…sets out promising industrialisation, but is stuck with political vendetta
After the Supreme Court necromancy that elevated evil over good, Akwa Ibom people are stuck with Udom Emmanuel for the next four years. So we have got to deal with the situation as best we can. The prognosis, given what we have witnessed in the last nine months, does not give much room for hope.
Mr Emmanuel does not appear to be ready for the job of governance. He is merely content with using false propaganda to attack and malign his political opponents for every imagined or real political difference. For him every opinion about his job performance is an excuse for personal attacks and insults.
If Mr Emmanuel is asked, for instance, why he is not telling Akwa Ibom people how much debt he inherited from the former administration headed by Godswill Akpabio, he lashes out with insults and lies. If anyone calls him a stooge on the ground that he still takes instructions from Akpabio and for the reason that most of his commissioners and other appointees were imposed on him by Akpabio, he launches personal attacks and levels insults at his critics.
In this manner he has personally attacked Mr Umana Okon Umana, governorship candidate of the APC in the last election and even the man’s wife in apparent reactions to legitimate issues of governance raised by Akwa Ibom people. For Udom whoever raises a question of governance must have been sponsored by Umana. So to get back at his ‘traducer’ he falsely accused Umana of sponsoring people to blackmail the Director-General of the DSS and also of trying to get President Buhari to remove him, Mr Emmanuel, from office as governor. Taking leave of all decency, Udom Emmanuel, through his media minions, but without any basis whatsoever went to the extent of saying that “Mrs Umana has threatened to leave her husband because he has joined a cult.”
The personal attacks are getting more reckless and totally unprovoked. At a recent funeral of a former governor from the state who was military governor of Cross River State, Navy Captain Edet Akpan Archibong, Udom Emmanuel was as bruising as he was gross in his remarks against another former governor of the state. “I am here because the late Archibong was a man of integrity,” Mr Emmanuel said in a tribute to the late former governor, “unlike another former governor who went to the tribunal to lie that there was no election in the state.” This was an undisguised attack on Obong Victor Attah, former governor of the state, who testified at the governorship election petition tribunal and was cited in both the judgments of the tribunal and the Court of Appeal as a witness of truth.
The point is that in a democracy there is a right of reply. Since Udom Emmanuel has decided to launch these personal attacks, he should be ready for it when those he is attacking decide to reply in kind. After all, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones; the story of a signed letter by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria about Udom’s family tree is still fresh in the public mind, not to talk of the history of serial wife-beating. There will salacious feast if the mudsling continues.
No government has a right to set up newspapers for political vendetta and expect its victims to keep quiet. Those who raise questions about others’ reputations should expect equal and opposite reactions. Comrade Idongesit Okpon, a political commentator in the state, reacting to the spate of attacks by Mr Emmanuel on political opponents, cautioned that the governor has more to lose in an all out media war. Mr Okon Inyang, a political leader in Uyo, has commended the patience of those at the receiving end of Udom Emmanuel’s political barbs and warned that their “patience maybe fraying at the helms.” Inyang advised Emmanuel to focus on his plan for the development of the state.
Mr Emmanuel had during the election campaigns boasted of his plan for industrialisation of the state, vowing to plant manufacturing plants right across the state, but nine months after, the signs of industries are not visible anywhere save for groundbreaking, which is actually the signature action of his administration, whatever the sector.
In place of industries, Mr Emmanuel is setting up a string of guttersnipe tabloids dedicated to sleaze and slander, with the sole purpose of smearing the reputation of senior citizens in the state to massage his ego. At the last count, there were six of such hatchet-job rag sheets. Most notorious among them are The Citizen, Global Pilot and Society Watch newspapers. The others are Anchor Express, Nigeria Pulse and The Waves newspapers.
Intelligence is abroad that Mr Emmanuel is pumping millions of naira of government money into a not-so-covert demolition contract job designed to destroy all known opposition figures to his government, with Mr Umana Okon Umana as the principal target.
The search-and-destroy job is reportedly being coordinated by both the state commissioner for information and the chief press secretary to the state governor. Hired hands are on the prowl scouring for ‘enemies’ of Mr Emmanuel with the brief to invent and publish the most scurrilous, downright damaging stories on them in the hope that by such hatchet job they will cease to exist politically.
But sober citizens of the state are concerned that with Mr Emmanuel it seems to be “morning yet on creation day.” He doesn’t appear to realise that the media war should have ended with his award at the Supreme Court, and that now is the time for governance which has been on hold for nearly a year under the pretext that election litigation was crowding out time for the job of administering the state.
There is enough to keep Mr Emmanuel busy, without a needless media war. State finances are in the most parlous state from a combination of the consequences of cheap oil and carte blanche spending on election litigation. This is the time to sit down and think through the challenge of finding the money to finance development and alleviate poverty in the state.
It is the time to end the paradox of grinding poverty and hunger in the highest revenue-earning state in the federation. It is not time to continue with unabated and misdirected propaganda. It is time to address the unemployment time-bomb that is ticking in everybody’s face.
The most cursory check will reveal that about three to five generations of graduates in the state cannot find work. Many, if not most, of them have even given up looking for work, because they do not think they will ever get a job. Hunger is not some headline news on TV about starving millions in Ethiopia. It is a lived reality in the homes of Akwa Ibom people, a most disconcerting malaise coexisting with the fabled wealth of an oil rich state which collects the most revenues from the federation account every month.
These are the concerns that should keep a state executive awake at night, and not some imaginary political foes long after the battle has been won and lost. The man who has the onerous task of leading a state like Akwa Ibom should worry about the chronic lack of skills by most citizens of the state in nearly all areas needed to build the capacity for development. Then the priority should be investment in training, skill acquisition and capacity building. The priority should not and cannot for any reason be investment in guttersnipe publications and the hiring of attack dogs to go after ‘political foes.’
Given the circumstances in which Akwa Ibom has found itself today, where payment of workers’ salaries and pensions is no longer a certainty month on month, where rural infrastructure has decayed to the extent that the countryside is about to be cut off from the cities, investment in hate press is tantamount to a wrong-headed decision to major in minor; in fact, akin to the emperor fiddling while Rome burns.
Haba! There is so much to do and the stakes are so, so high that a state chief executive cannot afford this kind of self-distraction. The primary and secondary school system is in shambles. Or is it education at the tertiary level that is in good harness? Look at the state owned university! The place exists just in name. The school is so cash-strapped that it couldn’t prepare for the recent accreditation visitation from the NUC. Conditions are even direr at both the state polytechnic at Ikot Asurua and the state college of education at Afaha Nsit. Yet students are being graduated from these institutions.
What quality are they taking with them to the job market, and what is the implication for the state in terms of local capacity for development? This should be the concern of a leader, and not investment in some hate enterprise.
Let this go out as a call for return to normalcy. Mr Emmanuel has a job to do to develop the state and let democracy dividend reach every hamlet and home. Hate press will not cut it, though that is easier to organise. What will cut it is serious, sober work of putting a shoulder to the wheel.
As for the rain of insults, there is bound to be negative feedback if it continues.
- Mr. Etop wrote in from Lagos
