A few days to the 2011 governorship re-run election that saw the Okorocha and his lynch mob sack Chief Ikedi Ohakim as governor of Imo State, I had done an article (on the back page of The Sun newspaper) entitled, “Before Imo goes to the dogs”
In that article, I tried to warn of what laid ahead of Imo State if the electorate insisted on the self-destructive path it was headed. Of course, not too many listened to the warning as they bayed for the blood of the man they mischievously branded Ikiri.
Needless to say, that article permanently marked me, before the Okorocha mob, as an Ohakim person. It also meant I was never trusted by that administration.
Of course, I’m no Ohakim apologist. It’s just that given a choice between Ohakim and Okorocha as governor of Imo State (or as a human being for that matter), I would choose Ohakim over and over again. In fact, there’s no basis for comparison. And I think Ndi-Imo now know why. But that’s story for another day.
Fast-forward to 2019. Enter Rt. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha.
For any ‘outsider’ following the developments in the post-May 29, 2019 Imo State there appears to be just one narrative: the new low into which immediate past governor, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, sank the state. And the not-too-enviable task before the new governor. The task of picking up Imo State from the abyss of retardation, and getting it back on level ground, before we can even dream of moving forward.
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So, before you jump into the wagon of those admonishing Ihedioha to forget Okorocha and move on, you’ll do well to spare a few minutes to understand the mess he inherited. You’d be forced to say a prayer for him if you discover that he has an irrevocable ganishee order of about N30 billion on his state’s account. That there are about 150 judgements against the state, many of them given by a certain court in Abuja. That he got no handover from his predecessor and that the governor’s office he should operate from had been abandoned for eight straight years. That he inherited a state secretariat that has not had public power supply for eight years and that the generators have all vanished into thin air.
Of course, there could be some exaggerations here and there, considering that what happened in Imo, like in Oyo, Bauchi, Ogun, Zamfara and even Ekiti before them, was not a smooth transition, but a hostile take-over. However, Okorocha’s Imo deserves a pride of place in the hall of infamy.
Yours sincerely had the fortune (or misfortune) of being guest of the then governor on two occasions, along with other senior journalists. And on each of those occasions, one specifically raised concern over the seeming brick-and-mortar disposition of the governor to development. But Okorocha always parried the question, the same way he dodged revealing the costs. According to him, a governor colleague who saw the great work he did with the flyover, had given him a contract to come build same for his North-western state, and that he would not reveal the cost of the Imo flyovers because the North-west governor would feel Imo’s was cheaper than his state’s.
Okorocha would also not explain why he would resort to building 27 new general hospitals (all along major roads) instead of equipping the ones built by his predecessor to make them functional, especially when he also ended up not equipping any of the new ones. Why would he focus on building new classroom blocks (also only those along major highways) without retraining teachers, paying teachers their salaries and equipping the existing schools? Why do his new buildings develop structural faults so soon after construction? How come it is only in Imo that acid rain falls and damages roads? How come it is only Imo roads that oil drips from trucks destroy? How come it is only in Imo that the Nigerian Society of Engineers is always raising the alarm over the fidelity of bridges and flyovers?
The answer is simple: To Okorocha, development (and dividends of democracy) meant nothing more than physical blockworks.
I guess, it had to do with his background as a building contractor. It was as though Imo elected an untrained, miseducated bricklayer as governor. Under Okorocha, there was a visible dearth of creative thinking, even in looting of state funds. It seemed the only ways Okorocha could think of getting his paws into the till were either by crudely carting away raw cash like Abacha did (Please, don’t tell President Buhari that I said Abacha stole), or through a mindless spree of construction contracts. It was simple: award contracts for building after building. To phoney contractors. At inflated sums. Channel all the monies to one and same “contractor”, who may not be unconnected to the known filial linkages. The money vanishes, and the job is shoddily done, if it’s done at all.
In fact, it is even an anomaly to describe the process as a “contract”, because there are usually no papers signed. There are often no drawings too. Okorocha just sees an empty space, grabs it by fiat, uses his toe to sketch something on the ground as to what catches his fancy to erect there, looks around his travelling gang of jesters for whoever seems most excited about the “project”, and orders him to start work. A contract has just been awarded. And payment? The accountant or commissioner for finance would be asked to pay some billions of naira (for the project) to Government House account, chief of staff or just anybody being used as the conduit pipe at that point in time. The emperor-governor, as a policy, never signs any papers to implicate himself in any such awards. Like the typical Mafia Bleacher, he always gets other people to do his dirty jobs. No land anywhere was spared. Even inside government house, Okorocha kept erecting kiosk after kiosk, taking up every space and making the entire premises of the revered Douglas House look like a glorified poultry house. And if Providence hadn’t intervened, in the form of his tenure running out, my governor would have kept erecting more buildings. It did not matter that he did not equip them properly, nor that the furnishings were looted soon after, right on his watch.
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Truth was: Okorocha understood the psyche of the countryside electorate. They like to point to gigantic structures and say, Governor A built that for us, Governor B built the other. No one says anything about the structure serving any purpose for which it was built.
Of course, the projects would look eye-catching to the untrained eye. But they almost always failed the most basic civil engineering tests and often collapse after few weeks of completion, if they don’t collapse midway into construction. The collapsed bridge at Mgbee, leading to Okorocha’s Ogboko village (pictured above) says it all.
This is the story of the buildings, the roads, the flyover, and even the underground tunnels. I had always thought that the roads were branded “China road” by Okorocha’s opponents, which made me to once advise that they should let him be. However, returning to some of the roads, barely three months after the ‘guided visit’ I undertook earlier, the fraud of it all stared me in the face. I reconfirmed my original position in 2011, that under an Okorocha governorship, Imo would indeed go to the dogs.
Now, the unenviable task of Ihedioha is to spend the next three or four years correcting and rebuilding things for which Okorocha has taken credit of doing, even when he did absolutely nothing, beyond setting the state several years back and several trillions in debt. The new governor may even have to pull down two flyovers, which have already started caving in, even without being put to use yet.
But the joke of it all is that Okorocha claims he used his personal money to work for Imo and that the state now owes him some N18 billion.
But I’ll leave Ihedioha and the Town Unions of the over 600 Autonomous Communities and collaborating Apex Zonal Social Cultural Organization, who recently penned a detailed petition, to audit the assets and tell us which one is truly Okorocha’s and which ones were hijacked from Ndi-Imo. For the heist of the last eight years must not be allowed to endure.
One advice for the new governor will suffice here: Your Excellency, the distractions will be enormous, considering you’re up against a formidable, well-oiled propaganda machinery. Keep your eyes on the ball. Stand on the side of the law and due process. Don’t go out of your way to persecute Okorocha, but don’t shy away from prosecuting him if it becomes inevitable. Above all, do Owerri (and of course, Imo) people one favour: retrieve their lands.
