Governor Sule: Changing the narrative in good governance

By Ali Abare

In Nigeria’s North Central geopolitical zone, Nasarawa State is witnessing a quiet revolution under Governor Abdullahi Sule’s leadership. His recent Outstanding Public Service Excellence Award at the Africa Summit 2025 in London underscores a six-year journey of groundbreaking and unprecedented service delivery, good governance and inclusivity.

Under the stewardship of Governor Sule, good governance and inclusivity have become the guiding norms, catapulting Nasarawa, a previously backwater state, into an economically viable entity that is being indentified as an emerging investment and industrialization hub.

Right from the onset in 2019, Governor Abdullahi Sule has singled out agriculture as the cardinal point of his administration. Agriculture has remained the backbone of Nasarawa’s economy. True to his word, so far, the Governor has distributed over 83,000 metric tons of subsidized fertilizer to farmers while partnering with giants like Dangote Sugar and Olam Farms to further expand the scope of commercial agriculture and value addition through food processing in Tunga and Rukubi respectively.

Deliberate efforts geared towards revitalising the agricultural sector through the prompt provision of fartlizer and other necessary farm inputs to farmers in the state, improved agriculture extension services, as well as deliberate steps to mechanize agriculture, are turning the state’s comparative advantage in sesame, yams, and cassava into thriving agro-industries.

Through the creation of the Nasarawa State Bureau for Rural Development, concrete steps are being taken to open up vast swath of land in rural communities previously made inaccessible but for which presently network of rural roads and other critical infrastructure such as water supply and electricity are making life easier for rural farmers across the state.

In an unprecedented move aimed at enhancing agricultural production across the state, Governor Sule graciously approved about N176m as counterpart funding, with further approval for another N176m in order for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to be able to expend USD10m in training 9000 women and youths as part of the IFAD/FGN Value Chain Development Programme (VCDP), towards enhancing rice and cassava production in the state.

With industrialization as the centrepiece of his transformative governance, Governor Sule launched the Nasarawa Economic Development Strategy (NEDS) and established the Nasarawa Investment Development Agency (NASIDA) to attract global investors and to drive the administration’s agenda to industrialise the state.

His masterstroke, the Executive Order One, mandating mining companies like Avatar Energy and Matrix Group to set up local processing plants, put a necessary stop to the exhortation of raw mineral while also creating jobs. This policy birthed Africa’s largest lithium processing factory in Ende, capable of refining 3,000 metric tons daily.

For the first time since the creation of the state in 1996, Nasarawa State is answering its real name as the Home of Solid Minerals. This is not by accident but the outcome of a deliberate injection of ideas and innovation to drive the solid minerals sector under the leadership of Governor Abdullahi Sule.

It’s on record that, aside from opening up the solid minerals sector to exponential growth, with multibillion naira investments sprouting up across the state, Nasarawa State presently leads in the country and has become a guiding light in the areas of mining and solid minerals development.

This is just as another innovation of the present administration, the Nasarawa Technology Village (NTV) which is located along the Abuja-Keffi corridor and features a tech hub with Decagon Institute, with a focus on nurturing digital talent through public-private investment. This initiative is pivotal to the policy thrust of the administration towards boosting the digital economy of the state.

The bigger picture behind this laudable project is to groom tech savvy youths from Nasarawa State who would gradually occupy the digital space and economy with the corridor of the FCT and beyond. This is but a replica of the renowned Silicon Valley in the United States.

Indeed, the vision behind establishing the NTV was to emulate and duplicate the Silicon Valley in California, renowned as a global center for high-tech innovation and a hub for numerous technology companies. The NTV is expected to become a pedestal for the rapid growth of the electronics industry, particularly in the development of microelectronics, personal computers, and the internet.

For the youth, opportunities are blooming beyond farms and factories. A N500 million revolving fund with the Bank of Industry (BOI) empowers small businesses, while skills training at the NTV, as well as the Wing Commander Abdullahi Ibrahim Vocational Institute in Lafia, prepare graduates and other citizens of the state for both the digital economy and self-reliance through meaningful skills acquisition.

As Governor Sule often says, governance is about “lifting others.” With a N384.3 billion 2025 budget focused on transparency and a Nasarawa Open Governance Initiative (NOGI) tracking public spending, his administration proves that consistent steps, not grand leaps, build enduring legacies.

From London’s award podiums to the sesame fields of Azuba, where a new processing plant is presently under construction, Nasarawa’s story is being rewritten: one innovation, one life, at a time.

Abare is the Senior Special Assistant on Media to Governor Abdullahi Sule.