When he was governor of Enugu State, 1997 – 2007, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani often promoted a slogan known as Ebeano. Ebeano in the Ibo language means, ‘where we are’. Part of why Dr. Nnamani was known as Ebeano governor was not to say that he was where he was a governor of Enugu State; but that his ebeanoness was his stratagem for wadding through the time and tide of the many accusations of his incapacity as governor. So he often arranged media tours to areas that bore what he said were the insignia of his outstanding accomplishments as governor of Enugu state. Whilst at his tours, he would have members of his paparazzi train the cameras at him, while he would raise his hands like a conquistador, brandish a resplendent smile on his handsome face, strut back and forth, pointing to projects that he said that he executed. What became the selling point, the swag and the allure of those events was that on both sides of the roads and project sites that he often promoted, you would find scores of old women and children line the streets shouting, ‘Ebeano, Ebeano, Ebeano in a rhythmic gyration.
It turned out that those were mere photo-ops and make-believe arranged to impress. After Monsignor Ebeano left office, allegations of the heist he allegedly unleashed on Enugu state began to surface. But this discussion is not about Dr. Nnamani. His name only just popped up her because today he seems to have a fan in the governor of Delta State, who against the accusations of ineptitude from his critics, has embarked on massive Ebeanolike campaigns in Delta State. This is how it started for us: credible intel indicated that even though Delta state gets 13% Derivation from the Federal government, only 50% of that 13% funds appeared to be being used on, for the whole of Delta State. Based on that, we published a broadcast asking where the remaining 50% of the 13% was and why it was not being used for oil producing communities in Delta State. Whether these accusation of the governor’s alleged ineptitude is what led to other accusations that he was also planning to dump the PDP, we cannot tell. What we are verily sure of is that as soon as these criticisms got to town, the governor hit the ground, he began to run to places where he has some semblance of work to his name, and unleashed a massive Ebeanolike campaign. Week in week out, we received very carefully choreographed videos of Sheriff Oborevwori dressed in the traditional Ebeano uniform of jeans trousers, face cap and sneakers sweating it out from one project to the other.
It is important at this point to say that there appear to be nothing wrong with a chief executive officer of a state like Delta personally going through the projects under his watch. The idea may be that he is genuinely interested in seeing to the meaningful conclusion of those projects in an environment replete with ‘ongoing’, substandard and abandoned projects. But there are two buts to the matter. The first one is that he has commissioners who can get these kinds of things done, and doing these things himself gives an indication that either he does not trust his own commissioners or that he has inept people around him. The second but is that nearly all of the projects that the Ebeano exponent was supervising appear all to be in the city centres. Weren’t the 13% funds supposed to be for oil producing communities – communities in the hinterlands where governance hardly gets to? And why were there no independent observers, journalists, civil society bodies taking part in this supervision exercise that the governor embarked upon? If the governor was legit, we offered to take part in the project supervision exercise, if not for anything but just so that there is some semblance of transparency, accountability and believability to what has now become a legit Ebeano exercise.
What befuddled is that instead of responding to some of these concerns, the governor and his handlers would unleash one Ebeano video one after the other from their Ebeano archives, totally unrelated, unconnected and alien to the issues and concerns that citizens seek to know. They appear to have preferred to thread the Ebeano path of visiting big tv stations to defend this method of governance that serious-minded administrators left behind in the early millennium. In a state with epileptic power supply, how many Deltans actually saw the big Ebeano interventions on Channels? My Prof wrote an article in the Guardian newspapers discussing the deadly Warri-Sapele Road. I forwarded the article to a representative of the Delta State government. The response, which the Prof said looked like something that emerged from the Kalahari Desert because of its surprising distance from the issue of the deadly Warri-Sapele-Benin road, was another Ebeano video.
Let us be clear: Delta State has capacity to be among the forward looking states in Nigeria. It is endowed naturally, and has some of the best people in the world. To move the state forward therefore, the governor needs to depart from the norm, and overhaul his governance style and replace it with one that is innovative, people-driven, and certainly not one programmed to hoodwink.
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Image: Sheriff Oborevwori website
