FOR much of last week, Kogi State was rife with rumours of their vanishing and
unpopular governor, Yahaya Bello, who assumed office in January after a
controversial election that earned him a little over six thousand votes.
While
some said he was dead, others swore he was admitted at a German hospital where
he was rushed to after he collapsed. Yet others said he went for eye surgery.
But finally his spokesman told a disbelieving public only after the rumours had
become unbearable that the governor was taking a break at an undisclosed
location.
The
spokesman did not attempt to answer the question of why the governor must
embark on a secret rest without handing over to his deputy through laid-down
constitutional provisions. Or why his return was publicly put on show a few
days later when his departure was shrouded in mystery.
Kogi is in ferment.
It
is so badly run that it seems it has generated a curse of its own, perhaps
making many people to wish the governor dead from the said indeterminate curse.
Salaries are selectively paid, and projects, including the much-maligned
roundabouts in the state capital, Lokoja, are left derelict. There is hardly
any establishment where all public workers have been paid the same month’s
salary, even in arrears. The state is left forlorn, with many Kogites, including
his Ebira ethnic group, heartily cursing the All Progressives Congress (APC)
schemers who imposed Mr Bello on them.
Even if he has proved so inept at governing, wailed many Kogites, surely he
shouldn’t also mismanage the simple, ordinary act of taking a holiday, whether
at home or abroad, without following the law. That simple action does not
require the ingenuity and discipline he so evidently lacks. The trouble, it
seems, is that like many other politicians and party leaders at federal and
state levels, and especially the Kaduna
State governor, Nasir
el-Rufai, Mr Bello is not a democrat. Mallam el-Rufai, now widely considered an
irredentist and schemer, the reader will be sad to note, cannot even tolerate
critics. The case of John Danfulani, a political science lecturer with the Kaduna State
University who was forced
to resign for criticising the governor, illustrates the disaster befalling many
states.
It is not clear how Kogi will endure Mr Bello for more than three more years in
the spirit of democracy. He cannot be impeached, and he will not resign for
incompetence. Whatever effort those who didn’t vote for him make — only some
six thousand voters put him in office without a deputy — will naturally be
thwarted by the governor’s powerful backers outside the state. Kogites will
give anything at this moment to know what is on God’s inscrutable mind for Kogi State,
especially in view of the sometimes peremptory manner he deposes rulers.
Source : THE NATION NEWS PAPER
