Shadow boxing and Al-Makura’s messianic cult in Nasarawa
The latest effort in this regard belongs to Tony Iredia whose piece in the Sunday Trust newspaper of July 17, 2011 entitled “For States like Nasarawa, Its Now or Never,” went to lengths to draw hackneyed comparisons, and pass flawed judgments on issues, it seemed obvious, he had very scant notion of. In the said […]
The latest effort in this regard belongs to Tony Iredia whose piece in the Sunday Trust newspaper of July 17, 2011 entitled “For States like Nasarawa, Its Now or Never,” went to lengths to draw hackneyed comparisons, and pass flawed judgments on issues, it seemed obvious, he had very scant notion of. In the said piece, Iredia proceeded to cast Al-Makura in the mould of a ‘superman’, ‘man of destiny’, with ‘an eye on history’, a miracle worker of sorts, being a man, in (his own words) who “had made success of every previous assignment he handled”! He continued: “In other words, if Al-Makura does not succeed, the state may have to accept that it has lost it”!
Without mincing words, the parallels which Iredia set out to draw between Brigadier-General Samuel Ogbemudia (rtd) as Military Governor of the defunct Bendel State and Governor Al-Makura of Nasarawa State as two of a-kind exemplars of transformational leadership are non-existent and wide off the mark as they were taken out of context.
The one was a military governor under a twelve-state federal structure, and the later a civilian governor under a 36-state arrangement. On the other hand, if Iredia was holding out the Ogbemudia era as a model for Al-Makura to emulate, it would still amount to the same exercise in futility given that nearly forty years separates the two periods, and as such, the environments coupled with the realities and challenges of governance have changed significantly. The mere fact that Iredia could not situate a contemporary model of his ideas of governance is the flaw in the entire write-up.
In order to appreciate where Nasarawa State finds itself today, fourteen years after its creation, this writer suggests that all those who hold a stake in the future of the state as well as its well-wishers must take a peep into history. This has become imperative because the further backwards we can look, the further forward we can see. The struggle for the creation of the state was necessitated in the first place by a desire to liberate the peoples of the former ‘lower Plateau’ from the backwoods of history to which they had been confined under both the defunct Benue Plateau State and the old Plateau State. The long-drawn out struggle was championed by none other than the former governor, Aliyu Akwe Doma. No one could be under illusion that one hundred years of political marginalization and social domination could be overcome in fourteen years, out of which Doma presided for a mere four years.
Al-Makura’s greatest failing in the past 60 days consists in a palpable inability to cast a vision going forward, to chart a direction or otherwise articulate a course of action to overcome the debilitating weight of the state’s narrow resource base or for dealing with its poverty pandemic. The incessant attacks on his predecessor is not going to crystallize into a credible substitute for a socio-economic programme or development strategy capable of reversing the fortunes of the state.
Doma’s 13-Point Agenda, with all its inadequacies, at least provided a model for socio-economic transformation of the state which had agrarian revolution as its lynchpin. The justification for this derives from the fact that ours is largely a rural state with over 80% of the population engaged in one form of agricultural activity or the other. Therefore, it makes sense to position agriculture as the propelling force of sustainable rural development and poverty alleviation, which inevitably brings me to the issue of the new governor’s jaundiced and impulsive reversal of the relocation of the state-owned College of Agriculture from Doma to Lafia; and which Iredia lists as one act of courage. This is indeed one good example of how politics colours the decision-making process in the state currently, and what afflictions the state expects from the new governor.
In the first place, the relocation of the school from Lafia to Doma was necessitated by a felt need to accommodate the newly established Federal University in the state and ensure its prompt take-off. Besides, the mandate of the College of Agriculture would be better served under a rural setting such as Doma community presents. The choice of Doma was made all the more compelling given that the community, apart from being a major agricultural belt of the state, already plays host to a major agricultural facility of the Lower Benue River Basin Development Authority which, would no doubt, be of immense assistance to students of the college. Were the former governor a typical Nigerian politician, he would have stopped at nothing to have the new federal university domiciled in his village in Doma, but he chose Lafia instead, borne out of a sense of patriotism and appreciation of the beneficial impact the new varsity promises to have on the development of the state capital, which at any rate already boasts of a surfeit of higher institutions.
Another pointer to Alhaji Doma’s statesmanship and moral stature relates to the issue of the non-commissioning of the numerous infrastructural milestones which his administration left behind, notably the ultra-modern architectural masterpiece that is the new State Legislative Complex.
Aliyu, an Attorney-at-Law, lives in Abuja.