Yari, choose between state and business

Since he became the Governor of Zamfara two years ago, critics have accused Yari of engaging in too much travel outside the state and outside the country. According to the critics, Yari goes to Saudi Arabia for the lesser hajj every month and he travels to many other countries as well. For the remaining period […]

Since he became the Governor of Zamfara two years ago, critics have accused Yari of engaging in too much travel outside the state and outside the country. According to the critics, Yari goes to Saudi Arabia for the lesser hajj every month and he travels to many other countries as well. For the remaining period that he is in Nigeria, Yari spends a lot of time in Abuja, where he previously lived as a member of the House of Representatives. When he does find time to be in Zamfara State, critics also say Yari spends more time in his home town of Talata Mafara than in his state capital of Gusau, 110 kilometres away.
At last, Governor Yari has answered critics of his pastoral-like leadership style. Unlike the sophisticated media operators around President Goodluck Jonathan who rush to deny things as visible as sunrise and sunset, Yari did not deny the charge that he travels all too frequently. Instead he provided an explanation and, what an interesting explanation that was. According to one report in a newspaper, he said he travels all that often in order to oversee his sprawling business interests! The governor said, “I am used to foreign trips even before my election as governor, and I have already built a business empire. So, I shouldn’t allow it to crumble just because I am governor of a state. I shall therefore look after it [in order for it] to prosper more.”
Aargh! You are used to foreign travel! The question is, when you were campaigning all over Zamfara State and your godfather Alhaji Ahmed Sani, Yariman Bakura was leading you to shout your controversial campaign slogan of “Allahu akbar!” [which, by the way, was a violation of the Electoral Act which prohibits the use of religiously-tinged slogans in election campaigns] did you for once promise the people that you will govern the state from abroad? If the hard-pressed people of Zamfara had heard that, would they have turned out in large numbers to banish your gentle predecessor who at least was ever present in Gusau?
Let’s come to that talk about a business empire. Alhaji Aziz, you believe, don’t you, that a business empire will crumble if it is not tended to gingerly, which is why you spend so much time tending to it. But you apparently don’t believe that a state, too, could crumble if not well attended to. The way governors centralize everything in their hands in modern times, how do you expect a state to survive, much less prosper, with an absentee governor? Did you ever bother to find out what happened to Jigawa State in the days of Governor Ibrahim Saminu Turaki, who was said to be more familiar with an aircraft cabin than he was with his own desk?
Yari provided another justification for his [Gulliver’s] travels that was stranger than fiction. He said once he is around in the state, the treasury suffers because of people who make unnecessary demands on it but that if he is out of the state, “the treasury will have a rest and thereby allow government to save a lot of money for development projects.” Aargh! Just like that! It seems there in Zamfara there in neither planning nor budget, just the whims of the governor, which are at least curtailed when he is abroad. It is the strangest, weirdest, looniest money-saving measure I have ever heard. It also will never wash with Nigerians. When, by the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi’s count, President Obasanjo travelled abroad 102 times in his first two years in office, did it save the Federal Treasury from leaking like a sieve?
Oga Yari, please sit at your desk, meet with your officials, study your files, tour your state, meet with your people, listen to them, initiate projects, inspect their execution and evolve measures for planning and budgetary control. If the people of Zamfara State had wanted a roving expert to sit on the Governor’s desk in Gusau, at least it has some citizens who trek all the way to the South and back every other season.