When Jigawa State was created 35 years ago, it inherited many of the challenges that confronted Nigeria’s newly created states: limited infrastructure, weak institutions, inadequate human capital, poor access to basic services and an economy heavily dependent on subsistence agriculture.
But the decision to carve Jigawa out of the old Kano State on August 27, 1991, was driven by a broader objective — bringing government closer to communities that had long complained of distance from political and administrative centres and creating a structure through which development could be more evenly distributed.
Three-and-a-half decades later, the creation of Jigawa has become an important example of how a new state can gradually transform its limitations into opportunities.
The state, with Dutse as its capital, has had to build institutions, infrastructure and an administrative identity almost from scratch. Its progress has therefore been shaped not only by the resources available to successive governments
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