Intervention is under fire for writing what its critics from the People’s Democratic Party, (PDP) say is promotional of the All People’s Congress, (APC) governorship candidate for the March 11th, 2023 governorship/House of Assembly election. In the piece under attack now, an Intervention editor who reported the Fr. Moses Adasu regime in Nigeria’s Benue State some 30 years ago projected the possibility of another Catholic priest adding value to Adasu’s records then.
Fr Alia and his running mate, Sam Ode
Neither would Fr. Alia win the election nor would he be as developmental as Adasu comes a “rejoinder” to Intervention from a PDP elder who requested anonymity on the ground that he is not really ready to join in what he calls their misdirected euphoria but only reacting to ‘educate’ Intervention against joining the Abuja crowd.
The caller who obviously thought that Adagbo Onoja, Intervention’s reporter who wrote the story in question is still based in Abuja and might have been influenced by Senator George Akume’s circle directed much of his bile at Senator Akume. Fortunately or unfortunately, Onoja no longer lives in Abuja and has never met Senator George Akume in person. But the elder insists that there is a Senator Akume circle out there going after Governor Samuel Ortom but mostly from the position of deliberate ignorance as well as mischief about Ortom not paying salaries of civil servants and pensioners. The problem, he argues, is that Benue State neither receives enough monthly allocation nor generates enough revenue internally to cope with its wage bill. This is the problem any other governor of Benue State will contend with, including Fr Hyacinth Alia if he were to win the governorship, adds the caller.
But Alia, he says, will not win the governorship. Although the caller agreed with all Intervention’s points about the late Adasu, conceding that Adasu brought ordinariness to governance and demystified orthodoxy, he insists on a distinction between Adasu and Fr. Alia, asserting that Adasu was a product of what Chinua Achebe would have called ‘solid personal achievements’. Adasu, he further told Intervention was a Dean at the College of Education in Katsina Ala, won election into one of the Constituent Assembly sessions and rose to be the second most powerful official of the then Makurdi Diocese which has now grown into Makurdi, Gboko, Katsina Ala, Lafia and Otukpo dioceses. Continuing, he credited Adasu with assembling brilliant and independent minded young chaps such as Dr. Gabriel Moti, Sabastian Agbinda, the late Bave Dzeremo and co who took charge of policy.
Alia on the other hand, as far as he is concerned, is only a product of Senator George Akume who he claims cannot do without being in control of the Government of Benue State. But Alia will not, in his analysis, win the governorship. One, consultations are going on between the PDP and other parties. And as he put it, it should not be forgotten that all Labour Party’s votes in Benue State in the Presidential election were actually PDP votes. Two, the APC ticket of Alia and Sam Ode is not popular in Idomaland where he claimed that people see it as a Tiv-Tiv ticket because, Sam Ode who is Alia’s deputy is of Tiv mother. As far as he is concerned, the election of the governor in the state would only have been complicated if the APC had picked someone as Prof Terhemba Shija, the Nasarawa State Literature scholar whom he credits with having nuance and pedigree.
Reminded of observed massive trooping back ‘home’ by voters determined to vote out the PDP across the state as well as PDP’s loss of nearly all House of Representative seats and two out of the thee senate seats, the elder still insists that APC and Fr. Alia are all about euphoria and that euphoria will not get them the office because Alia does not, in his view, have the clout in the Catholic Church implied by Intervention. Above all, he posits that Alia has no leadership experience and would fare worse in inability to pay salaries, returning to his thesis that Benue has a cash crunch crisis.
The late Rev Fr Moses Adasu, governor of Benue State from 1991 to 1993
Ironically, he traces the crisis to Adasu whom he said over-employed in a bid to enact his populism, shooting the wage bill to a level that Joshua Obademi, the Military Administrator who took over from Adasu in 1993 was forced to retrench. Since then, he says, no other governor has escaped owning workers backlog of salaries in the state. It is in this sense that he says Senator Akume and his imagined Abuja circle are a part of the problem. He doesn’t disagree that Senator Akume is generally regarded to be very kind and accessible but he insists Akume is part of the problem “because they know why the governor cannot be up to date on payment of salaries. The money is not there”.
As Intervention reflects on the PDP elder’s protestation of the story, it could not but conclude that everything in Benue State has assumed the Akume – Ortom conflict, including how each camp reads every media report. Everything is read in terms of either it is for Akume and, therefore, against Ortom or the other way round. And that raises the question: if both Akume and Ortom are in politics to serve the people, why is it impossible for the duo to step back and raise the stakes on how best they could come together to serve the people. Those who may consider this a naïve question may think so because they can only see victory or defeat for one side or the other. But, in truth, the people are paying for the conflict. Intervention is, therefore, not interested in reducing the situation to a personality clash between the two.
Below is the same story the Benue State PDP is protesting its slant:
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.
Retired from politics or will he soon resurface?
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!
