The recent “advice” by the former governor of Akwa Ibom State, Obong Victor Attah, to his successor in office, Chief Godswill Akpabio, did not come as a surprise to keen political watchers in Akwa Ibom State. It had been speculated for so long, an impending outbreak of political hostilities that would mark the beginning of the expected brinkmanship pursuant to the 2011 governorship election in the state. Opposition politicians in the state have all this while been waiting for the person with enough guts to cast the first stone. That stone has been cast, by no less a personality than Obong Victor Attah, the immediate past governor of Akwa Ibom State.
Obong Attah accepting to become the rallying point of opposition in the state may not sound strange, judging by the frosty relationship that has existed between him and his former commissioner, now the governor of the state. It is not news that Attah had preferred foisting his son-in-law, Dr. Udoma Ekarika, on the people of Akwa Ibom as his successor. The resentment that followed the ex-governor’s unsuccessful attempt to thwart the emergence of Akpabio has always been there. Therefore, to hear or read critical sentiments against his successor should not in any way solicit any serious attention.
However, going through Obong Victor Attah’s recent belly-aching “advice” to Chief Akpabio, one’s reaction would be that of shock and disbelief. Knowing Obong (Arc) Victor Attah as a man of deep thought, a cerebral statesman and one of our men of immense intellectual capability; it was indeed not difficult to believe that some strangers to the happenings of the last ten years in Akwa Ibom State must have written the piece and then attributed it to him. The Attah we all know as a forthright messenger of truth and a dogged fighter for justice could not have written such brazenly hypocritical and utterly self-serving piece. The piece came across as the effort of a possessed man throwing stones at the glass walls of his own home. It was like pulling the trigger with the gun pointing at your own head.
The unintended consequences of the piece would be a closer scrutiny of the Attah years to unravel the truth of the deals and rot that underlie the so-called mega projects of the Attah administration. These projects have been like a cog on the wheels of the current government that has spent more than half of its resources trying to finish them. These are the same projects that the Attah administration had, without due process, without proper supervision, committed funds, sometimes as much as 100 percent without commensurate work done. Most of these projects, one must admit, had some merit, but in their actualisation, a lot of hazy, unclear and unrealistic approaches were adopted, which led to most of them not actually taking off before that administration left.
One of such very important projects that Attah’s unrealistic idealism short-circuited to the disadvantage of the people of Akwa Ibom State is the Akwa Ibom State University of Technology (AKUTECH). An Uyo-based newspaper columnist, David Augustine, had in his “Firing Range” column in Weekly Insight of August 2, 2007, captured the fate of AKUTECH with these words: “that administration (Obong Attah’s) failed to take the necessary practical initiative in the establishment of the university. It instead went into some political fantasy and idealism in the conceptualisation and proper take-off of the University. Governor Attah had a dream of a unique University… But like all dreams, the idea cried for realisation. It was at this stage that a few hijacked it. The steering committee took off in search of models. It toured all the universities in all the continents of the world looking for models. A very dependable source hints that so much money was spent at this stage of the project on designs, on consultants, on endless foreign trips, on limitless ad-hoc committees and their sittings. The then supervisory ministry, the Ministry of Science and Technology, had a field day engaging in all manner of trips in search of models. The state House of Assembly Committee on Education also benefited immensely from the world junketing jamboree. Those involved, as is always common in Nigeria, went home richer while our hope for a university continued to dim”.
It indeed continued to dim until the arrival of Governor Akpabio. It is this same university that Attah accused Governor Akpabio of not having done more “about their University of Technology, which, by now, would be providing much needed back up services to the oil industry and whose Faculty of Agric Technology would be designing and fabricating simple agricultural implements and tools”. It would be pertinent to ask Obong Attah how many faculty buildings he erected in his “12 Lakes” university in the swamps, in all his years of drawing and redrawing. Yet the former governor, by his own admission, spent N12.5 billion on the non-existent University. If former Governor Attah had been so interested in AKUTECH, why did he disgrace his friend, Prof. Akpan Hogan Ekpo, by appointing him a vice chancellor without the funding that could have enabled him start off the University? Is it now that the university is about to take off that the former governor is waking up to remember his drawing board?
It is sad to be reminded of the confusion and near commissioning madness that gripped the Attah administration at its twilight. Recall the disaster that was the planned commissioning of the Uyo Stock Exchange building that had, to the shame of the administration, changed to what government called “executive inspection” even when important guests were already set for its proposed commissioning, or the Ibibio Museum that the governor shamefacedly commissioned even when no part of the project was near completion.
The crazy “commissioning” of a non-functional Ibom Power project by former President Obasanjo in the last days of the administration gives credence to the observation by Dele Sobowale, the Sunday Vanguard columnist, that if you tie a ribbon round a palm tree, President Obasanjo would cut it to commission! In a recent interview with The Sun newspaper correspondent, one of the facilitating engineers at the Ikot Abasi-based power plant, Mr. Tony Apps, said the commissioning was political; a gimmick! It is this same project that has again gulped $30 million, after Attah’s payment of $140 million, representing 100 percent payment. The KPMG audit of the project, we are sure would tell us what happened to the $80 million refund from the federal government on that project.
Our society desires statesmen with the humility to wait for history’s judgment of their actions or inactions. It is distasteful for an elder to commence hurriedly re-writing a history that is less than even five years away. It is unfortunate that Attah, a man held in the highest esteem by the people of Akwa Ibom State, could so suddenly succumb to the mortal temptation of self deification. He was so concerned with the welfare of the people that he built numerous water works, but could not afford a mere N6 billion to reticulate it to half of the population of Akwa Ibom. Yet the same government paid $2 million to a phantom consultant to bring in golfers to tee-off the Ibom Golf Course. The same government spent millions of dollars paying the golf stars that came for that official tee-off. If those millions of dollars were converted, maybe we would have been very close to N6 billion. Or if a fraction of the billions that went into his presidential bid had been channelled there, N6 billion wouldn’t have been any problem.
The former governor should be reminded that robbery in Akwa Ibom State, especially bank robberies, were a significant part of the people’s life in the state while he held sway. This government, no doubt, is being confronted by the new national vice –kidnapping, a scourge that knows no boundary. It is, however, being confronted most sincerely and most creditably. This youth unemployment did not occur to Attah, for 8 years. He did not know that it was meet and right to create jobs when he allowed all the industries he inherited to die, while none was initiated.
One of Attah’s projects that he was very passionate about was the Ibom Science Park. His administration promoted its virtues and advantages so much that we were all eager to herald its arrival and have our lives changed for good. With time, its model started appearing in newspapers and magazines, even in government pamphlets, as an already completed project. But the truth is that the project is a monumental scam. For a project worth N6.5 billion, a whopping sum of N5.2 billion was said to have been paid upfront, representing almost 90 percent of the entire contract sum. But when the Akwa Ibom State House of Representatives caucus visited the site on 11 August, 2007, the shock of many of the lawmakers was apparent, as less than 30 percent of the job was discovered to have been done. This is the same project the ex-governor is blaming Governor Akpabio for suspending work until a proper audit is undertaken.
It will interest many, even people within Akwa Ibom State, to hear that Ibom Le Meridian Hotel and Golf Resort have not been commissioned up till now. What the last administration did was the usual magic of bringing people and making them believe a project has been completed. The 5-star hotel had only its lobby and a few rooms, about 17, ready when the past administration left, so that a sizeable percentage of the work done in that hotel was done by the present administration of Chief Akpabio, after the Attah administration had spent well over N26 billion; a figure largely more than some states’ allocation of his time!
On the Tropicana and the self-righteous insinuations, one would caution Obong Victor Attah to leave judgment to history. I am sure he got similar criticism when he decided to spend so much to build a world-class golf course, even though he knew that majority of the people in Akwa Ibom State, including himself, did not know what a golf stick looks like, let alone how to hold one. Even now, can he show us the percentage of the people of the state able to patronise the hotel and play golf there? Let history be the judge. Our state can never remain at this stage of development for ever. I wonder what people thought of Chief Awolowo in the late fifties when he established the first TV station in Africa.
As for the fly-over, one is surprised that a Victor Attah, regarded as one of the futuristic leaders our country has produced, could be thinking in terms of Uyo of today, forgetting the Uyo of tomorrow primed to be the hub of economic and social activity in the region in future. Maybe he wants us to wait until we become like Port Harcourt and its bottle-neck traffic before we act.
Nothing, not even politics, can justify Attah’s vicious vituperations. He is our icon and a statesman of gigantic status. We need him to see how best we can play and get our fair share at the national level. He has played his role locally, and so, he as well as the one presently occupying the seat are candidates of history’s judgment. Let us give the Akpabio’s administration the needed peace to concentrate on the onerous job of developing Akwa Ibom State. The government has already spent two years battling with the numerous projects left by Obong Victor Attah and his government. Government is a continuous thing, but every government should bite as it can reasonably chew. We are still in a world where whoever started a project gets the credit, without giving some to whoever completed it, no matter how much the person invested in money and effort. Akwa Ibom needs peace to develop and peace we must have!
•David, a journalist and public affairs commentator, sent this piece from Uyo.
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