•’How we changed Benue’s no-salary narrative, began pension payment’
Benue State governor, Father Hyacinth Alia, narrates his experience as the governor of Benue State and how his administration has managed to effect regular payment of salaries and pensions and also construct roads. He spoke with VINCENT IKUOMOLA
After one year in office, what has been experience coming from the pulpit to government House?
In the last one year, my experience was kind of mixed. I came in as a leader with a new thinking. A leader who was very confident of what I was bringing to the table. A leader who tries to keep his or her word since I told people the very many things I would be able to do, because we mapped out everything and I knew where I wanted the state to move as a new phase of development and growth.
Surprisingly, when I came in, a good number of people who were on the campaign train with me were the ones that masterminded resistance. And you know, the whole thing boils down to money. So my thinking was once we came in, we would start taking care of civil servants’ salaries, revive pension payment and get back to the drawing table to see how we could make our civil service very stable. That is the engine of every democratic government. Even till tomorrow I cannot get over this. And the resistance was simply that if you are paying salaries why must you pay pensions or why can’t you miss some months? Why are you spending so much money on salaries and pensions?
Then the next phase was that I need to do some projects. So, the question was why? I said yes this is why I came to work! Then I started having attacks left, right and centre. They said this is not the church; you mustn’t do everything you say. But I came from the church. That is my background, so I have to fulfil my words.
For more than 33 years, I had been in the trenches with the poor people. I know their plight. I know where it pains them the most. I know the little things we can do to change the narratives, and that is why they gave the votes that they have never given anyone in the state before despite the fact that one whole local government was out of the election. But then the votes we got were incontestable, so they had to simply go ahead and announce the results.
So I have come to realise that a number of elites are the problem in communities. I don’t understand their understanding of the democratic system and what should come from it – the people’s democracy. I believe that our people deserve better. The masses deserve better. They trust us. It is a social bond. They keep their part by voting us in and we must keep ours as well. Anything short of that is deceit. And the players of politics that believe in this deceit are the ones spoiling the name of politics as a good game.
After God the divine above, the next is the democratic process, true governance of the people. There they set their minds on growth, development, job creation, building families and all that.
So that was the first kind of a shocker I received. But we have to stay on course. I say remember, my bosses, you are saying these things. I took an oath and at the end of the oath I said ‘so help me God’ and I want to keep to the letters of that oath. I understand what an oath is; it is a seal, and once you commit your life to that, if you don’t do it, what excuse do you give?
Well, we thank God irrespective of that shock, the resistance to even pay people’s salaries, the resistance to revive the poor pensioners who were owed billions of naira. These people were never paid for years and they were dying in their numbers.
When I see an old pensioner, I see my father. My father was a pensioner. He could ride a bicycle about 56 kilometres. The man would ride a bicycle to go and collect N4, 000. And they didn’t even know what they were paying them but there was orderliness, N4,000 was huge money. So why mistreat these people? That is all they have to take care of their medications and at least once in a while eat some little good food and just take care of their little businesses. Their demands are not many.
So what is the new thinking?
The new thinking we’re coming on board with is that each person is a stakeholder in this. Irrespective of your religious or political affiliations, you are a stakeholder in our administration, you have so much you can offer. If you are a farmer, there is so much you can give to curb food insecurity. We are willing to support you. But then they said that wasn’t the case, you are telling us the young people to go back to the farms. And I said yes, that is where the money is! It is not standing by the road to tell people ‘Ranka Dede’. That is not where the money is. The money is on the farms; let’s get back to the farms.
And then letting people understand that those who should be in the driver seat of governance are the masses; attending to their needs, asking them what they want, and not you doing what you think they want. If you do what they want, you help them so much even to be on board with you. You are now giving them the power that is theirs. So, if you mistakenly go out there and say you want to do a road for them and their need is primarily water, they tell you to give them water and be very sincere about this.
So that was one stumbling block. But God helping, we are able to keep to our word. We took people on the campaign train, saying we are going to do this and that. We cannot do anything else. I have a scorecard to present. You know, last week, I sat back, wondering I would be showing people after one solid year if I had not persisted. My heart goes out to our President. Those who don’t understand will never understand it. But those, including our elites, who are sincere, will understand it. Those who are playing politics with everything they see on the table can never understand it.
What do you mean?
Making a decision that there should be no more fuel subsidy is a very major decision. And when you discover that there are people out there who are holding meetings and planning against how to ensure that the system doesn’t work. So these few elites what do they truly want? This is the only nation we can call Nigeria. This is the only state, I remind my people, we can call Benue. See how much money we are putting into road infrastructure now.
This is 2024. We came in 2023-2024. What happened in the past years? If you are giving a contract to someone to do, say a road construction, there is no need to say you market women, come, let us cut some portion of it and give you. What do they know about typical road construction? There are certain things you don’t toy with. If those elements of development were in place, I wouldn’t be going back to spend money starting road construction within the city (Makurdi) here or the solar lights we are putting up there.
We have a number of building infrastructure that collapsed, including the state secretariat; a 42, 43 years old structure which then was number one in the entire nation. But either nobody cared, we have to come back and begin afresh.
I think we truly need a rethinking; a new way of patriotism. If you ask them, they will say that is the version of patriotism they know. But there must be a common standard of patriotism, and if people understand this, I think we will be in a better place. That was the kind of shock I got. So, if we say okay this is what the few of you want so we will do what you want, I have a name. I am a priest. Is it that a priest cannot get into politics? If people say politics is a dirty game, that is the place that we must have reverend fathers to come and clean up, and that is my ideology. I knew it was broken so I came in to fix it. There is something called reputation. A good name is better than money where I come from.
In the last one year, we have heard less about insecurity in the state. What is the secret?
The secret we came to the table with was very simple. I told my team we must be very sincere with Benue people. Almost all the people in the state knew that people were cashing in on insecurity; that people deliberately caused a number of harm to the poor citizens; that people invited those who were like accessories to the destabilisation they wanted. So I told them I cannot be an accomplice of that, neither will I be a champion of it at any point at all. We must think differently. The poor people have suffered. So we came in on a new slate. Let us do what will be very beneficial to them, be very sincere in the approaches we are bringing.
We have relative peace today because we are on the lane of sincerity. There is no need for you to go and cry wolf down there when people come and you slaughter them and you go crying to the federal government to give you money so that you will come back and take care of business. Then there is no need to incite the young people, steal cows, rustle the cows and then come and give you. There will be a reprisal, and when the reprisal comes, lives will be lost. So one bad man was in some quarters orchestrating these and was cashing in when people were being buried every day. So we took another route.
We do security but it has to be targeted and deliberate. So if we discover any individual inciting a group of young people to be responsible for this we will make sure you pay for it.
With the barrage of challenges you met on ground (insecurity, salaries and pension arrears and what have you), were you at any time overwhelmed? And given the impression that the state is very poor, from where were you able to fund all the projects executed in the last one year?
Was I overwhelmed? The answer is no. As I mentioned earlier, I was shocked at what the few elites do to keep the entire state in a dungeon. Because it was targeted that Benue was a poor state and Benue wasn’t welcoming to development and there were no funds for the state to be developed.
What I have done in the last year is I have never taken any bank loan. I have never taken a loan from any source. I want the poor masses of Benue to have a feel of transparency and true good democratic governance. Just be accountable.
So, we have demonstrated this for them to understand that the few individuals were feeding fat on the entire Benue. So, it was my responsibility to have them exposed. I didn’t have to talk, but whatever we got in there had to be properly channeled. The pension, the demurrage on salaries, pensions and gratuity, you will be so shocked that it was in billions of naira. Is it that the federal government could not support the state? The federal government supported. So it tells you that there was a calibration that people must stay poor, people must suffer. That is not democracy. That is not the ‘Renewed Hope Agenda’.
The Renewed Hope Agenda our President came on board with is the practicality of what the poor person can gain. How we can remove that veil so that they see the light, they come to the light and they exercise and work in the light. This is the new democracy we have brought to bear, and this is why certain decisions are quite hard to make. You know for quite a time I didn’t have a car to drive as a governor. For nine months, I did not have a car to drive, but I managed the car I used during the campaigns. That was what I was back and forth with here.
It was a difficult decision for me to make but we had to do it. I would have conscripted the money for pensions, the money for salaries to do this, but I knew the people were burning badly that they needed some cushioning. I needed some cushioning myself because I knew the demands were already tall. I knew right behind my mind that the support I had, I knew the expectations were also humongous. So we needed to do what was going to be on the side of the people for the people and in the interest of the entire state. So I had to make that difficult decision.
Instead of packing all these now, my deputy governor, the executive council, the commissioners, the major advisers and all that, I pleaded with them, ‘gentlemen, we are leaders, and not just leaders, we must transform this state. We must be transformative leaders, and a transformative leader leads by example. If we don’t do this thing, it will just be a de javu. We will be playing back the old records to the hard Benue people. And guess what, under one month, either we run away or they will pursue us. So that was why we had to take that action.
We made the sacrifice that everything that came in had to give a cushioning to the civil servants. When we came in, most civil servants were not coming to work. Local Government headquarters were overgrown with weeds. So the system had collapsed, but we needed to revive all these and we needed to lead by example. I said I was willing to do this and the deputy said we are toeing the same line and everybody in the room said the same thing. We needed to do just the needful.
Ask them how many months they were not paid. I have not been paid even as I am speaking here. I have never taken a salary in the last one year. My deputy governor has never taken his salary in the last one year. So we needed to let people understand that we only came in to make a difference. We came in to let them know that when you sacrifice something, better things come in. And then Benue is so rich. So the few people who chose to enslave us, the few people who painted a different picture that the federal government never gave money to the state were all liars. And I needed to prove that they were liars or they are liars not by talking, not by making a sound bite but demonstratively putting in place the payment of salaries, pensions and gratuities and the construction of roads.
When we came in, there was a deconstruction of the entire system. And for us to make a new construction and then in some places to reconstruct, took every energy out of the new administration. But today I am not even thinking of the sacrifices in the last year. I am not even thinking about the pains. I can tell you I was travelling the other day to Abuja, I think the car experienced the wear and tear after Akwanga, it started slowing down. At a point, it stopped. We were there. I said you guys, don’t worry. I have seen what the future holds for all of us and younger people. The security people were like but you are a governor. I said I know, and for now, no one takes it away from me. The primary thing is not just to be a governor in name, I want our system to work.
Do you know how much one car costs? So we have to do a number of things. We just got our new cars in the last two, three months that I got a full complement of cars on my train. We are here live and it is the same security people who are applauding that they just wonder what would have been if we never closed our eyes to so many things.
So, resilience, commitment, and it has to be very intentional. So, I am happy that we are able to achieve this kind of feat. Is it that we are not going to take any loan? Now the people understand that without loans their salaries can be paid. So just imagine in the next one year, we will tell them what I have to do to advance this cause going forward, they will be the ones saying go take this money come and make us proud because we have demonstrated accountability. We have shown them that in the nearest possible time, when you talk of Benue or when you are in Lagos and you are thinking Lagos, then the name Benue should be coming to your head, and that is my target. These are things we can do. We can achieve these things. It is just that resilience and targeted goal, and that is where we are headed.
How are you going to sustain the food basket status of Benue and take it to the next level?
There is no question about the sustainability of what we have started. As I mentioned, we have never taken any loan but you have seen the milestone we have done. So when we take that, then deliberately it is targeted at the number of projects we intend to do. The projects have been already mapped out, including agriculture, to keep the statutory nature of the state. There may be no stopping us.
I get saddened each time we talk about food insecurity and primarily here in the state. Before 1999, most food produce left Benue to a good number of places in the north, to the south, to the east. The only bad thing was that subsequent administrations thought less about that. The diversion of attention was just too focused on oil and we all lost it. So it now became a case of everybody waiting for allocation to be given then they came to the drawing tables and it was shared. So if we didn’t have the muscle to get to the drawing table for your launch there, then you are left out.
So the narrative has changed, believe me. We are going to maintain what we have started because we have the political will, and maintaining it must be because we are still in this contract with the poor masses. What is happening today and even tomorrow is the same thing that is going to happen in the next one year. If you don’t have anything on ground for them, you will not walk the streets of Makurdi. I know how they fight back!
I am a freeman in the way that I go to the market as I am speaking. I go to Wadata, I go to Wurukum. I am very free. That is why I get incentivised to do a number of things. Just gain interaction with these people and ask them truly do you want me to succeed? They say yes. What can I do to help you as a woman selling in this market? And that is why I give all the commendations, all the applause to the masses. We gain all these ideas from them. We gain resilience from them. They were mistreated for a very long time but they just knew that one day God was going to bring them out of that bondage, and I know that this is the time that God says no, get out of the bondage. So why should I try to settle for less? I can’t.
So, we have agricultural programmes that we are going to unfold. As I am speaking, we make it an onus in this administration to come and be off takers to the farmers. It’s been a very long time since disinterest was pumped in the minds of farmers. So to have them back to the threshold of farming, we would like to be the off takers. We will give them what it takes. We already have acquired a number of tractors as a state. And then we have personnel that will go and be encouraging them to get into farm cooperatives so that if we are sending tractors in one area, I know that farmers in that cooperative must have told me they want to do sesame or they want to plant palm trees or oranges or a number of citrus. And that is the kind of support we have made and we have already made financial provisions for these.
So I am still waiting to have more of them coming to say I want to do this. We would take care of the tractors. We would pay and then we would get the seedlings. All they need to do is this is their portion of land and they will simply ensure that the bad guys do not come on the farms. At the end of it all, we will also provide the fertilizers and all the herbicides. At the end of the day, they will just harvest and sell back to us and the primary aim is very simple: I want them to smile to the bank.
Since we came in, if you go to the part of my local government, a whole bag of orange was N3,000. The highest it went was N4,000. The moment we came, I wanted us to buy everything. I will just send people to go to so many areas that produce oranges, and guess what, they just spoil. And it is one thing we are wrestling with: post-harvest waste. So we are putting a number of machinery in place to curtail that as well. So what we did with the oranges is once you pluck them and bag them, if they are not sold at appropriate rates, call us, we will buy them. Do you know all of a sudden that was jerked up to N15,000, N16,000? At least they are gaining on their produce and then with the roads we are doing out there, they are able to bring out their goods from their various local farms.
So there are a number of incentives for the farmers, and it is the only way. That is what Benue is known for and it is the only way we can fulfill our capacity as a food basket. We have the capacity to take care of not only the North Central Nigeria. How about exports? We got some guests that came in here. They were surprised at the orange tree sauce here. We plucked some for them, right within the residence here, they took it and they said they drank from the same tree in some farms but it didn’t taste the same. That is one other blessing we have on this land. Anything you plant has a very different, sweet natural taste. We have to take advantage of that.
The guest even said why are you not exporting these to the neighbouring countries here and even to the UK? I kind of feel ashamed because it is something we can easily do. But that will require the regulations and following the international standards and everything. But that is what we should be targeting. So I was happy that they said this in front of so many people and everybody was there. I asked, are you serious? They said yes they were, because it tastes very different, sweet, natural and all that. So we have a number of programmes to keep unfolding for the farmers so that the Benue glory on farm produce takes its position and my farmers smile to the bank and they are happy once again.
