2022: The Burdens Of A Governor–Abdulwahab Oba
As the world welcomes 2023 and bids 2022 goodbye, our governor will be weighed down by heavy burdens of deceit, betrayal, failure and deliberate lies. Apart from the general apprehension about his impending election loss, God willing, AA will usher in 2023 with several issues still without explanations yet with only some weeks to the general election.
How would AbdulRahman explain, for instance, the failure of his administration to subject itself to the decision of the highest court in the land on the issue of local government elections? A few months short of four years guaranteed him by the constitution, our governor still insists that he has better wisdom than the judiciary; that he can conveniently ignore the directive of the Supreme Court which had declared his Transition Implementation Committee (TIC) at the local government level as ultra vires, illegal and unconstitutional. Except he does the needful before May 2023, which is nearly impossible, he will carry this burden for the rest of his life. It is a shame.
AbdulRahman will be haunted by his campaign promises. He promised not to take loans in the running of the government. Now, he had accumulated more than N50b in domestic and foreign loans without commensurate development of the state. What a shame and a disaster! AbdulRahman, before being sworn in, had promised not to sack any workers in the state. But today, the burden of the sunset workers will keep haunting him. AA will carry it into 2023 as baggage. These are bonafide Kwarans, employed into the teaching service during the Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed administration far away before the 2019 general election, but whom our governor decided are not fit for their roles and status.
Four years down the road, the burden of their plight, the knowledge that they were denied legitimate jobs because of political vendetta, and the reality that they will be waiting at the polls for our governor in the elections, will all weigh him down as he joins others to welcome the year 2023 . AbdulRahman will also transmit the burden of the displaced and traumatized workers of the Kwara Hotel and KWI-RS to the year 2023.
For almost four years, AbdulRahman has not fulfilled his promise to the people of Kwara North. He promised to construct the bridge linking Patigi and Bida in Niger state. He promised to build agro-processing industries in Kwara North. AbdulRahman also promised to abolish the subsisting joint funding between local government and state government. None of these came to fruition. Shameful!
What of the N27.9b he said his administration secured as a bond but kept N17.9b in a commercial bank? We don’t have the name of the bank. But even at that, every reasonable person will ask what type of wisdom is inherent in that decision? You borrow money to develop your state, and there are many areas of need in the state but you decided to keep the borrowed money in a commercial bank. When will he spend this money? Or, is it kept as collateral for an imaginary loan for a personal project in a West African Country? It is a shame, and the burden will not go away in 2023 and beyond.
Since almost all his major projects are allegedly being funded by the bond, AbdulRahman also has the burden of telling Kwarans how the over N110b IGR is spent. What about the enormous resources from the monthly federal allocations?
Today, if there is a family meeting of the APC loyalists, how would AA explain the departure from the party of those men and women of integrity who abandoned the ship mid-sea? That they all wanted him to steal government money? Or, that he deceived them during their collective struggle to get into office? It is a clear burden for AA. And a shame as well.
The insinuation is also ripe in town that our governor has business interests in Cote D’Ivoire. Is that why that country’s Minister of Petroleum allegedly visited him while the Minister was in Nigeria recently? Is AbdulRahman truly building a refinery in that country? Is our governor still mixing personal business with government business? It is a contradiction that he will have to explain to Kwarans.
The apprehension about the elections must be the reason he has been incoherent recently; mixing details and making false allegations. Of course, it is evident that for a man whose intellectual exposure is not deep, being made to rule a state like Kwara in four years must be extremely taxing ; enough to lead to all sorts of embarrassing gaffes in the public. Kwara, like any other state worth its name in this century, needs a governor who is at home intellectually, who can hold steady in and out and who can be relied upon to speak to issues without messing up as our governor has been doing recently. That is why it is a shame.
The many burdens AbdulRazaq will carry into 2023 are a shame.
But we are no longer interested in public explanations. We are just waiting for the elections to show him the Red card and for follow-up actions of the anti-graft agencies when section 308 of the constitution will no longer hold stowage– Alhaji Abdulwahab Oba , who is Alhaji Shuaib Yaman Abdulahi’ s Special Adviser on Media, writes from Ilorin.
Alhaji Yaman Abdulahi is the Kwara state PDP gubernatorial candidate.
