ON February 13, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo gave a keynote address at the maiden Kogi State Economic and Investment Summit. There was nothing in the speech to indicate that he attended the event reluctantly. But he read an address that was distinctly unemotional. Among other things, he revealed that the federal government had since 2015 supported the 36 states with about N1.19trn, though some components of that sum were the entitlements of the states. A few reports quoted the vice president as suggesting that he was proud of the performance of the governor, Yahaya Bello. Said the professor, according to an online report: “I’m proud of what happened in Kogi state and the governor for the outstanding works afor the people, traders, market women, artisans and people with disability. We’ll support and do anything that will can to help small business grows in Nigeria. You don’t need to know a governor or Senator or politicians before you benefit. This is the kind of country we are trying to build. A country without corruption or man-know-man. You apply, if you are eligible you get picked.” This statement could not be independently confirmed.
Prof Osinbajo is unlikely to ever disclose what he felt in his heart going to Kogi to address the economic summit. He had a job to do as vice president, and he has apparently done it. If called again to do his job in any state, and regardless of his private feelings about the state and its chief executive, he will grace the occasion and read his speech. But no one, not even the vice president, can claim not to know the tragedy unfolding in Kogi State. Yes, a few memoranda of understanding were signed on the opening day of the summit, and a few investors showcased their readiness to put their money in the state. However, the facts on the ground in the state is that Kogi state is dysfunctional economically, politically and socially. If the organisers of the summit hoped that it would help restore the state to functionality, it remains to be seen how the state’s silent and incompetent officials hope to perform that miracle.
The governor marked his two years in office in January. He only managed to renovate a few structures to mark the occasion. He has no real project started and completed by himself, except perhaps the so-called Revenue House. He has no clue how to pay the salaries of public sector workers on a consistent basis, and is in consequence owing them, on staggered basis, salaries in excess of five months, seven months, 10 months or more, despite his offending claims to the contrary. Even when he paid five months salaries last December, no worker was paid more than half his salary, with some, on account of deductions, going home with less than 50 percent. It is obvious that the idea of an economic summit is an abstraction to him, a distant idea with no ties to either his own vacant mind or economic and social reality. The state is in decay, its people groaning in abject poverty and government-inflicted pains, and he has engineered an oppressive air that envelopes the state.
Completely incapable of conceiving and building landmark projects, Mr Bello has lately developed the idea of selling legacy buildings constructed by his predecessors. Reports indicate that these buildings, which he argued were not making money, include Confluence Beach Hotel, Lokoja; Kogi Hotels, GRA, Lokoja; Kogi State Liaison Office, Ikeja-Lagos GRA; Kogi State Liaison Office, GRA, Kaduna; and Lokoja International Market, Lokoja; 12-storey Kogi House in Abuja; the ample Commissioners’ quarters in Lokoja; and the House of Assembly quarters on Hassan Usman Katsina Road, Lokoja. If, as he said, they were not making money, does he not by chance have the gumption to turn things around? Such benumbing profligacy is not found anywhere else in the country, and it is tragic that Aso Villa does not give him the cold shoulder simply because he peddles his support for the president as currency for his incompetence and serial misdeeds.
The governor makes up for all these harrowing shortcomings by turning himself into President Muhammadu Buhari’s most fanatical supporter, trumping even Nasir el-Rufai, the Kaduna State governor. Mr Bello is often in Abuja, making up for his lack of ideas by romping with the powerful and pacifying his own shortcomings. Both the president who sometimes receive him, and the vice president who has had to attend the governor’s economic summit, can pretend not to know that Kogi State is probably the most misgoverned state in the country. But surely Aso Villa has its own independent means of finding out the true situation of things in that woebegone state.
As a demonstration of his support for the president, Mr Bello openly and rapturously supported the cattle colony idea. He thus became the first governor, and by implication the first state, since the colony controversy broke out, to embrace the idea. Even when it was clear that the federal government had not yet developed a consensus or plan on just how the colony boondoggle would be implemented, Mr Bello met with the Agriculture minister and presented him documents indicating that the state had provided 15,000 hectares for the programme. The federal government had wanted 5,000 hectares per state. Asked by reporters whether he had sorted out the compensation issue, the governor, who cannot find money to do projects or pay workers, said he was working out the compensation details.
Mr Bello was tragically oblivious of the fact that the Agriculture ministry and the presidency had indicated that whatever lands were taken for the colony programme would be paid for by the herdsmen themselves. Why would a state impoverished by Mr Bello’s ardent misrule offer to pay for the colony lands? How does he hope to defend the purchase before the state legislature, as impotent as the lawmakers are? The answer was indirectly provided by the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Matthew Kolawole, when in response to the governor’s borrowing of N10bn ostensibly to pay salaries suggested that the governor did not need prior approval. An approval could be given later when the government would begin repayment of the loan. That appalling logic will be replicated over other matters. It escaped the Speaker that the loan was not appropriated, nor was a supplementary budget passed to accommodate it.
The truth is that governance has virtually collapsed in the state. The executive is bereft of ideas and understanding; the legislature is fearful, ignorant and impotent; and the civil populace is intimidated, discouraged and resigned to fate. When Prof Osinbajo visited last week, he could not claim not to know the tragedy that has befallen the state. He minced his words a bit when he made reference to the federal support given to states to help them overcome their cash flow and mismanagement issues, a support the governor treated contemptuously. But the vice president should have had the courage to speak more openly and frankly about the abject horrors the people of Kogi were experiencing. The horrors are too graphic to put in proverbs or idioms. Importantly, too, by receiving the peripatetic and melodramatic Mr Bello in Aso Villa often, the presidency gives the impression that it is knowingly complicit in the tyranny and misrule being executed by Mr Bello over Kogi State.
The gaffe-prone governor, as his recent tiff with Catholic bishops demonstrates vividly, will of course not be returning as governor in 2020, for the damage he has orchestrated upon the state cannot be remedied in the next two years of his tragic governorship. But to have him for two more years will simply stretch the forbearance of the people to its elastic limit. He ought rightly to be impeached, and those who foisted him on the state, despite his lack of qualification to vote or be voted for, should be called out and shamed — and the conspirators, as everyone knows, are distributed among governors, judges, and party leaders. Prof Osinbajo should have no reason to dignify Mr Bello with his presence anymore. The short and infamous list of those who attended his inauguration in January 2016 should serve as a national indication of the fact that Mr Bello was from the very beginning a pariah. He should remain ostracised for the rest of his governorship.
