Has the rain washed the chalk off the white lion?

The governor of my home state of Kogi, Yahaya Bello, suffered a knockout blow last week at the APC convention despite boasting with unbridled gusto that he had 16 million Nigerian votes in his kitty and would win the general elections in a matter of hours and that he is the best thing to happen to Nigeria since the Great Dick Tiger.

Bello’s emergence on the political scene was a product of Abubakar Audu’s death on the eve of being declared governor-elect in the governorship elections rerun of December 2015. Bello, who did not campaign for those elections, was invited to assume the office of governor in place of the late Audu, by virtue of coming second at the party primaries.

As the first Ebira man to occupy Lugard House and a young man at barely 40 when sworn in, many expected him to seize the opportunity and launch Kogi State, trapped perpetually in the rust-tinted haze of the past and sozzled with underdevelopment, into the 21st century. The governor himself had rightly described his capital as a “glorified local government headquarters.”

There was hope that his performance would transform the state and change its political dynamics. Here was, after all, a new breed of politician, untainted by the weight of the past. 

What has happened since then has been a fantastical throwaway of opportunities. Kogi is being misgoverned. Despite claims of increasing revenues, since his assumption of office, civil servants in the state have been receiving only about 35 per cent of their salaries meaning a Level 12 local government employee, for instance, could take home about N26,000 per month instead of the N100,000+ they are entitled to. In this crisis of inflation, how does one feed a family on this and pay school fees, rent, utilities and health bills?

Governor Bello’s first order of business in office was to demolish roundabouts in Lokoja, again like Don Quixote attacking the windmills. Though people claimed it was a mission to uproot charms and amulets buried in those roundabouts, Gov Bello told a delegation from the Maigari of Lokoja that modern cities have done away with roundabouts. The irony was that two years later, the government began the construction of new roundabouts to replace the old ones. Other than the conversion of the former stadium into a Creative Centre, and the construction of the Revenue House and the Ganaja Flyover, what other infrastructure is there worthy of bragging about?

Sadly, Gov Bello seemed more interested in happenings in Abuja than in his state and would put every photo op with President Buhari over and above the needs of governance in Kogi. It became a meme that each time President Buhari was travelling abroad, which was quite often, Gov. Bello, who had styled himself a lord of portals, a sort of Heimdall to Buhari’s Thor, was always at hand to see off the president, and to welcome him back.

It became obvious that Gov. Bello was courting favours in the villa with ambitious designs on 2023. The expectation on his part was that the president would see him as a loyal acolyte to be handpicked to succeed him, that the baton would pass from the father figure to the political son. 

He missed the point. Yes, to be president, one needs powerful allies and they don’t come any bigger than the president. But what Gov Bello needed to have done more to put himself in good standing for that shot was to have governed Kogi well while maintaining a respectable presence at the centre. After all, what stood Umaru Yar’Adua out in 2007, aside his personal relationship with Obasanjo, was the work he put in in Katsina and a financial record that was far more robust than his personal health and hermit proclivity were.

In the end, Gov. Bello realised the president would not lift a finger to help this time as he had done before. 

His performance in the state was dire enough that it required blatant violence and electoral fraud to secure his re-election in 2019. That violence included the burning alive of a Salome Abuh in her residence on election day for working for the opposition party. Her murderers, who chanted the ruling party’s praise songs with throats filled with the smoke of Salome’s burning flesh, have still not been held accountable for their crimes.

A video emerged of the governor, celebrating his election victory with a song mimicking the tatata of gunshots, a disturbing song made popular by his supporters. A year later, the governor himself exported the song to Ogun State during an APC rally for the governorship elections there.

It was a conduct unbecoming of one who aspired to lead a new generation of politicians to rescue a country that is already soaking in a deluge of blood and an orgy of violence and certainly not one that would inspire a generation of young Nigerians to rally to his banner in 2023. But that was the governor’s miscalculations, that he didn’t necessarily need the support of Nigerians but the support of one Nigerian—the big kahuna in the villa.

He did benefit from his constant fawning in Abuja. It gave him access to federal might to unleash on the poor people of the state and that the government at the centre tacitly endorsed this methodology, as it did for Ganduje in Kano, by supplying the uniformed guns and looking away as election day in Kogi played out like The Purge, that vicious movie featuring Ethan Hawke to the extent the US government barred Gov. Bello from visiting the country on account of his culpability in electoral violence.

If Governor Bello had read the sands well, he would have seen that Nigeria is yearning for a new generation of politicians who are untainted by the legacy of the past, yet have the strength of character to deliver the good governance that has been sorely lacking. At the time he was presented with the throne of Lugard House, he had the chance to straddle this divide and ride it to crescendo. In the end, that did not happen.

If he had read the sands well, and played his cards wisely, he would not have needed to fritter away resources, be it from the state coffers or from his personal pocket, to recruit Kannywood stars to sing and dance his praises, run autotune-filled earworm campaign jingles for him and basically bootlick his ego for the generosity he dished out to them at the expense of his starving, poorly paid civil servants.

However, one thing one can’t take away from Gov. Bello is a Don Quixotic bravado and a bristling confidence. It drove him to throw his hat in the presidential race, regardless of the president’s insouciance, and to battle it to the bitter end. It led to his claims that he would win the presidential elections in a couple of hours when he could not even win the votes of the APC delegates from his state. Realistically, no one believed those claims, perhaps not even Gov Bello himself. So what could have led to such comments? Excess confidence or delusion of grandeur?

Either way, the rain fell on the white lion and washed the chalk from its skin. What it revealed is up to Gov Bello to decide. He is still young enough to redeem his political legacy and I trust the system would find space for a dogged fighter like him. 

Ultimately Gov Bello could have been that politician who would prove that the young Turks could actually show Nigerians a different kind of leadership, one that genuinely cares about the masses, one that could set a long-suffering state, blessed with incredible resources and some of the smartest brains in the country on the path of redemption.

The governor may be swayed by the devious praise of his courtiers who would celebrate him for his fighting spirit, for his doggedness and ignore the lessons of his failed presidential bid—that in Nigerian politics especially for an upstart, a record of performance sometimes counts for something and that winning the hearts of the people you govern is as crucial as bagging yourself a political godfather, if not more important.