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.
Credits: Adekunle Ade-Adeleye | The Nation
