By Adamu Lawal Toro
In the same month, Kaduna State did two things that looked unrelated. It reconstructed the roads leading into Panteka, a fabrication market whose roots predate colonial rule. And it graduated 4,050 welders, tilers, mechanics and tailors from a state-run vocational institute that did not exist three years ago. Read separately, these are two infrastructure stories. Read together, they are a single bet: that Kaduna’s economic future depends on the working hand, whether that hand learned its trade under a mango tree in Panteka a generation ago, or in a modern classroom in Rigachikun last year.
Governor Uba Sani made the connection himself. In his address at the maiden IVTSD graduation, he described the remodelling of Panteka Market as designed “to create a major skills and enterprise hub, bringing modern tools, structured training and improved opportunities to thousands of artisans,” and argued that “a society that celebrates academic qualifications while neglecting technical competence cannot fully unlock its productive potential.” That is not two policies running in parallel. It is one philosophy, applied to the state’s oldest informal economy and its newest formal institution at the same time.
Understanding why that matters requires understanding what each place actually is.
The market that came first
Panteka is not simply a place where goods change hands. It is where generations of Northern artisans learned metal fabrication, welding, machinery repair and the construction trades that quietly hold a region’s economy together. Long before “skills acquisition” became a phrase politicians reach for at commissioning ceremonies, Panteka was already producing skilled hands, one apprenticeship at a time. Tens of thousands of artisans, apprentices, traders and transporters depend on it today.
For decades, that importance was acknowledged in speeches far more often than in budgets. Access roads deteriorated year after year. Dust, noise and unsafe conditions became the market’s permanent atmosphere. Heavy-duty vehicles struggled to reach traders who needed them. Blocked drainage turned ordinary rainfall into flooding that damaged roads and goods alike. A region that speaks proudly of its artisans in cultural terms failed, for too long, to back that pride with the roads, drainage and healthcare those artisans actually needed to work safely.
That pattern is shifting. The Chechnya to Panteka Market Road, once dusty and difficult, has been reconstructed into an asphalted route linking the Old Leventis Roundabout through Chechnya Market and Old Panteka toward Kaduna Polytechnic and Tudun Wada. Malam Madori, Enugu and Lemu roads around Old Panteka have also been rebuilt, with drainage desilting and solar streetlights added. Beyond roads, a dedicated Panteka Market Clinic, equipped with an ambulance, now brings primary healthcare within reach of artisans who previously had to leave the market for basic treatment. A modern ICT Centre offers digital literacy and e-commerce training, connecting Panteka’s traditional craftsmanship to the digital economy.
Crucially, the redevelopment was designed without displacing the artisans already working there, protecting livelihoods while upgrading the space around them.
If Panteka represents Kaduna’s inherited skills economy, the Kaduna State Institute of Vocational Training and Skills Development represents its deliberately engineered one. Its three campuses, at Rigachikun, Soba and Samaru Kataf, one for each senatorial district, train students tuition-free across fourteen trade areas: electrical installation, welding, aluminium fabrication, computer hardware repair, catering, masonry, refrigeration, fashion design, carpentry, painting, tiling, plumbing, solar installation and automotive mechatronics. The Institute’s partnership with the National Board for Technical Education means graduates leave not merely with a skill but with a credential recognised under the Nigerian Skills Qualifications Framework, the difference between training people and building a labour market that takes them seriously.
The results have already travelled beyond Kaduna. At the 6th National Construction Artisans Award in Abuja in February 2026, IVTSD trainee Ibrahim Abubakar Jikamshi was named Overall Best Artisan of the Year, competing nationally. The Federal Ministry of Education has since asked to use Kaduna’s technical training manuals as reference material for national standards. Governor Uba Sani has also approved a ₦200,000 grant for each of the 4,050 graduates, a total of ₦810 million, to fund tools, working capital or transportation into employment, alongside a job-placement drive and a digital platform meant to track employment outcomes over time. As he told graduands, “we are not merely presenting certificates; we are celebrating competence, discipline, resilience and the dignity of productive work.”
Where the two stories become one argument
The temptation in covering Kaduna’s government is to treat Panteka’s roads and IVTSD’s certificates as separate line items in an infrastructure ledger. That misses the point. Both are answers to the same underlying question: what happens to a Northern Nigerian who has real technical ability but no institutional pathway to turn it into a livelihood?
For decades, the honest answer was: not much. An artisan in Panteka could master welding through years of apprenticeship and still operate in a market with no functioning roads, no nearby clinic, and no formal credential to show a bank or a contractor. A talented young person outside the formal education system had no equivalent of a university degree to open doors. Both forms of exclusion had the same root cause, a state that treated skill as something to admire rather than something to invest in.
What Kaduna appears to be attempting now is a single coherent correction. Modernise the old skills economy so it can absorb new tools, new training and new capital without displacing the people already working in it. Build a new formal skills economy so the next generation does not have to wait for informal apprenticeship or a government job to become economically relevant. Connect both to the same institutional architecture, the Kaduna State Council on Skills, which the governor chairs personally and which the Vice President has praised as “a template for a grassroots, bottom-up approach to skills acquisition.”
Neither achievement is complete simply because a ribbon has been cut or a certificate handed out. Panteka’s new roads and clinic will only matter if they hold up under the weight of daily commercial traffic and are maintained after the cameras leave. IVTSD’s 4,050 graduates will only validate the model if a meaningful share of them are still working in their trade a year from now, tools intact, enterprises growing, rather than quietly drifting back into informal underemployment once the grant money runs out.
This is where journalism covering both stories has a genuine role to play, beyond stenography for government communications. The governor has publicly committed to tracking employment outcomes for IVTSD graduates. He should be held to a parallel standard for Panteka: are the artisans there measurably better off a year after the road commissioning, in terms of customer traffic, input costs and safety, or has the market simply gotten a cosmetic upgrade that photographs well?
Kaduna is making a bet that dignity and productivity are not separate goals but the same goal seen from two angles. Whether that bet pays off will not be decided by how many roads get asphalted or how many certificates get printed. It will be decided by whether a welder trained at Rigachikun and a fabricator working in Panteka are, in five years, demonstrably better off than they would have been under the old arrangement, one where skill was celebrated in speeches and abandoned everywhere else.
Panteka built its reputation before Kaduna had a governor to commission anything. IVTSD is building its reputation because one finally did. The state’s task now is to make sure both institutions, the ancient market and the new institute, are judged not by the ceremonies that launched them, but by the working hands they leave standing a decade from now.
