|
PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Another Word for Kure
Almost exactly three years ago this month, I offered an unsolicited word of advice on these pages to the governor of my state, Niger, Engineer Abdulkadir Kure. At that time he was barely ten months into his second term as governor. In my article I noted that he returned as the governorship candidate of the ruling PDP for the 2003 general elections in spite of the almost universal opposition of the state’s respected elders, irrespective of their tribe or religion. This opposition arose essentially because they believed his performance during his first term was dismal. In this they merely reflected the opinion of most ordinary Nigerlites whose lives seemed to have worsened at the end of Kure’s first term.
The big exception in this opposition to Kure’s return was former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida. Babangida, it seemed, valued the unalloyed personal loyalty Kure gave him in his cat-and-mouse power game with President Olusegun Obasanjo, than the governor’s performance. And in the politics of Niger State, Babangida’s word seems supreme.
As Kure approaches the end of his second and final term as governor, it seems appropriate to revisit my article of February 25, 2004. That article went down badly with Kure himself and with Babangida who complained that I was unduly harsh on his political protégé. However, in spite of its going down badly with Kure, it seemed to have gingered him to do something about some of the areas in which I said he failed Nigerlites.
The most obvious example, if many Nigerlites I spoke with after the article are to be believed, was the 80 odd kilometer road between Minna, the state capital, and Bida, the second largest town in the state and the political capital of Nupes, the majority tribe in the state. Before my article, that road, like virtually all roads in Niger State, was absolutely deplorable; it took no fewer than one and a half hours to travel. It may have been mere coincidence, but not long after my article, the state embarked upon the reconstruction of that road. Since its completion a couple of years ago, it now takes an average of 40 minutes to travel between Minna and Bida.
Unfortunately, the happy lot of those who travel between these two towns is shared by few who travel about in other parts of the state. For example, a journey between Bida and Lapai through Agaie is a real bone-shaker. Far worse still is a journey from Agaie to Baro, a major railway terminal on River Niger and Nigeria’s largest inland port until it suffered absolute neglect from both the federal and state authorities.
Barely three months or so to the end of Kure’s second term, the bleak story of Niger State in the road transport sector appear to have been replicated in all other sectors in the state. Like most other states in the federation, the absolutely enormous resources that have accrued to the state in the wake of the oil windfall of the last four years or so do not seem to have made the lives of most ordinary Nigerlites any better than it was before the return of civil politics in 1999. Instead, the ordinary Nigerlite has suffered crushing poverty even as a few in the charmed circle of the governor’s friends, political associates, relations and kith and kin have become enormously rich.
At this point let me make a confession. For a while after my February 24, 2004 article, my erstwhile warm relationship with the governor became decidedly frosty. However, he eventually took the initiative to defrost matters, having realized, presumably, that as my governor such an initiative laid more with him than with me.
Following the thawing of our frosty
relationship, I gained unrestricted access to him, an access which I used
to ask him several favours on behalf of others.
Yet another favour I asked the governor was for him to give a grant to an elder friend who had fallen into hard times and needed to buy a house in the high density Rigasa ward in Kaduna.
The governor gladly obliged all these requests and a few others more like helping to sponsor a reception a group of friends organized in Bida for some generals of Nupe origin who had retired from the military and had expressed a willingness to return home to serve their communities.
The confession I’ll like to make here is that each time I requested these favours from the governor I wondered if I was not asking him to do the very thing for which I had criticized him, i.e. to use his office for the benefit of a privileged few. For me it was always an acute dilemma and, unsatisfactory as it may be, I often resolved it by telling myself that first, I was not the personal beneficiary of those requests and second, that the requests were well within a governor’s financial and other discretions to exercise at little or no expense to the ordinary citizen.
There are, I suspect, people who would argue that having had unrestricted access to the governor and having used that access to seek for favours from him, I forfeited the moral right to criticize him. I may be wrong, but I personally have never seen things that way. Few people have been my personal benefactors like General Babangida, but that has never stopped me from being among the severest, albeit friendly, critics of many of his policies as military president and of his politics since he “stepped aside” from office nearly fourteen years ago. My attitude has always been that it is precisely those you benefit from that you are even more obliged to tell the truth to.
For me the most important thing about criticisms is absence of malice rather than being on a higher moral ground, important as this is. And I want to believe that when I criticize I do so without malice. As any lawyer would tell you, the test of the absence of malice is consideration and respect for the facts and the context of a case, which is what I strive to do when ever I write.
The last time I criticized Kure’s record as governor, I said it was not too late for him to correct his mistakes. He may, I said, have had Babangida’s support in spite of his dismal performance during his first term, but he needed more than that if he wanted history to be kind to him. Nearly three years on, he has, by common consent, not only not done enough to correct those mistakes, he seems to have compounded matters by assembling and supporting a slate of executive and legislative candidates for the next general elections that smacks too much of cronyism at its worse.
Probably the most controversial, though not necessarily the worst, case in this respect is his support for his wife, Zainab, as the PDP candidate for Niger State’s Zone A senatorial district, Kure’s own district. Zainab is a good lady, as far as I know, and, thanks in part to her high profile youth empowerment scheme, she is certainly more well-known than the governorship candidate Kure has decided to impose on the PDP against stiff opposition from many of his lately estranged political associates, including Alhaji Magaji Abubakar, the North-Central Vice-Chairman of the party.
However the governor himself had told the world in unequivocal terms that he will never allow his wife to go to into politics, much less contest for the Senate, possibly out of consideration of the political and religious sensitivity of a state as conservative as Niger State and even more possibly because he knows there are better qualified candidates for the job.
It is such a great pity that, should the PDP win the next election, Kure, who came in as the state’s youngest governor with so much promise as a competent civil engineer and a man of God, will probably go down as not only a great disappointment but also as someone who, upon his departure, saddled his state with an even more incompetent, colourless and self-aggrandizing political leadership.
The greater pity, however, is that several among the elders from his own senatorial district who should be the first to advice him against his political conduct have been acquiescent because their sons and sons-in-law and other relations, some with little or no record of public service, and others with a terrible record of public service, are beneficiaries of the governor’s behaviour. |