Aso Radio/TV: Aliero’s big cane of nepotism

Ambassador Yusuf Mamman, the embattled Chairman of the Board of Aso Radio/TV, has argued rightly that the Minister was in the wrong to have unilaterally and so brazenly and through a kind of military fiat, forced a general Manager on the Aso Radio/TV. It was this audacity from the board that has earned it the […]

Ambassador Yusuf Mamman, the embattled Chairman of the Board of Aso Radio/TV, has argued rightly that the Minister was in the wrong to have unilaterally and so brazenly and through a kind of military fiat, forced a general Manager on the Aso Radio/TV. It was this audacity from the board that has earned it the sack. But what is surprising in all these? Nothing if you ask me, because to those of us who have kept an eye on the antecedents of the ex-governor, the man will soon land himself in trouble big enough to eventually consume him.

Aliero is a wounded politician who is on a revenge mission in his native Kebbi. His appointment as FCT Minister is, to him and his co travellers, a licence to deploy all the resources of the FCT to prosecute his mother of all battles with the governor of Kebbi State, Alhaji Sa’ídu Dakingari who has told Aliero in very unmistakable terms that he was unwilling to dance to the kind of master/servant music which Aliero wanted to play.

Some Nigerians may not be aware of how deeply wounded Aliero is. He had anointed a seemingly reclusive Dakingari as the governor of Kebbi state in 2007 even when it was obvious that Dakingari was apolitical, ill prepared for leadership and roundly too meek for it. But because he fitted the caricature of the kind of yes-man they wanted, the Aliero group insisted on him and deployed limitless resources to impose the man on the state. Soon after, Dakingari decided to jettison his benefactor and all his desire to control the state and its resources.

Aliero had never bargained with this reality and even though he had won the senatorial seat of Kebbi Central, he was not content with it because the power and resources required to deal with Dakingari has eluded him. This informed Aliero’s trenchant fight to get the FCT ministerial seat. The objective is to get even with Dakingari by way of bringing on board his camp people from Kebbi whom he thought would prosecute the anti-Dakingari-must-win-war. That was how the Ministry of FCT has now become a sort of an extension of Kebbi State. The Chief of Staff, Alhaji Abubakar Sadiq Yelwa was a commissioner under Aliero in Kebbi state, the Special Adviser on Media Abdullahi Zuru is also from there even though the same S.A. Media whom he inherited is still holding forth in the same capacity. We also have Kallamu Aliero, Samaíla Buí and Nasiru Junju all of them former Commissioners under Aliero in Kebbi state as well as Shehu Magaji Zagga a former Deputy Surveyor General under Aliero who have all been offered appointments without following due process. Again, the minister’s younger brother who was alleged to be the number one contractor in Kebbi during the Aliero years is alleged again to be playing the same role in Abuja today.

Allegations (not proven) are also in the public domain that choice plots of land have been allocated to some members of the Kebbi State House of Assembly who sold them off and carted the proceeds and smiled to the bank. They are expected, in return, to give their governor problems. All these are aside the other routine acts of nepotism which Aliero is openly committing and seems to be getting away with, all in his desperate madness to empower his kitchen cabinet members in Kebbi who would help him fight Dakingari. The appointment of Mohammed Attahiru Kamba, the former General Manager of Kebbi TV as the new GM of Aso TV is also in the same line, with the same objective and virtually the same view to prepare for the 2011 fight to finish in Kebbi.

Ambassador Yusuf Mamman and his board members should therefore see their predicament as just an accident. They are just victims of a cross fire involving an ambitious politician willing to do anything to have his way. They have to be sacrificed in order to tidy up the Aliero plan to wrestle power in Kebbi and to remain relevant in the scheme of things in the country. The resort to the blackmail that the board embezzled N400 million is just an afterthought to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it. But we expect Yusuf Mamman to fight on until justice is done. 

Maibindiga wrote from Kofar Kola, Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi state