How I wish time and tide and circumstance had softened that judgment. Rather, they have, if anything, reinforced it.
Then Kogi State was, and is even more so now, a political unit administered by the Igala largely for the benefit of the Igala, with scant regard for the interests and well-being of the Yoruba – the so-called Okun people of the former Kabba Province, the Ebirra and the Nupe who were corralled in a state that treats them as colonial subjects.
You see it at every stratum of the public service and in every aspect of the governance. It is dominance most unsubtle. When they bother at all to respond to the complaint of those whom they are lording it over with such in-your-face brazenness, they tell them it is all a game of numbers.
They assert that the Igala people outnumber all the other ethnic groups combined and should by that fact exercise the dominance that comes with that endowment. Theirs is a game of brute numbers in which equity and fellow-feeling have no place.
Those at the receiving end of this kind of treatment must therefore have felt sorely galled to hear Governor Idris Wada declaim the other day that he had brought equity and justice and fairplay to governance in Kogi.
Hear him, in a wide-ranging interview with Thisday (July 23, 2015)
“…We try to unify our people for a common purpose of development and transformation of Kogi State by being fair in the distribution of amenities and projects across the three senatorial zones of the state and we try to attend to the needs of our people in an equitable manner and this has helped to propel our agenda for unity and transformation …”
This declamation can perhaps be understood in the context of the gubernatorial election in which Wada will be seeking a second term. Outside that context, it flies in the face of the facts. It is even flatly contradicted by other claims Wada made in the wide-ranging interview.
The claim that he is building a university teaching hospital and a vocational training centre and an “ultra-modern” parking garage and 500 houses and has “electrified” more than 400 villages and built 300 motorised boreholes and renovated “countless” number of schools even while building many more may be well-founded.
The critical question is: Where are these projects located?
It is the contention of this column that the “equity” and “fairness” that Wada trumpeted in the interview under reference hardly informed the siting of the projects. The siting of the Federal University in the state and Wada’s role in it makes that point abundantly clear.
Word had come, apparently from on high that, finally, a major federal project was likely to be sited in Kabba, in the much-neglected Yoruba area of Kogi State. The entire area was agog with excitement and great expectation. The town already boasted a thriving College of Agriculture, an affiliate of Ahmadu Bello University, set up during the First Republic when Kabba belonged in Northern Nigeria.
With that solid infrastructure in place, and with plenty of room for expansion, the proposed university would be taking off on a sound footing, in an area where education is the major industry. It would, withal, serve as a catalyst for economic development.
The joy was short-lived. The university, Wada insisted, had to be sited in Lokoja, to make up for what he called a deficit of federal presence in the neighbourhood.
If anything, Lokoja already enjoyed a surfeit of federal presence as befits a state capital. It is host to a Federal Medical Centre, a branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Inland Waterways, a military garrison and a police area command, among other institutions.
According to corroborated media reports, Wada led a visiting National Universities Commission delegation to the premises of a secondary school in serious disrepair and told its members that that would be the home of the new federal university. And at the end of its visit, NUC Chairman Professor Julius Okojie dutifully announced that it had indeed accomplished its mission of locating the best site for the new institution, namely the premises of the derelict school, aforementioned.
To be fair to Wada, he is not solely or even principally responsible for the blazing inequity and the grasping propensity that have under the ruling ethnic group in Kogi become the defining characteristics, if not the fundamental objectives, of the governance of the state.
The template was set by the imperious first elected governor, Abubakar Audu, who invested himself with royal airs and an ornate, outsized wardrobe to match. It was notorious that he conducted business from a throne-line chair while his fawning appointees had to stoop before him to take their orders.
He reluctantly agreed to set up the state university in the nearest town, Ayingba, when it became clear that his village lacked the absorptive capacity for that kind of project. Even so, he had it named for himself by subterfuge.
A student delegation from the institution had gone to meet Audu in Lokoja to complain about a dearth of facilities at the institution. The students, so the story goes, were dragooned into a room and asked to draft a petition urging the Kogi Assembly to name the university for Audu. The petition was forwarded to the Assembly, which assented post haste.
That was how it came to be called Prince Abubakar Audu University –not just any Abubakar Audu but the princeling – with the hilarious acronym PAAU. The institution has since reverted to its original name.
Audu’s successor Ibrahim Idris, the carpenter they called “Ibro”followed the same path, but without the flashes of urbaneness that Audu often radiated even at his most imperious. Wada has been a good and faithful student of the duo.
If Wada wins the PDP’s nomination, he will face re-election in November in a profoundly altered political environment. The superior numbers the PDP had relied upon over the years to win and retain power in Kogi without serious challenge is no longer assured.
The PDP retained control of the State Assembly in the general election this past March, but the strong showing of the APC in that poll, not forgetting that it is now the ruling party at the centre and that it has thrown up candidates with far wider appeal do not bode well for Wada and the PDP.
One more thing: The voting pattern in the general election suggests powerfully that, contrary to what has been the dominant assumption in Kogi all these years, the Igala do not constitute a bigger voting bloc than all the other ethnic groups combined.
If they play smart, those groups can effect a power shift, especially if the PDP is seen to be offering nothing but continuity.
http://thenationonlineng.net/kogi-the-unending-mess/
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