Dancing Under Akpabio’s Shadow
By UbongAbasi Ise
I write this piece with deep conscience: one, because I am a concerned citizen of Akwa Ibom State who takes pride in the state’s splendor, while feeling every detail of shame in its squalor; two, because it is my own fancy that my generation can bequeath enduring legacies to the posterity. I also have sincere belief that every government dispensation must work and outshine its predecessor to show the imprints of progress, and to leave a big statement for our future. Hence, I found it necessary to write my concerns down.
Looking at the life of Akwa Ibom State in the last decade, that is, from 1st January 2010 to 1st January 2020, a keen observer would find out that the state is governed five years each by His Excellencies, Godswill Akpabio and Udom Emmanuel. In the first five years under Akpabio (2010 to 2015), Akwa Ibom was at the peak of both infrastructural and human capacity development. In the next five years under Udom, the state experienced a dip in its general developmental stride. This, of course, is a wrong narrative that should have worried every sincere Akwa Ibomite irrespective of their political party affiliation and leanings. If the days of old could be better than the present, it therefore means our state’s growth is either stagnated or retrogressing, or we are backtracking from the Eldorado we were heading to in the first five years of the last decade. To have Akpabio’s achievements still shadowing Udom’s performance in the last five years is not a good thing that should be allowed to continue.
Five years of Godswill Akpabio, despite his administration being described as reckless by some commentators, was the height of inter-ministerial projects undertaken by the indigenes at the instance of the state government. By this initiative, government’s money was expended in the state and this helped stimulate the informal sector of the state’s economy. In other words, private businesses were booming through the indirect effect of the inter-ministerial works put in place by the government of the day, but all these changed in the last five years of the present dispensation. Because the government, as a big spender in the state, is no longer spending domestically as it supposed to, instead choose to attract services elsewhere, we now have a lot of businesses ailing and eventually closing down by the day. The ripple effect is the increase in the unemployment levels, a situation that made Akwa Ibom the second state with the highest number of the unemployed in the country, according to NBS statistics in 2019.
Human capacity development during Akpabio’s years of the last decade had reached the tideline in the state’s socio-political history since 1999 when democracy returned. The existing free and compulsory education was to be invigorated by way of increasing staff strength in the state’s public secondary schools, hence the employment of over 5,000 teachers as well as the absorption of about six community schools into the mainstream public educational system. Instead of increasing the number of teachers at his coming in order to take care of increasing students’ population in the public schools, Mr. Udom Emmanuel had to nullify the appointment of the teachers that were fortunate to be selected from over 22,000 persons that applied for the job. Udom’s government would also ignore the staff of the absorbed schools and leave them unpaid for years, and the result was felt through poor performance of Akwa Ibom students in WAEC in recent times.
The first half of the last decade was a chirpy moment and a turning point in the life of the state. Most personal assistants (PAs) of that era built houses, owned cars, and assist their relatives to establish businesses - we can't ignore that facts. This period was followed by five moribund years of Udom Emmanuel’s administration. Even most of the PAs today are seen moving about incognito with nothing productive to show that they are in government.
While Akpabio’s first five years of the last decade saw either the inauguration or commissioning of world class projects such as the government house, the international stadium, e-library, specialist hospital, flyovers, good roads network, etc, the next half of the decade saw the state government under Udom Emmanuel struggling with Nsima Ekere’s NDDC to commission kind of roads infamously termed ‘bush-tracks,’ with major ones poorly finished or abandoned as catalogued by some concerned media practitioners in the state.
If by 2020, the state government is celebrating the payment of arrears of workers’ entitlements, then this is a clear betokening of poor, fluke governance.
A new system is expected to be more robust than the old. If the dynamism expected from the succeeding dispensation of Akwa Ibom State government had manifested in the last five years, Akpabio’s legacies would have been eclipsed by now. Going about vilifying Akpabio’s name would never bury his towering image; it is the superior performance that would rubout his imprints on the governance of the state. For instance, if Akpabio had brought free and compulsory education for secondary school students, Udom should have thought of free tertiary education at lower level for the state’s indigenes.
Instead of the present fickleness in industrialization which refuses to solve the perennial problem of unemployment, the governor should consider sending our youths to East Asia, Russia, Europe and other parts of the world for training in the critical sectors of technology and manufacturing and then encourage them with seed funds to start their own cottage industries. This would have paid off better than the current entropy in the area of industrialization.
The year 2020 is the time to leap out from Akpabio’s shadows. This would mean progress, increase in opportunities, aggressive industrialization and solidity in infrastructural development. As a good citizen of Akwa Ibom, I wouldn’t be happy that Akpabio’s era remains to date the best thing to have happened to the state. It is time to erase the past and rewrite our present and future. Period.
Yes! I am UbongAbasi Ise. For comment, send SMS to 08189914609 | email: ubongabasiise@gmail.com
©The Sensor Newspaper
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