Never knew that the time would come so soon when I’d be missing my gentle, youthful and amiable governor, Yahaya Bello. However, I’m counting the remaining days, evaluating Saturday’s charade; sorry, I meant selections and suddenly realising I’m gonna miss Governor Yahaya Bello. I believe I say this for all Kogians, especially those who have tasted what it means to be at the receiving end of Bello’s definition of democracy and peaceful elections.
For eight years, Kogi people have enjoyed the best leadership infernal hell could deliver. If you asked them how they arrived at that lofty destination, many of them might confess somnambulism. Mass hypnotism is not often associated with politics, but in Kogi, beware of the enchanter. It looked like yesterday when Kogians were bracing up for four more years of the flamboyant dynamism of Abubakar Audu. They thought Audu had served two terms, but the courts don’t do elementary arithmetic. Their algebra gave Audu another term and he would go ahead to win the votes required for the land lordship of Lugard House and dominion over Kogians for four more years.
Cruel fate had a different agenda, snuffing life out of Audu before he could put his dainty hands on the holy books and legitimise his win. Human calculators saw his deputy ‘ascending’ the throne of his principal, but again judicial calculations determined otherwise unleashing Yahaya Adoza Bello from the reserve bench. People asked how? And jurisprudence threw more mystery as Bello became the youngest ever elected governor of any state since the return of demoncracy.
These were the days before the Not Too Young To Run crusade. Everyone expected a digital government. One that would harness Kogi’s natural and intellectual diversity to prove its pride of place among states. If you ask Dino Melaye, one of Bello’s arch-rivals, it never happened.
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From the onset, Bello showed off as Peter Tosh’s archetypal Stepping Razor as pictures of the gym-obsessed six-pack governor started making it to social and mainstream media. The ravaging national insecurity that started in the North East seeped into the Middle Belt region and Bello designed a budgetary plan to tackle it headlong. Within weeks working with trusted accountants, Bello had spent N260 million security votes to safeguard Kogi without arming a thug or purchasing an AK47 and signalling that Bello is never afraid of doing whatever Bello sets out to do.
An accountant by training, Bello knows the rigours of state prevented Bello from acquiring a PhD. He found a professorship in Humanitarian Services and Human Resources Management from a horse-on-paper university in England. If the title alone confuses you, have pity on me.
Under my outgoing governor, opposition was officially a doomed art in which only the outright suicidal dared. One could have said that nobody dared and lived to tell the story except that Melaye is still alive and so is the freshly-minted fighter, Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, the Senator currently representing Kogi Central. Her party headquarters were torched after several attempts to assassinate her by state-sponsored thugs. When that failed, her house and that of a relative were razed. When Natasha appeared undaunted in her struggle against the self-styled ‘White Lion’, the road leading to her homestead excavated by state-sponsored gold prospectors who believed that there was treasure under the coal tar on the eve of an election.
Most men with balls would have relocated from Kogi like others but Natasha, the undaunting lioness of the savannah braced it headlong. In the end, even the White Lion caved in after her constituents elected her and the appeal court affirmed the legitimacy of their votes.
Apparently, Natasha’s chi is stronger than Madam Salome Acheju Abuh. She was the opposition leader who was roasted alive in her abode after an election.
By far one of Bello’s most brazen spats with the public was the COVID-19 pandemic during which Bello incredibly resisted the incursion of the pandemic with a satellite-propelled app that cost the state a paltry N90 million. The app ensured that no Kogian was infected by the virus and none died, except those concocted by the media. For the first time in the history of mankind, Bello declared his state totally COVID-19-free and forbade relevant tracking agencies from monitoring the spread of the disease he described as no deadly than common malaria. For attempting to contradict the governor’s orders, the federal health centre in Lokoja, the state capital, was attacked and destroyed just to prevent disease monitors.
While Bello described the state COVID-free, he did not see spending federal and donor agency allocations for the eradication of the disease as haram.
This feat made India, the leader in cutting-edge software development green with envy at missing the boat. Now, where on earth would Kogi ever get another dynamic governor with such incredible genius? For these and many firsts, Nasir el-Rufai prostrated with Kogians to let him remain their governor. Aisha, Buhari’s wife, concurred on a second term as the whole world hailed the electoral sagacity of Kogians who rewarded Bello’s leadership excellence with a second mandate.
Unfortunately, two terms are what our stolen constitution sets for elected and selected executives. And so, with a heavy heart, Kogians went to the polls last weekend along with two other off-season states to choose a new leader. Mahmood Yakubu, the chief electoral umpire, swore he was prepared to demonstrate credible, semi-digitised poll, especially in the state that prevented a pandemic with an app. Critics now say he failed.
Bello handpicked a successor, Ahmed Usman Ododo, a ranking member of Bello’s cabinet of unrivaled performers and best practices brigade. Failed candidates that have proved no match for Bello’s powerful electoral success machine were in the race. The process turned out electoral majors in which thuggery, violence and brigandage were widely exhibited. Residents of Ogori Magongo shocked the world by voting in their sleep on election morning.
At least one person was killed and many wounded in what Bello declared the freest and fairest election ever held since the Greeks invented democracy. He blamed the press for inventing reports of death, violence and brigandage. The violence of the pen, microphones and keyboards, kill more than guns directed at prospective voters from a state helicopter as happened during one of the elections in which Bello was a candidate.
Weeks ago, Bello elevated traditional heads just to pave the way for one in his domain that until then did not exist. The invention earned the position of a first-class king. Here I was thinking I’d never miss the exit of a politician. That was because even in my wildest dreams, I never thought that a rustic, often forgotten state like Kogi could never produce a maverick as Yahaya Adoza Bello. We wait to see how his surrogate outclasses his godfather and what life has to offer to President Bola Ahmed ‘Adekunle’ Tinubu’s youth campaign coordinator.
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