Umar Farouk Ahmed

Colonel Umar Farouk Ahmed was Military Administrator of Cross River State, Nigeria (August 1996 - August 1998) during the military regime of General Sani Abacha. He was then appointed administrator of Kaduna State in August 1998 during the transitional regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, handing over power to the elected civilian governor Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi in May 1999. Shortly after, he was retired by the Federal Government, along with all other former military ministers, governors and administrators. Quotes “Before now, most of the airlines avoided Nigerian airspace and they found it extremely difficult to communicate with air traffic controllers. The reason was that the communication system was weak, and over-saturated due to demand." “As the industry is growing, you should expect more routes to open and there was no corresponding facility to match the emerging air traffic. So, what we did was to cause a huge investment in that regard by the federal government." “We realised that there were so many openings, so many routes, we had to increase more stations to have signals that would cover the entire Nigeria. The entire communication had been re-designed to make sure that everywhere, every blind spot is covered." “We realised also that our radios are working well and well positioned and we have addressed the challenges we met but then, we are still having issues. These issues have nothing to do with radios. Now, it has to do with electricity,” “What we have decided to do is to deploy solar energy to some of these facilities so that they can function well. We have two sources of power. We have the primary one which is the national grid and we have the second one which is generators, and plants and the third one is solar."