Abbas Inaugurates Modern Community Market In Katsina

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Abbas Tajudeen, has commissioned a modern community market, which he attracted to his late mother’s hometown of Dutsen-Kura community, Kafur Local Government Area of Katsina State.

This is even as the Speaker performed the groundbreaking ceremony for four projects: the Darika Central Mosque, the Dutsen-Kura to Kahutu Road, the rehabilitation and expansion of an earth dam, and a new skills acquisition centre at Gozaki. He also inspected a skills acquisition centre at Dutsen-Kura.

Commissioning the Dutsen-Kura Community Market, the Speaker said in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Musa Krishi, that the market would open doors of opportunity and boost trading in the community and its environs, noting that it would provide a safe, “orderly and dignified environment in which the commerce of Dutsen-Kura may flourish. It offers modern, secure trading spaces for our farmers, traders and artisans.”

“It is a great honour to stand before you once more, this time to commission the Dutsen-Kura Community Market. On a day already rich with new beginnings, we now inaugurate a project that will touch the daily life of this community perhaps more directly than any other.

“I confess that it moves me deeply to render this service here in Dutsen-Kura, the home of my beloved mother. Every visit to this soil is, for me, a return to my own beginnings, and to the values of honest labour and neighbourly kindness that I first learned among these very people. To build a market for this community is therefore not a duty alone. It is an act of gratitude and of affection.

“A market is far more than a gathering of shops. It is the very centre of a community’s economic life. It is the place where the farmer sells his harvest, where the trader earns her living, and where the artisan finds a buyer for his craft. It is where prices are set, where news is shared, and where the wealth of a community changes hands and multiplies,” he said.

Speaker Abbas added that with the commissioning of the market, “a woman who once traded in the open, exposed to the sun, the rain and insecurity, will now conduct her business in comfort and in safety.”

He pointed out that the project reflects the wider purpose of the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, “which seeks to build the prosperity of our nation from the grassroots upward, beginning with the ordinary trader, farmer and artisan.

“The reforms of the past two years have asked much of our people, and I am mindful of the hardship they have borne. Yet those reforms are now restoring the strength of our national economy and releasing the resources that make projects such as this one possible. When we strengthen the small enterprises in rural communities, we lay a brick in the foundation of a stronger Nigeria.”

He commended all those who laboured to bring the project to completion and thanked the revered traditional and religious leaders for their prayers and guidance. He also thanked the people of Dutsen-Kura for their patience, support and affection throughout his life.

On the four projects for which the Speaker performed the groundbreaking ceremony, he said the mosque would provide the people with a dignified place of worship and religious instruction, while the Dutsen-Kura to Kahutu Road would connect the community to the wider world and convey farmers and their produce to market, children to school and the sick to the clinic.

On the rehabilitation and expansion of the Dutsen-Kura earth dam, the Speaker said when completed, it would “greatly increase our capacity to store water. It will enable our farmers to cultivate through the dry season, and not just in the rains alone. It will sustain our livestock and bring an end to the seasonal shortages that have long troubled us.”