By Temitope Ajayi
Temitope Ajayi writes on how the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster
Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouk is courageously
executing the mandate of her office.
Without any doubt, Sadiya Umar Farouk, the Minister of Humanitarian
Aairs, Disaster Management and Social Development is in charge of one of
the signi!cant Ministries. She is saddled with the job of managing and
coordinating national response to many calamities that have almost become
a permanent !xture. Because of the omnibus con!guration of the Ministry
and its expansive scope of work, the job comes with a huge burden.
The Ministry as proclaimed by President Muhammadu Buhari on August 21,
2020 was a major reform initiative designed to recalibrate the way Nigeria
deals with crisis of existence that happens from time to time as a result of
man-made and natural disasters. For some inexplicable reasons, many
people hailed the idea of a separate Ministry of Humanitarian Aairs,
Disaster Management and Social Development. It was a necessary
intervention to make government more humane. That a sharply-focused
Ministry would serve as the major driver for the management of recurring
disasters across the country was well thought-out by President Buhari.
Before the creation of the Ministry, the missing link in previous eorts had
been the lack of co-ordination and synergy among various agencies and
between the states and the Federal government. There is no better
indicator yet, of the premium the Nigerian government placed on the lives
of citizens than this Ministry that is already a year old.
To run a new Ministry is not a tea-party. Unlike her cabinet colleagues who
had well established Ministries to run, Umar Farouk did not have the good
fortune of an existing Ministry with functioning and running infrastructure
to rely on. She had to start from the scratch; literally from scratch with
issues as basic as looking for oice accommodation and getting her sta
together through the civil service bureaucracy for eective takeo. Without
skirting around the issues, she started from ground zero. On assumption of
oice, undaunted by the enormity of tasks ahead, she picked herself up and
plunged into the job. One year after, it is to her credit and that of the
management and sta that the Ministry is eectively ful!lling the purpose
for which it was established by the President as the main driver of Federal
