Can Nigeria still boast of any servant-leader
or are we afflicted with only Stalinist Leaders? Fundamentally, the problem
with Stalinist leaders is that they neither understand, nor appreciate, the
true purpose of governance in this day and age. This poverty of
understanding, with which the government of Godswill Akpabio is so manifestly
afflicted, is what makes the Stalinist approach to governance so prone to
errors and assorted depravity.
The Stalinist leader erroneously believes first and foremost, that government is
all about those doing the governing rather than the governed. So, every move,
policy or project must address the personal interests of those in government
first, before (if at all) the interest of the public is put into contention.
This jaundiced view of the true purpose of governance helps explain why one
of the earliest acts of Godswill Akpabio in office was to pull down a
perfectly good Governor’s Lodge and erect a multi-billion naira edifice in
its place for his own personal comfort. As Mr. Larry Esin, the
youthful national chairman of the Progressive Peoples’ Alliance (PPA) has had
occasion to remark, only someone who has no understanding of what government
is about would do a thing like that in Akwa Ibom; of all places.
We are speaking here of a state whose general population is in the tight grip of
poverty – never mind the fancy mansions and flashy cars and huge unearned
wealth of those in government. After attending to the personal need for a
so-called state-of-the-art Governor’s Lodge, it then occurred to our
governor, three years later, to start clearing a site for a general hospital
for Uyo, the state capital. At the time Julius Berger started work on the new
Governor’s Lodge, Uyo had no general hospital save for the federal
government-owned teaching hospital. It did not even occur to His Excellency
to properly refurbish the decrepit St. Luke’s Hospital inherited from the
Catholic Church which has been doing duty as the only general hospital in Uyo
for the last 50 years or so. He had to first of all build a Governor’s
Lodge worth many times, according to Larry Esin, the real estate value of the
American White House. But then, so are prodigal ways of those to whom Joe Stalin
is the model leader.
Notwithstanding that his stated reason for desecrating the Uyo landscape
with tons of
concrete in the name of ‘flyovers’, namely; “that Akwa Ibom people would not
have to go to Lagos before they can see flyovers”, already sounds asinine and
pedestrian enough, we know that the bridge project with bloated cost, is
about him, and his personal aggrandizement. Uyo needs flyovers like a hole in
the head. A small town in a small state, lying for the most part on a
reasonably flat terrain with ring roads laid-out to ease an as yet
non-existent traffic problem, Uyo is in urgent need of pipe-borne water. Yes,
water before multi-billion bridges to nowhere. Even if you are thinking ahead
to a mythical future when Uyo will have the traffic problems of Lagos , in
cost-benefit terms and given the time value of the cost outlay of the
flyovers today, you have to wonder at the mind that thought up such a
mindless squandering of riches.
But
Akwa Ibom people do not have to wonder much. They know, in fact, why
the flyovers have been inflicted upon them. They know that the bigger
the project, the costlier it is, the bigger the cut. Akwa Ibom people surely
appreciate that it is all about filthy lucre and the corrupt siphoning of
some into private pockets from the public till. In true Stalinist fashion, it
is all about those governing rather than the governed.
So,relevance is dammed, as in the Ibom Tropicana entertainment complex. If the
matter did not involve our collective existence, we would have to admire
Godswill Akpabio and his cohorts for the sheer insane audacity of their
conduct. For, it takes a certain psychotic kind of boldness to look the
over three million people of Akwa Ibom in the eye and promote the manifestly
false idea that what is required to change their lives for the better is a
N33 billion, multi-storey entertainment centre. But, it is our collective
patrimony that is being squandered away, so we cannot commend such
brigandage. Our patriotic duty is clear. If the entertainment complex
does get built, if our hard-won derivation funds are wasted on what is bound
to be another white elephant, we shall at the end of the day, rename the
ill-conceived project and make sure it wears the proper application; to wit,
“Godswill Folly”.
As a Stalinist, the man desires
monuments to his ‘greatness’. We predict that the boondoggle of Tropicana
Centre shall be one such monument; a veritable morality takes about the
dangers of allowing a certain sort of people in power.
Again,the man on the street is not deceived. The attraction of the Tropicana
project to its promoters remains its mega size and bloated cost. If a
project is not big enough, how can billions be creamed off its purported
costs? Akwa Ibom is now finding it difficult to get reimbursed the Akpabio’s
claimed N81billion spent on federal roads within the state; the federal
government has only refunded N2billion according to him. Why not; the federal
government would not approve Akwa Ibom’s N1billion per kilometer road contracts.
Stalinists speak glibly of development but do they really
know what it means? To them development inheres in roads, bridges and tall
buildings. However, if history teaches anything at all, it is that the
content of development is as important as (if not more so than) its physical
form. The point often eludes Stalinists who typically possess more animal
cunning than any meaningful capacity for serious introspection.
Regardless of how broad the roads they build are; or how magnificent the palaces
they erect turn out to be on the outside, the Stalinist approach to
development frequently falls because it is typically driven by greed and
corruption.
Godswill Akpabio’s administration may have embarked on the construction of roads,
bridges and expensive buildings; but in the process, so much public wealth
has been squandered and looted that the dream of every young man in Akwa Ibom
is to float a political group or support those in power to make some, if not
as much money as the privileged ones in government. Constructive
pursuits give way to political thuggery as a way of life and means of
livelihood. And, for those who cannot get to the honey-pot of
government money – and most people can’t – readily turn to armed brigandage
and kidnapping. Thus the development they promote, if one can call it
that, lacks the one essential ingredient of genuine progress which is
sustainability.
And that is the fate of Akwa Ibom under Godswill Akpabio.
Emem Idong (emem.idong@yahoo.com) writes in from Eket
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