By Adagbo ONOJA
As things stand today, all the indices point at the electoral ascendancy of the Buga-dancing Hyacinth Alia, the Catholic priest carrying the All Progressives Congress, (APC)’s flag in Benue State in the March 11th, 2023 Governorship/House of Assembly poll. The indices in question include the Christological bonding with a Catholic priest in an agrarian setting as Benue; the nightmare that the Samuel Ortom regime is rated to have been across the board, the ascendancy of the APC at the national level and, lastly, the outcome of the election into the Senate in the State. APC took two, leaving the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) with one.
No one can be sure what the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) may do with the governorship poll. It seems, however, that Benue State is where INEC’s malaise may not affect the outcome. This is not to dismiss the emergency alliance the PDP is believed to be building against the reality of APC victory.
And so what if Fr. Alia wins? Well, it would remind everyone of the pioneer for that trajectory in the State – Rev Fr. Moses Adasu. Secondly, it will bring up the Ortom question in the politics of power.
In the early 1990s, Rev Fr. Moses Adasu was elected the governor of Benue State. It was a novelty in clerical populism. Some people swear that all that won him the governorship was that many voters remembered the priest who baptized them or their children over the years. Who better to trust by a peasant voter than the priest who was such an interlocutor between a Christian and his or her desire to make Heaven. It is an imperative to be born in Christ through Baptism. So, Adasu’s campaign managers had less work to do relative to his opponents.
In office, Adasu turned something else. One tale from the ground is that he could stop the convoy to the consternation of Body Guards just to greet either some worshipper he saw from his car or enact a similar scene. In other words, he was a demystifier of orthodoxy.
Adasu’s unorthodox approach to power and office caught media attention. The now defunct The Sunday Magazine, (TSM) sent this reporter to capture what was filtering into the newsroom as the Adasu phenomenon. The effort at getting the governor to talk so that the story package would have a box interview which allowed him to speak included hitching a ride on his convoy to Benin City where governors elected on the platform of the then Social Democratic Party, (SDP) were to have a meeting. In the course of the journey, the driver of the convoy car carrying this reporter and the late Rufa’i Ibrahim who was also pursuing the same story for the Daily Times was asked how the priest-governor now combined the two spaces. Somehow, the question trickled to the governor in a manner that made me look like a spy. That was exactly what the governor himself said when he sat with the two reporters the following morning. And for that reason, he wasn’t going to grant the questioner an interview. Rufai Ibrahim who knew me very well was aghast but I urged him to have his own interview. As at that time, I was already done with my story, interview or no interview with the governor.
Back in the newsroom in Lagos, the late Ely Obasi added his own editorial touch and the story made the magazine’s cover. And it brought out the other side of the late priest-governor. Adasu offered humbling apology, explaining how he was misinformed about me by his obviously ill-educated driver who just couldn’t situate my question beyond his own over-zealous radius. He said I was a good Benue man out to help his cause. And since then, we became friends. It is that friendship that saw me honouring his invitation to where he served what must be the cleansing process for priests who went into politics in Zaria in 1997. We went over a lot within the three hours we spent together that day. I wish I can still find my jottings from the session.
It is quite some time now and memories of his short-lived rule have faded. But, just within two years that he was in power, he established the Benue State University. And the university was structured in a manner that it could assert itself in the Nigerian Law School against those from Nigeria’s first generation universities. Before the ride to Benin from Makurdi on that fateful journey, I had a short session with Sabastian Agbinda who was the equivalent of what we know as Chief of Staff today to the late Adasu. I recall him mentioning the plan of the Adasu government to re-invent all the absolutely relevant industries the late Aper Aku government put in place but which the military governors from 1983 to 1990 misgoverned. If the elected governors under IBB in 1991 had stayed, it is most likely Adasu would have brought back all those industries. There is no strategy of development superior to Aku’s industrialisation strategy in Benue State in the Second Republic up to this moment.
What’s point in all this? It is that it could be hope rising if the first priest-governor was a study in unorthodox ways and developmental too, the second could even be transformative. There was no Buga then and Adasu did not dance Buga. Could Alia dancing Buga signify that he is surely improving on Adasu? Only time will tell.
Now, to the Ortom question in the politics of power. The governor of Benue State for the past eight years has lost the Senate seat he sought in the February 25th Presidential and National Assembly Election. His tenure expires in May 2023. His party, the PDP did not win the presidential election. Even if it did, Ortom is already estranged from the party. Peter Obi whom he supported did not win the presidential election either. After a bitter fight with George Akume, Benue APC leader, it is unlikely that he can find his way into APC by following Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, (assuming that is Wike’s plan). In any case, Buhari, Ortom’s mortal enemy, will remain APC elder for quite some time. So, how might things have come this way for the defender of the Benue Valley who can neither go back to the people whose salaries he never paid?
In particular, how did it happen that someone who, by his own testimony, started life as a motor park operative could not offer the downtrodden anything concrete for eight years? Wouldn’t this be the most mind boggling puzzle in Nigerian politics today? What is it that makes it impossible for an Ortom to perform where an Aper Aku or an Adasu set a record within four and two years, respectively?
Lastly, what is about Benue State that no rich person ever rules the state? It is always either a teacher or some activist, (Aku) or a civil servant, (Akume) or someone from the masses, (Ortom) or priests. Barrister Gabriel Suswam who seems to be the exception in that he got into Benue governorship from the National Assembly is not of the bourgeoisie at the end of the day. Something to ponder upon!