ODILI’S
FUTILE QUEST FOR THE PRESIDENCY
by Silva Amadi
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.
