By Ismail Rasheed
The fact that governors are considered the chief security officers of their states but do not, in reality, have powers over police personnel deployed there is easily among provisions that rankle the most about Nigeria’s federalism. However, nothing highlights some of the confounding points of Nigeria’s federalism as starkly as the classification of roads in a manner that literally causes a dilemma for governors with regard to fixing federal roads in their states.
I read a statement recently wherein the Ogun State governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun, said that his administration will commence the reconstruction of the Lagos-Sango Ota-Abeokuta road if the federal government failed to do so in two weeks’ time. In an age where nearly every action is cynically reduced to the shenanigans of politics, there are certainly some who would think it was mere posturing. But the governor was apparently speaking in the context of the president’s comment made about three years ago, urging governors not to fix roads owned by the federal government as the latter would no longer reimburse states monies spent fixing such roads.
To users of such roads, however, the distinction between state and federal roads makes little sense. This state-federal roads dilemma will, understandably, be felt more in Ogun State, reputed to be the state with the highest number of federal roads in the country. The brunt of collapsed roads is essentially borne by the people who, predominantly, reside in states where such roads exist. Not surprisingly, their rage is often directed at their governors – not the presidency. Governor Abiodun clearly understands this. His comment during an inspection tour of the said road underscores that: “At its expiration, the state government would, putting the safety and comfort of its citizens first, have no choice than to immediately intervene through total reconstruction.”
He would reinforce this compelling sense of obligation to the people’s welfare one week later when he approved the reconstruction of the 32-kilometre Sango-Ijoko-Akute-Yakoyo and the 8-kilometre Mowe-Ofada roads. It did not matter that these were federal roads. His concern was how their deplorable conditions would be adversely impacting the people’s lives, both their daily commute and their businesses. So for the Ogun State governor, the sustained zeal that has characterized his upgrade of collapsed infrastructure, public healthcare and education is not influenced by a vain desire to earn public acclaim. For him, it is all about fidelity to his social contract with the electorate. From the Igan-Ishamuro Road in Ago-Iwoye, Ijebu North Local Government Area to the 4-kilometre Oba Erinwole road that was once a nightmare for travellers heading to Ikorodu from Sagamu, the steady stream of robust infrastructure projects being commissioned further amply demonstrate this.
Amid all the remarkable turnaround that has birthed projects like the reconstructed Ijebu Ode-Epe-Sagamu-Benin (federal) Expressway Interchange and 42-Sagamu Interchange-Abeokuta road, however, there is yet a sprinkling of cynicism that could be gleaned, especially on the social media. It does appear that for each road fixed by the government, there is an online hound gleefully pointing out a bad road elsewhere that similarly requires some makeover. Perhaps it just might have been commendable if the motive of this online brigade was altruistic. The puerile nature of their civic monitoring gives them away as partisan agents of some disgruntled politician, who increasingly seems like a relic from an ancien regime.
It is thus not mere coincidence that Senator Ibikunle Amosun, a former governor of Ogun State, is dredging up an old grudge as the plaudits for his successor’s stellar performance become even more resounding. Sounding, as he always does, as though his words were a holy writ, Amosun proclaimed that Abiodun “must be removed from office in 2023”, alleging that the latter’s electoral victory in 2019 was rigged. The former governor made the claim at the Abeokuta Club which conferred an award on him on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. “When you are in a place and they are telling you that you have done the work of four or five governors altogether. I feel elated. I am happy that they appreciated our little efforts,” he told journalists afterwards.
One can only react to this delusional quip with the words of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” As a resident of Abeokuta for many years, I have no doubt that if Amosun truly worked like “four or five governors altogether” like he claimed he did, the incumbent wouldn’t have inherited the kind of terrible development deficit that he encountered on assuming office. Also, the number of ambulances in the state would not be be a paltry five if he had done as much work as he claimed. So it is just as well that Governor Abiodun described his predecessor’s pronouncements, fittingly, as “self-delusion”.
Indeed, even beneath the shenanigans and posturing of his online brigade, it is interesting to note a tacit admission of failure of their principal. The current intervention offers a glimpse of the sort of incremental turnaround that would have occurred in Ogun State’s public infrastructure had they been over the past years received the kind of attention the Abiodun administration has devoted to their upgrade.
Performance cannot be deemed impressive simply on the basis of sycophantic eulogies of acolytes. It is often based on concrete social indicators, not a self-pronounced achievement like Amosun’s ridiculous claim that his record was comparable to the “work of four or five governors”. Such an achievement would have been self-evident like Abiodun’s accomplishments. As the National Bureau of Statistics’ most recent report (2020) of the Most Fully Employed Population Shows, Ogun State has the best ranking among Nigerian states, including the FCT. Besides having the country’s fourth-least poverty headcount ratio, Ogun State has since 2020 recorded the fourth-highest IGR performance. Those feats were achieved without putting an unnecessary tax burden on the people. I can attest to that. Equally significant is the fact even in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated economic catastrophe it wrought, data from the NBS reveals that Ogun was among the only 10 states that attracted foreign direct investment.
It is instructive though that Senator Amosun’s scurrilous attacks on Governor Abiodun are not premised on his perceptions of the latter’s governance scorecard. They are fueled by an insatiable lust for power, a primitive urge to make a totem of oneself and demand an eternal obeisance. So, Amosun’s fuss is not about the Ogun State people; it’s all an egotistical rage. And, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe in Arrow of God, when an oracle becomes excessively irrational in its demands, the people would have no qualms showing it the tree from which it was carved. As it was in 2019 when he was undone by a self-defeating quest, Amosun’s latter-day flight of fancy will certainly fall back to earth with a thud in 2023.
Rasheed writes from Abeokuta.
