...he's tried on education but done poorly on job creation – Chukwubuike
...it’s all empty rhetoric and little achievement – Onuegbu
...state runs a ‘keke and hotel’ economy – Okey Ezeh
CHUKS OLUIGBO
In spite of the government’s self-adulation and showmanship, there appears to be a general consensus among citizens of Imo State, the Eastern Heartland, that in concrete terms, the Rochas Okorocha administration in the state has recorded very meagre achievement in the last five years. This view stems from the fact that, having ridden to power on the back of popular support from the mass of Imo people who were clearly disenchanted with the loud-mouthed and ‘all-talk-and-no-do’ administration of Ikedi Ohakim, much confidence and expectations of messiahnic proportions were reposed on Okorocha.
Ohakim, because of his numerous promises that never saw the light of day – such as the claim that he was transforming Imo into a one-city state, a modern model state and tourist destination of the world and that he was constructing the most ambitious road project ever in the history of Nigeria, a 150-kilometre Boulevard called Imo Interconnectivity Multilane Freeway, which would pass through 500 communities, 19 local government areas, 39 markets with 13 electronic tollgates and connecting Oguta Resort and the entire state – was generally seen as the bad guy of Imo politics.
Allegations of maltreatment of a Catholic cleric and a general disenchantment with his government combined to mobilise Imo masses against him. And so, when the elections came, as a people so impoverished by past ineffective governments and a state held hostage by a clique of political renegades, they dared the odds to elect a leader considered to be after their hearts.
Okorocha’s coming to power was thus greeted with euphoria. It was tagged ‘The Imo Revolution’ in some quarters because observers believed that at last, Imo people had taken their destiny in their hands. It was considered to be the first time since 1999 that the people themselves truly elected their governor without the interference of any godfather. Okorocha once reportedly admitted publicly that he prosecuted the 2011 election without a kobo from his personal purse; it was all the goodwill of the Imo masses. Many referred to him as a servant-leader who understood the plight of the people and was coming to right all the wrongs of the past, and Imo people were hopeful that the Eastern Heartland would shine again.
He understood the mood of the moment and exploited it. In his inaugural speech on May 29, 2011, Okorocha waxed lyrical. Punctuating his speech with elaborate Bible quotations, he said: “Today, the Lord has loosened the captivity of Imo people. Today is indeed the day of freedom, the day of emancipation, the day of resurrection.... I know you expect so much from me. I know you believe in me. I know you believe I can deliver. And I promise I will deliver.... If the only reason that I will be poor in this life is to serve my people without being corrupt, then I declare myself a poor man from today onwards.”
He told Imo people that he was on a rescue mission and that he would deliver on his promises, which included, among others, free education to Imo children, jobs for unemployed Imo youths, fight against corruption, and community-based governance. In short, he promised to exceed the records of Samuel Onunaka Mbakwe, the first civilian governor of the state, who is generally perceived as the only true leader Imo has had since its creation in 1976.
Five years down the line, many Imo State citizens say what they have got from the governor was not what they bargained for. Most people say though the governor started out well during his first term in office, he, however, derailed along the way. They point to the granting of free education up to tertiary level, which was the governor’s major campaign promise in 2011, the opening up of inner-city roads within Owerri municipality and expansion of existing ones, unfolding of an ambitious project of transforming Orlu and Okigwe into full townships, among others.
“When he came, he said he was in a hurry to develop Imo State, and we were all happy when he actually began to work. He was even nice to civil servants in the state. He paid their salaries promptly and at some point doled out money to them for Christmas celebration,” said Nnenna Okoro, an Owerri resident.
“Along the line, however, the governor derailed. Most of the projects he started have not been – and may never be – completed; the roads he constructed turned out to be of very low quality and many of them failed within a year of completion; and, worse of all, he has not been very fair to the civil servants,” she added.
Some others, however, say rather than make their lives better, Okorocha has unleashed monumental suffering on them, making them to bite their fingers in regret. They refer to the numerous anti-people policies of the government, such as the sack, in 2011, of 10,000 youths employed by Ohakim in the state civil service, the recent summary dismissal of over 3,000 workers in the state, the arbitrary slashing of salaries and outright non-payment on many occasions.
“Our salaries have been slashed in a 70 percent/30 percent sharing formula that we hardly understand. Even the small thing that is left is not being paid promptly. We are now in June, but could you believe that the last salary I received was January salary, and it was paid only in May? It is very difficult now to feed, pay house rent, pay school fees and settle other bills,” said a civil servant in the state who craved anonymity for fear of victimisation.
“Pensioners are not faring better either. The other time some of them were issues cheques, they dragged their old bones to the banks only to be told that there was no money in the accounts. This government issued dud cheques to pensioners! And many of them have died waiting for their pensions after serving the state meritoriously for 35 years. It is difficult to trust this government. In fact, I regret voting Okorocha,” he added.
Enyinnaya Onuegbu, a lawyer and former publicity secretary of People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Imo State, told BDSUNDAY that what Imo has witnessed in the last five years is the appropriation of government as part of the governor’s personal estate.
“As far as we are concerned in Imo State, we are not enjoying any reasonable level of governance but we have a governor who is very talkative, a man who can sell ice to Eskimos and who says everything is possible, telling the people what they want to hear,” he said.
Reeling out the statistics, Onuegbu said of 18 general hospitals Governor Okorocha inherited from the previous administration, only three are currently functional; of 305 school blocksthe governor claims to have completed in each of the electoral wards of the state, not up to 50 percent have actually been completed and those completed are not in use; and the 27 general hospitals in each of the local government areas of the state are still at the shelf stage and none is completed or in use.
“The governor has been busy praising himself, but the state university has been closed down for more than three months now. The Imo State Judiciary has been on strike for over a month now. No court is functional in the state now, except federal courts. Ministry of Justice, where we have legal officers of the government, they have not been paid for upwards of 10 months because the governor unilaterally cut their salaries. They only go to their offices but they don’t go to court,” he said.
In Owerri city itself, Onuegbu said the governor has only concerned himself with destroying the streets built by previous administrations in the guise of expanding them, which has resulted in destruction of people’s property, whereas there are virgin areas, like New Owerri, that he can develop.
He also said the governor has killed the local government system as local government staff now only go to work and wait until the end of the month hoping they would be paid.
“All the local governments are overgrown with weeds. The local governments have no sources of revenue because the state government is going as low as collecting market rates, bicycle licence taxes, etc. Functions of the local government have been appropriated by the state,” he said.
Education
Chidozie Chukwubuike, a former chairman of Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Imo State chapter, says if every government is judged by how it has fulfilled its campaign promise, he believes Okorocha’s first term in office could pass for a success.
“In the area of education, which was the major plank of Okorocha’s campaign in his first coming, and which was what sold him to the people of Imo State, he tried in his first four years by giving some form of free education. Even though many people have reservations about that, as far as I am concerned, at least there is some form of free education in existence in Imo State,” he said.
“And that was why, in the face of all disappointments and frustrations in the state in the first four years of Okorocha, people still had that mind to forgive some of his shortcomings based on the fact that he promised free education and he gave it. We can go on and enumerate some of the fraudulent things that went on in Imo State in those four years, but one can say that at least within the context of that free education promise, he did well,” he added.
But Onuegbu pooh-poohed the free education policy of the Okorocha government, saying it was not qualitative and has pushed Imo from being among the top five states in terms of performance in WAEC exams to about 28th out of 36 states of the federation.
“So what is free education when the student will not pay tuition but the teacher will not be paid, the students will not have facilities in the lab, the students won’t have books in the library, the lecturers are not getting any grants for their research, and there are no sabbaticals, no exchange programmes? So because students are not paying tuition, which is nothing, everything is dead about education in Imo,” he said, adding that because of the policy, admission policy in the state’s higher institutions is now skewed against the indigenes in favour of non-indigenes because the non-indigenes pay fantastic school fees.
Job creation
Chukwubuike is of the view that the last one year of Okorocha’s administration has been a disaster as the governor has made no conscious effort to fulfil his campaign promise of building factories and creating jobs for Imo people.
“He came in 2015 and was shouting all over the place: ‘job, job, job; factory, factory, factory; industry, industry, industry’. He said that was the only thing he was going to do in his second term in office. He mentioned no other thing but that, but we have witnessed 365 days and we have not seen any conscious effort towards industrialising Imo State,” he said.
“We have not seen any conscious effort towards attracting investment into Imo State. We have only seen suffering and rising unemployment and so much deception coming from government quarters. That is what we have witnessed in the past one year,” he added.
Okey Ezeh, chief executive officer, Savvycorp Limited, a Lagos-based treasury management, financial and investment advisory and a governorship aspirant in the 2015 elections in Imo State, said there has never been a more difficult time to be a young person of 35 years and below in Imo than now.
“The National Employment Survey currently estimates that Imo has 800,000 unemployed youths. This figure will probably be more if the number of our people in the throes of disguised unemployment is included. I refer to hordes of young men and women whose names have been included in the nominal rolls of ministries and parastatals and who arrive offices every day, tick their names on a register, shuffle a few files, gossip around office hallways, collect a few gratifications from hapless members of the public and spend the rest of the day sending and responding to friendship requests on Facebook,” he said in a chat in 2015.
Imo economy today
Imo economy as it is today, according to Ezeh, is at best a “Keke and hotel economy”. Indeed, Imo has never been known as a very economically viable state. At best, it is often described as a civil service state, implying that it is only when civil servants are paid salaries that economic activity picks up in the state.
“Imo is now what you can call a mono-economy state, not from the perspective of oil as is the case with Nigeria, but from the perspective of federal allocation. The government just sits and waits for federal allocations and the economy revolves around a few people. Whenever salaries are paid, economic activities pick up in Imo State but as soon as the salaries are finishing, hardship returns. And there has not been any conscious effort by any government to change that,” said Chukwubuike.
But even this quaky civil service economy has been dislocated with the epileptic payment of workers’ salaries in the state as it is today, observers say.
“Because nobody is sure when salaries will be paid, the economy of the state is in total mess. Private businesses are closing shop because of low patronage. Government’s contracts go to individuals who are not resident here, who are not even from here,” Onuegbu told BDSUNDAY.
“So there is capital flight from government agencies; nothing again stays in the Imo economy. The salaries are not regular, there are no contractors who are from here, and at the end of the day you find out that the projects that the man is even doing are projects that have no economic value – for example, trying to erect gates around the streets of Owerri and building 27 general hospitals that have not been completed for over five years now,” he added.
Meanwhile, even the few state-owned concerns, including those set up by Mbakwe, such as Adapalm, Standard Shoe Industry, Avutu Modern Poultry, Resin Paint Industry, The Statesman Newspapers, Concorde Hotel, Imo Transport Company, etc, have either been concessioned in a very opaque manner or allowed to decay beyond recognition.
“If you come to the industries that we used to have, Adapalm is still not functional, though the governor says he has concessioned it. ITC, which used to function optimally and was almost going public before Okorocha came on board, is currently not functioning up to 20 percent capacity,” he said.
The death of opposition
Political analysts believe that Governor Okorocha has successfully silenced opposition voices, even within his own party. They point to the drama that passed as the All Progressives Congress (APC) gubernatorial primaries in the state last year. The party had given the ticket to Uche Nwosu, the governor’s son-in-law, but the governor, who had been vying for the party’s presidential ticket, returned home after losing the presidential ticket and took the governorship ticket from Nwosu. Nobody in the party could utter a word.
The analysts also point to the governor’s emasculation of the state legislature, which is now at his beck and call, foreclosing any chances or possibility of checking the governor’s excesses.
“Do you hear as much as a whimper from the State House of Assembly? Many people don’t even remember that the state still has a legislature. The governor has pocketed them. The other time he created task forces and assigned the so-called honourable members to head the task forces, and as o-yes members, they all consented, collecting revenue from village markets instead of making laws for which their people elected them,” said a disenchanted opposition politician who refused to be named.
But for Chukwubuike, Okorocha’s emergence has shown that there has actually never been a true opposition in Imo State but just a bunch of self-centred politicians who were in it for selfish reasons. But even the voice of this chameleonic opposition has been totally drowned.
“Okorocha has systematically destroyed the voice of opposition. Now he can afford to do whatever he chooses and nobody seems to be able to challenge him because he has conveniently destroyed PDP by trying to sow the seed of discord,” he said.
“You know that PDP is made up of selfish individuals whose only interest is being in power and amassing wealth, but if it is a serious party that wants to make impact, they could close ranks and fight this government that is not delivering on promise. But they can’t do it because they are a bunch of very self-centred people,” he added.
Abandoned projects
One of the earliest projects embarked on by the Okorocha government was the construction of what it called ‘City Gates’ within many parts of the municipality. However, the gates, which are of questionable economic value, remain uncompleted as sources close to the government say no contract agreement was signed with any of the contractors and no money was advanced to them. Till now, the abandoned pillars dotting the streets of Owerri are still standing, with no effort by the administration to dismantle them.
There is also a litany of abandoned roads in the state, while a few that were completed – Imo people refer to them as ‘China roads’ because of their poor quality – failed shortly after completion.
The governor also began the construction of 27 general hospitals, one in each of the local government areas of the state. Today, however, many years after the projects were started, only the block work has been completed, with no effort being made to complete them or put them to any use.
