|
Odili's Futile Quest for the Presidency
With the apparent demise of OBJ’s third
term agenda, the stage has been set for political gladiators and
opportunists to profile themselves and their favoured candidates for the
exalted office of President, since there may be a vacancy in that office
after all. In this process, the media has been replete, in recent
weeks, with names of prospective candidates, with reviews and counter
reviews of those who are best suited to step into OBJ’s shoes come the
magic date of May 29th, 2007.
One of those reviews which attract some
attention was the recent covers story by Newswatch Magazine, which
focused on the presidential ambition of Governor Peter Odili of Rivers
State. In that piece written by veteran journalist, Mr. Ray Ekpu, the
magazine went to extreme lengths to showcase the many ‘achievements’ of
Governor Odili, and concluded that he would be a fantastic candidate for
the Presidency, come 2007. Some of the achievements highlighted include
the now famous gas turbines, which, after gulping over N40 billion of
people’s money, is said to have solved the problems of power in Rivers
State, such that power failure has become almost an anathema in the
State. Other achievements include the construction of roads, provision
of medical facilities in hospitals, including the purchase of an air
ambulance to medevac critically ill patients to hospitals outside
Nigeria for urgent medical attention, ostensibly due to the high premium
placed on human life in the State.
As I struggled to restrain myself
throughout the agonising trauma of reading the Newswatch article, I
wondered how a journalist of Ray Ekpu’s standing and a newsmagazine of
Newswatch’s reputation could have allowed themselves to fall prey to
this sort of armchair journalism, which is apparently a paid advert to
embellish the truth and thereby perpetrate bad governance in this
country. In order to ensure that the contents of the publication are
not accepted hook, line and sinker by gullible Nigerians who may not be
privy to the facts, I felt impelled to put my thoughts down, in the hope
that this may, somehow, set some of the records straight.
As an indigene of Rivers State, I have
watched with utter frustration the challenges faced by the State in the
past seven years, and the utter waste of public funds by an
administration which held out a lot of promise at inception, and which
has enjoyed unprecedented goodwill from the peace loving people of the
State. It however appears that the quiet and civilised disposition of
the citizens of the State has clearly been taken advantage of all this
while. To start with, Odili has no reason to fail as Governor of Rivers
State, because his emergence as Governor is one of the Seven Wonders of
the World, so to speak. Coming from Ndoni, probably the smallest ethnic
grouping in the State, who are originally of Ibo extraction, it was
clearly a miracle for Odili to have emerged as Governor of a State which
has large and proud ethnic groups like the Kalabaris, the Ikwerres, the
Ogonis and Andonis, the Ibani people, the Ijaws, to mention but a few.
The fact that Odili had been Deputy Governor under the administration of
Governor Ada George, could not have qualified him for the exalted office
of Governor in a purely democratic setting where numbers matter a great
deal. However, the miracle happened, and when Odili emerged Governor in
1999 through an electoral process adjudged by many to be clearly below
minimum civilised standards, people expected that he would use the sheer
opportunity given him by God to do what is right, and at least leave a
solid legacy, knowing that such a rare opportunity will never come the
way of his kinsmen again. And he had every opportunity to do so,
considering the harvest of good fortune in the name of excess revenue
through derivation, and in more recent times, excess crude oil revenues,
with monthly inflows to the State from the Federation Account running
into several billions of Naira. In addition to this steady revenue,
there is also the undeclared but equally exorbitant internally generated
revenue from personal income taxes of staff working in oil and gas
companies, which abound in the State. In fact, from Shell alone, the
Rivers State government is reputed to generate monthly revenues in the
region of N500 million from Pay As You Earn taxes, which the employees
groan under, with absolutely nothing to show for it from the State
Government on a monthly basis. This is not to take into account PAYE
taxes from other oil and gas producing and service companies, and the
sundry other taxes and levies collected by other agencies of the State
from time to time.
The unfortunate thing however has been the
undue emphasis on cheap propaganda and press capture which the Odili
administration embarked upon right from inception. The first signals of
this was when the government declared, barely 100 days into the life of
the administration in 1999, that it had completed 1,000 housing units
for the benefit of indigenes of the State. No one ever saw these
buildings, and to date, the few ones erected along the roads for the
benefit of the press have been largely uncompleted, and the quality of
finishing so low that no sensible person can possibly occupy them. Then
came the extreme propaganda on the gas turbines, which, because of the
huge problem of power failure in Nigeria, captured a lot of attention.
These gas turbines, which have been commissioned several times over by
different administrations in Nigeria, starting from the Shehu Shagari
era, have been recycled, repackaged and re-commissioned at least five
times by the Odili administration since 1999. Many people in the State
wonder at the special attraction the State holds for President Obasanjo,
who has, at the last count, visited Rivers State 17 times, while he has
not visited some States in Nigeria even once! The truth of the gas
turbines however is that there is no power coming from any of the white
elephant projects, which are apparently drain pipes for the corrupt
siphoning of State funds to private pockets of government officials.
In the area of healthcare, the situation
is so pathetic that one wonders whether Odili is indeed a medical doctor
as he professes. The Braithwaite Memorial Hospital in Port Harcourt,
which is the premier State owned medical facility, is in such a bad
state that patients and their relations have to buy water for operations
to be performed on them, and huge rats jump from bed to bed, terrorising
patients and sending them to their early graves in the highly unsanitary
conditions at the hospital. If this is the situation for the main
hospital in the State, one can only imagine what the situation would be
like for other places. In the face of all this neglect, the Governor
goes to buy two private jets, one of which he branded an air ambulance.
The real question is, why do we need an air ambulance in Rivers State,
if the facilities in the hospitals are as good as Odili’s propagandists
will like people to believe? The mere purchase of an air ambulance is a
clear acknowledgement of the non-availability of adequate medical
facilities. After all, the other hospitals where patients are expected
to be flown to also use medical facilities, which can be bought with the
funds available and installed in our hospitals here. And I hope Odili
will tell Rivers people one day how many ordinary patients have been
flown in the air ambulance to any hospital since it was purchased over a
year ago. What is widely known as a fact is that Odili bought those
planes for his futile presidential ambition, to execute his campaigns,
and no Rivers man is fooled by his lack of depth of thinking. The mess
in Medicare in the State is so glaring that even Odili’s private Pamo
Clinc had no functional mortuary to keep the remains of his father
in-law when he died in 2004, and his remains had to be deposited in the
mortuary of one of the oil and gas companies in the State!
The sorry state of affairs in the health
sector pervades every other sector, ranging from education, to
infrastructure, such that there is a near total absence of governance in
the State. The government has been surviving on propaganda, and it is
obvious that even the propaganda machinery is tired, as there is nothing
new to say. The recent desperate efforts to construct a few roads,
which are all without drainage and very poorly finished, is such a huge
joke that every discerning person sees through it. Moreover, there are
allegations that the contracts are often over inflated, and awarded to
sons of highly placed individuals in Abuja who may be able to help Odili
with his presidential ambition. The fact that the whole of Port
Harcourt is always submerged when there is a major rain, like the one on
Saturday 10th June 2006, is a clear testimony to the fact
that Odili’s seven years in office has been a total waste to the State.
To demonstrate Odili’s disdain for the
Rivers man, he embarked on a destructive exercise in 2004 of demolishing
people’s houses, apparently aping the exercise in Abuja by Nasir
el-Rufai to restore the Abuja master plan. This exercise sent a lot of
people to their early graves and confined many more to perpetual penury,
as their means of livelihood and their residences were destroyed in the
name of expanding roads or beautifying the city of Port Harcourt. Not
only was no compensation paid to any of the victims, but to date,
nothing has been done to provide the roads or drainages the houses were
demolished to make way for. In a similar vein, early in the life of the
administration in 1999, Odili ordered the demolition of Rainbow Town, a
settlement within the Nigerian Army Rainbow Barracks at Trans-Amadi,
Port Harcourt. The propaganda then was that the vast area would be laid
out, with modern facilities like roads, water, electricity, etc., to
make way for a modern settlement. Seven years after the bulldozers
wrecked the havoc on the hapless residents, the area remains desolate,
and latest indications are that the choice property has been shared out
between Governor Odili and his political cronies.
Finally, Odili’s desperation further came
to the fore through the childish sycophancy he embarked upon by his
recent purchase of some vehicles, ostensibly for public transportation,
many of which he dedicated to the memory of the late first lady, Chief
Stella Obasanjo. Instead of allowing this lady’s spirit to rest in
peace, especially in view of the highly embarrassing circumstances of
her death, these vehicles are all over the place in the city, charging
ridiculous and unsustainable fares of N10 per drop, in the hope of
winning cheap popularity as usual. But the majority of Rivers people are
not fooled and are a lot more sophisticated than Odili and his political
adventurers will like to believe.
Also, having so openly supported
Obasanjo’s ill-fated third term bid and declared that OBJ has been the
best thing to ever happen to Nigeria, Odili has clearly shown that if
given the opportunity to serve in that exalted office, he cannot perform
up to what Obasanjo has done. And knowing as we all do, that Obasanjo
has hardly achieved anything meaningful since assumption of office seven
years ago, the clear verdict of Odili on himself is that he will be a
misfit in any other office bestowed on him. It is therefore clear that
having cursed himself, whatever efforts he is dissipating currently will
come to nothing but another round of wastage of public funds. It is
hoped that someday, the EFCC will muster the courage to hold him and
other thieving Governors to account for the way they have misruled their
States since the restoration of democratic governance in Nigeria in
1999.
__________________________________
*** Silva Amadi, an indigene of Rivers
State, lives in Port Harcourt.
|