On Wednesday, Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello announced his intention to seek a second term. He predicates his ambition on the “people’s call to run for a second term in office as the governor” and the “tremendous achievements (his government) has made in the past three years”. He made his intention known, according to some newspaper reports, during the inauguration of the Kogi State House of Assembly Commission in Lokoja.
Here is how he put it clumsily: “I would like to inform the good people of the state, the All Progressives Congress (APC) family and supporters from the state, the local government areas down to the wards and polling units as well as various stakeholders, opinion moulders, families and friends, of my interest to answer the people’s call to run for a second term in office as governor of Kogi State.”
He then adds rather boastfully and chimerically: “We have made tremendous progress in the last three years and based on our achievements, the people of the state have been calling on me to run again to consolidate on our first term achievements.”
Mr Bello is locked in battle for the position of the most ineffective governor in Nigeria with Zamfara State governor Abdulaziz Yari. Mr Yari is detested in Zamfara despite being at least empathetic towards his people and their sufferings. His chief problem is his vacuousness, his grinding incompetence, his peripatetic lack of focus, his many silly distractions. Mercifully, the constitution bars him from a third term, thus sparing his state additional misery.
Mr Bello, on the other hand, can contest for a second term, as indicated by the constitution. But, on top of his gross incompetence, a vice for which he is no pushover when compared with Mr Yari, the Kogi governor is embarrassingly ignorant, brutal, servile and, for a man of so few accomplishments and gifts, paradoxically arrogant. He puts his decision to contest for a second term down to the call of his people. Not only does he not have a people he can call his own, no call of any kind has gone to him from anywhere. Kogi people are neither self-haters nor cannibals, nor yet so short-sighted that they cannot see the disaster Mr Bello’s second term would spell for Kogites and their children.
It is hard to explain why Mr Bello announced a second plank upon which to anchor his second term ambition. He talks of himself and his cabinet having made tremendous progress. The phrase tremendous progress is bastardised in Nigeria, and insanely dragged to death by petty and arrogant tyrants passing for state governors.
But for Mr Bello to seize upon that phrase to announce his ambition is to cruelly mock the people of Kogi and damn their horrifying sufferings under his cruel rule. No progress of any kind is or can be attributed to the person or government of Mr Bello, let alone progress that can be qualified as tremendous. Other than his insufferable manners and his starched agbada, both of which are contrived to mask his inferiority complex and incompetence, there is absolutely nothing noticeable or eye-catching about him. He does not pay workers their salaries. But when he deigns to do that, he pays them in fractions and trickles. Consequently, he is owing some of his workers more than 20 months salaries, and others some seven or so months. Every Kogi civil servant, some of whom have endured cruel and degrading torture of every kind, is stuck between poor or little pay, or late and badly fractionalised pay.
There is in short nothing for Mr Bello to anchor his second term quest. He has done or said nothing to earn his party’s offer of right of first refusal. It remains to be seen what his party, particularly under its sprightly and pragmatic chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, would do with Mr Bello’s misbegotten ambition.
Not only can the governor not win the poll if he is fielded, even if he could, he still should not. There was nothing gained in his first term, other than his preparedness to outdo the sycophants who gallivant around Aso Villa, and nothing can be gained in his second term, should the gods cruelly gift him a second term.
He is said to be prepared to use strong-arm tactics to win, such as he unconscionably deployed in the last state legislative poll, and is said to possess the evil genius to cash in on the rumoured ambivalence of Kogites towards the APC. Not being a man of conscience, not to talk of a man with any morality at all, he may in fact be prepared to damn the world in order to win the poll, should he receive his party’s ticket. But Mr Oshiomhole will have to determine in the weeks ahead whether so unpopular and so incompetent a governor would not abysmally corrupt and belittle the flag of the party by becoming its standard-bearer.
Mr Bello, should he contest, cannot get the votes of Kogi West and Kogi East senatorial districts. It is doubtful whether he can get even half of the votes of his Kogi Central senatorial district, having disgraced them with his incompetence and fought against them physically and verbally. He will rely on his readiness to project violence and seduce the hungry electorate with money. He tried both tactics in the last legislative polls and seemed to have succeeded beyond his imagination. But Kogites know the futility of putting good men and women in the state’s titular legislature, a lawmaking body that has been wholly disembowelled or even entirely castrated by the governor. They will bide their time and show their resoluteness in the November governorship poll. They recognise that the past three years and more have been an unqualified disaster for the state, but that it was a disaster authored by a conniving APC at the federal level and a few governors and politicians from outside the state.
To allow another four years of Mr Bello, they surmise, will pose an existential threat to them and their children. They may have concluded already that it is expedient for one man’s ambition to perish than for the whole state to be lost. They may not be as aggressive as would suffice to discourage their governor’s truancy and disrespect for Kogites, but they are smart enough to know that continuing to yield ground to a ruthless tyrant would doom them irretrievably in the near future.
Kogi State has been one of the unluckiest states in Nigeria. Their first governor in the Fourth Republic, Abubakar Audu, was competent and even surprisingly visionary. But he was supremely arrogant and misanthropic. Their second and third governor, Ibrahim Idris and Idris Wada, were unmitigated failures, though not on the scale of Mr Bello. Had Prince Audu taken office in 2015, though vestiges of his arrogance would have remained, for old habits die hard, he would have given the state some succour on account of his competitive spirit and intuitive feel for excellence. But instead of Prince Audu, APC conspirators imposed the vacuous Mr Bello on a state that sadly and unwisely put emphasis on their ethnic and religious affiliations.
Still in that primitive mould, and after sensing the people’s despair, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have zoned the governorship slot to the most populous senatorial district in the state, Kogi East.
Should APC fail to embrace the same zoning formula, not to talk of presenting the hated Mr Bello, they will probably lose the governorship poll. If the APC want to survive in the state, they have little choice but to repudiate Mr Bello and determine whether heading to Kogi East for a candidate would not present a sensible counter-force to the PDP.
In the next few weeks, Mr Oshiomhole will face the dismal choice of either bowing to pressure and yielding to the power mongers in Abuja who have seemed to sustain the sycophantic Mr Bello, or remaining true to his convictions and unionist pragmatism by unseating the hated Kogi governor and handing over the ticket to a more sensible and competent candidate.
The APC chairman’s antecedents indicate that he will opt for the latter, believing that therein lie the party’s best chances. He knows better than anyone else how Aso Villa — a place Mr Bello has dedicated the little dignity left in him to worship — will look at the dynamics of the coming Kogi governorship election before taking a decision.
The often inscrutable President Muhammadu Buhari has not quite indicated what he thinks of Mr Bello, especially of his ineptitude and the sufferings of Kogi civil servants. But perhaps Mr Oshiomhole knows how the president’s mind works.
Whatever the case, the APC chairman is left with little choice than to actively seek a new candidate for his party if they are to stand any chance in November. As it stands now, even if the APC ticket is given to someone else, their chance is already severely constrained because of Mr Bello’s boundless failings and hostile statements and actions in office. The ruling party would be sailing near the wind to ignore the objective reality in the state and pretend that the governor has not done enough damage to cost them the election.
Credit: The Nation
