We hope you realize just like us that history is upon us, challenging us to rise up to the occasion. We risk an unanswerable verdict against us should you fail, for whatever reason, to deliver on good governance. For your own good, don’t lean too heavily on political appointees because a major problem with them is their inability to summon courage and speak the bitter truth.
This letter is coming on the heels of vain efforts made to reach you or your office. Since you are widely perceived to be on a divine mission, we have been very careful not to incur the wrath of God by interfering in God’s highly valued project. This explains our stoic silence even in the face of pestering of skeptics to act, one way or the other. However, to continue to perch on the fence in the face of growing disaffection will call our patriotism to question apart from portraying us as renegades, the more so that we were the first to trumpet your administration as a dispensation of hope, fairness and the restorer of the years of the locust.
The content of the open letter to Alhaji Yahaya Adoza Bello, the Executive Governor of Kogi State, Lokoja, as he marks his one year anniversary in office, beginning on Friday, 27th January, 2017, is reproduced here:
Significantly, you were sworn in on a Friday, the spiritual significance of this coincidence is left to the spiritually discerning to unravel.
Meanwhile, we look forward to many happy and redeeming returns. Your administration’s physical development stride as manifested in several roads construction among others, are highly commendable and heart-warming.
Your Excellency Sir, Ebira Youth Congress (EYC) and Ebira Renaissance Group (ERG) are no strangers to you. To refresh Your Excellency’s memory, the two bodies, for many years, have crusaded for power-shift based on the hallowed principle of Equity, Fairness and Justice.
Some of our senior colleagues/comrades were detained and some paid the supreme sacrifice in the course of this noble crusade. Equally to be recalled, the fact that you met with these groups at Alama Hotel, Lokoja shortly before the APC primary which threw you up as runner-up to late Governor Prince Abubakar Audu – a feat that subsequently propelled you to become the State Governor.
It is also worthy of recall that the two bodies drummed up support for you via a press conference at the NUJ Press House in Lokoja as the right replacement upon Prince Abubakar Audu’s death. Upon the threat by the Faleke Support Group (FSG) to make the State (Kogi) ungovernable if you were ever inaugurated as the Governor, the EYC again, rose to call the Group to order through a press conference at the NUJ Press House, Lokoja.
This was followed up by our distress letters to the Presidency, IGP and the DSS. This was promptly acted upon; the result of this was visible to all, even the blind. We did not stop at that, when the so called “Kogi East Elders Council” sponsored a publication on 8th February, 2016 titled “THAT GOVERNANCE MAY WORK IN THE INTEREST OF ALL IN KOGI”, the ERG stoutly rose to your defence without any prompting or sponsorship from any quarter.
Further to the foregoing, the EYC/ERG major radio programmes, before the ERG rested her own, were effectively deployed to launder your government and galvanize people’s support for the nascent administration. With these antecedents, we cannot be classified as enemy of your government for whatever reason.
In short, we like to see ourselves as unacknowledged and unsung stakeholder of your government.
This letter is coming on the heels of vain efforts made to reach you or your office. Since you are widely perceived to be on a divine mission, we have been very careful not to incur the wrath of God by interfering in God’s highly valued project. This explains our stoic silence even in the face of pestering of skeptics to act, one way or the other. However, to continue to perch on the fence in the face of growing disaffection will call our patriotism to question apart from portraying us as renegades, the more so that we were the first to trumpet your administration as a dispensation of hope, fairness and the restorer of the years of the locust.
Your Excellency Sir, this letter is intended to give you a deserved respite from adversarial campaigns that presently suffuse the social media about your person and administrative style. However, we want to counsel you, Your Excellency to put your ear to the ground in order to hear the silent majority that presently groan under your well intended but poorly executed programmes and policies, especially as it concerns the seemingly unending screening exercises that have recorded a lot of painful casualties. You may also wish to address the worsening security situation in the State, particularly in your immediate constituency, Kogi Central Senatorial District where kidnapping enjoys unfettered comfort.
We hope you realize just like us that history is upon us, challenging us to rise up to the occasion. We risk an unanswerable verdict against us should you fail, for whatever reason, to deliver on good governance. For your own good, don’t lean too heavily on political appointees because a major problem with them is their inability to summon courage and speak the bitter truth.
More often than not, they shield their leaders from reality on ground in order not to imperil their personal comfort conferred by their positions. Political appointees, in most cases, constitute human barricade around the leader and inflict him with blinkered view which disables him from separating imagination from reality.
In conclusion, we plead with you to let the fear of God reflects on what you do or refuse to do as Governor. Please, count us among the major groups that earnestly pray that your government succeeds, at least for our collective good.
Our last line: a leader may never know his good friends until he is out of power.
Happy anniversary Your Excellency.
Bro. Baba AbdulRazaq President-General (EYC), Comrade (Engr.) Ondeku Momohjimoh Secretary. [myad]
