general election, insecurity, the future of youths, his humanitarian projects, and sundry issues.
As a governorship aspirant, do youth think the youth are ready for 2023 General Election?
Yes, I think they are ready because 2023 is very unique. A lot of people are more enlightened about politics and the importance of selecting or electing their leaders. The youths in particular understand the importance of participating in decision-making process. They have been often neglected, used and dumped in the past. They are ready; next year is not going to be business as usual. A lot of youths have shown lots of interest in participating in politics. Whether they want to contest for position or want to vote, they have demonstrated their interest that they will be fully involved in whatever happens next year.
Do you think party chieftains and the political elite would allow the youth to become a state governor or Nigerian president?
The answer is yes. Yes, because even the parties are already showing that. They are already incorporating the youths into positions. You can see the major party already have that: the PDP National Youth Leader, how young he is. You can see the one for my party, the APC; apart from that we also have younger people holding positions. Recently in my party, we elected a young lady as a National Women Leader and in my state, Benue; my party has the youngest chairman compared to any other state in Nigeria. The party is already showing interest in ensuring that young people participate and hold positions that will take the party to the next level.
We are yet to see more youths coming out for key positions like the presidency or governorship, why?
Service has to do with the individual and I want to believe that every youth that wants to participate or wants to present him/herself to serve should come out and do that; they shouldn’t hesitate. I’m participating and so many will; we have suffered and this is the chance that we have and we must demonstrate that we have the capacity that we are ready to serve and take a step of making things better.
What’s your take on the state of insecurity in the country?
We are in a very bad situation; I’m not making excuses for the government; they may have done what they think is their best but, in my opinion, that best is not good enough for Nigeria. The recent challenge we had in Kaduna is a clear demonstration that we are not on top of our game, that’s the truth. Security for me is not the responsibility of a particular person, but the responsibility of everybody. We all are stakeholders and we must show interest or play our parts to secure our country. Nobody out there is going to do it for us; we don’t have to rely on the President, the Chief Security Officer (CSO) of this country to change the security situation. We are not going to rely on the ministers, or the National Assembly members or the judiciary, or the governors to change the security situation. It simply means that all of us have failed, if this is the situation we find ourselves and should admit that fact, and the need to take up necessary steps to see what we can do to play our role effectively to change the situation.
What necessary steps are you implying?
How does the president, the CSO of the country feel when he listens or watches on television the situation of the country? I’m sure he’s not proud of the situation. Look at the National Assembly: Do we have a certain budget that they are meant to approve in order to secure or equip personnel to be able to secure our people, lives and property and they have not approved of it or have they turned it down. Do they think that the budget is too much to secure lives? The whole essence of governance is security; that’s their role in the National Assembly. What about the Police, Nigerian Army, Air Force, Navy? They have a responsibility, a role to play. What are they doing – are they within themselves jeopardizing the whole process? Do they have moles within them, do they have informants to this bandits – same thing with the police and civilians. What role are we playing? We recently had a challenge on that Kaduna-Abuja train that should not happen in this country. If we spent a lot of money to build that piece of infrastructure, that kind of transportation system that we’ve been yearning for so many years and now we have it. It’s helping a lot of people, most people work in Kaduna but stay in Abuja; while some working in Abuja stay in Kaduna. The rail is the best thing that has happened to this country. And one day, just over night, we’ve destroyed it completely. It’s going to cost us more than what we had to rebuild it. Who’s doing what and why have we not ensured that we have security information (intelligence report) ahead of time. Why are we being rational, why don’t we take proactive steps to ensure that some of these do not happen.
If you ask me – I am not a security expert neither a transportation expert, but – I believe there should be effective security surveillance in place and enough security personnel patrolling the place. If we have bandits coming just to derail the train or create that kind of anarchy, then a lot of lives has been lost. Who do you blame? Everybody is to blame; because you don’t even know if people (someone) in that train provided information to these bandits. You have no idea if the train didn’t have enough policemen or people that were well-equipped to be able to repel some of these attacks. We have endangered the lives of civilians, helpless people, just because we refused to put certain things in place. It’s something we should be ashamed of. I feel very disappointed that we’ve not been able to handle the situation till it escalated to this level. We have challenges on our roads: a trip to Abuja by road has been a death trap, everybody knows that; the only way or opportunity to go to Abuja from Kaduna is the rail. Now we don’t have it. How do you expect people to cope? Most people can’t afford to fly; already we are hearing bandits went into the airport (Kaduna); that has never happened, the situation is getting worse. Somebody needs to rise up to the occasion, starting from the President, National Assembly members, judiciary, Nigeria Police Force, Civil Defence, military, everybody, including civilians. Whatever you can do – even if it’s a piece of information or some knowledge that you think will help to calm the situation. Let’s stand up and ensure we secure our borders, our country; nobody is going to salvage the country for us. We have the responsibility to make Nigeria better than what it is today.
As a Nigerian, what steps do you consider necessary to make the country great again?
The first thing that we need is sincerity of purpose. A lot of people are deceptive; we lie about everything, almost anything. We need to play our role in our own little space where we found ourselves. If something is budgeted for security, hospital or education – starting from the allocation – we need to be honest about it. We don’t need to bloat the bills or the budget just to have something in one’s pocket. We don’t need to frustrate any process that we know will be beneficial to our society for our own personal gains. A lot is going on. When people talk about corruption: I’d say, what is corruption? For me, I call it disrespect and insincerity. You have a budget for hospitals, drugs and you don’t want to spend it for that purpose; you want to divert it for your own personal use. That’s disrespect, dishonesty, insincerity. And these are the basic things we need to do without really pointing the accusing finger.
The other thing we can do quickly is to focus on good leadership. We’ve never had good leadership in this country, even when we have a select few that want to do the right thing, we just mess things up. We have a lot of people in government today that are frustrating the efforts of the government. We have people today who are not ready to do the right thing. The best thing we can do is use the ballot, our PVC to change the situation. Again, it comes to the same corruption, insincerity, dishonesty that I am talking about. Let’s not think about politics, what people will give us, but take the decision and make that conscious effort that we will select, nominate or elect our leaders – people we think that are not corrupt. We will not necessarily recycle; we can’t keep having the same set of people. If you are doing something that’s not working, change it. We can’t keep having the same set of people come to lie to us, tell us stories and they do nothing. We should see what these people have done in the past before we take a decision of bringing them back. Next year is going to be critical in this country. We must come out and be honest, sincere and do the right thing, and refuse to be bought this time.
Why do you want to become the governor of Benue State?
I am challenged, highly motivated and inspired to do what am doing and I believe that the right time to do it is now. We cannot keep postponing or sitting on the fence and criticizing what’s happening; we need to participate, come in and be part of decision making process. We need to offer ourselves to serve people if we are capable and I think I am eminently qualified to do it. In Benue, we have a vision to redefine the Benue of our dream. We care about security, just all-inclusiveness: people will have the sense of belonging when we can take governance to the people of Benue. One of the challenges we have in our society today is that even during election, nomination for candidates, people feel disenfranchised, defeated; they don’t feel carried along. As a matter of fact, there are people who call this country a Zoo; people have lost hope in the leadership of our state, local governments and even the country. There are people who say the President is not doing well, the next president will come and we will still criticize and say Buhari is better or Goodluck was better, Obasanjo was better, etc. This is the way we analyse leaders, yet we also have people who will support them. Generally, whether they support you or not, we are not living well. We are suffering in this country and some people like me have decided not to be talking on social media, granting interviews or writing in the papers – I will offer myself because I’ve prepared myself towards it. We have a development plan, done a lot of consultations with different stakeholders, politicians, religious leaders, etc., and have discussed with many people, put up a document that is feasible that we can use to fix our state.
Our situation in Benue is worse. Worse because the basic things you can have in life is food, even if you don’t have a house, clothes, you should be able to feed. That’s the only way to survive and Benue is capable of feeding this country. We are so endowed with natural resources, agricultural potential, and we must harness it, that’s our strength. We just keep going in circle. I am coming on board by the Grace of God with a plan to be able to unlock the agricultural potentials of our state and take our state back to its rightful place as the food basket of the nation; raise the GDP and be able to take care of its citizens, visitors, settlers, raise the standard of living. Majority of our people are farmers, no place to go to or turn to, we must be able to provide a good and enabling environment for them to do what they know how to do best. This is the way to go for us in Benue State and, by the Grace of God, I believe this is going to happen when I become the governor of Benue State.
There’s hunger in the land – how do we change the mindset of money politics?
This is why we need to keep sensitizing our people. We have a huge responsibility of talking to the electorate, eligible voters, telling them that we’ve suffered (enough); this idea of money politics has not helped us. What do we do? It’s better to starve (for a while) and do the right thing than have a meal and everything goes wrong, and we go back to square zero. This is a choice that we have to make for our country. As a matter of fact, people have already paid the supreme sacrifice for this country – this sacrifice of staying hungry for the right thing so that tomorrow will be better is a way to go; and we have a responsibility (you and I) to sensitize people, tell them that what has happened in the past, receiving N500 to do the wrong thing. Choose today what you want to do, weather to collect N500 or #1,000 to sell your vote or you want to be hungry knowing that the result of what you’ve done will be better. This is something we must do; we must not fail to elect leaders that will do the right thing; who have the record of doing the right thing. We have people like that in this country and I am very proud to say I’m one of them.
You’ve given to the less-privileged, the elderly, and for youth empowerment through Jeffery Kuraun Foundation – what inspired you?
First, I return all the glory to God, it’s not about me. My motivation comes from what (Catholic’s) Mother Teresa said: ‘If you can’t feed a hundred, then feed one.’ It’s our responsibility to do the right thing, to sensitize the people. I am very proud of the Foundation; we started it some years ago and God has been faithful. I want to encourage everybody who wants to help in any way, to help. You don’t need to be a multi-millionaire or a millionaire to help; help sometimes doesn’t necessary means money. There are people out there who just need professional advice, kind word from friends, colleagues or neighbours. When we set out to assist people using our foundation, we were not going out to distribute money, we don’t have the money. We initiate projects that we know will be impactful and lots of people who see what we are doing come in to contribute money and we execute and account for it. That’s why I said God has been helping us and I return all the glory to Him. There are a lot of people that can help do a lot more than what we are doing, they have the financial and human resources. Sensitization is very important; we have to let our people know the impact of good governance, importance of assisting one another because we all need help and people need help. The whole essence of living is affordability; socio-economic security is what we seek from government. People need to afford healthcare, feeding, shelter, clothing, etc. – the basic things in life.
What are your final words?
Let’s pray for this country, sensitise the people, particularly the women and youths. The women are the backbone of the country and the youths are the commonwealth of the nation. Let’s ensure we have enough youth, participation like we’ve never had in this country because this is the only way we can salvage our country. We need young men and women who will go out there and work, engage themselves, focus on delivering this country from the current challenges that we have. Make sure you have your voters’ card.
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