By Obi Nwakanma

I have been told that the Imo State governor, Mr. Ikedi Ohakim has written some books on Marketing. Jolly well, I’d say! No wonder he is busy selling snake oil in Imo state. Marketing and advertising proposed sites as the great achievements of his three-years in Imo state requires a certain kind of talent for obfuscation.

Governance in Imo state is by means of “vuvuzela” and its all up in the air. I have been mercilessly assailed however by a certain Bill Obi, apparently a paid piper piping powerfully for the Imo State governor recently for what he calls my “ignorance” about the goings on in Imo State.

I have left the world of introspection, Bill Obi says, and I now navigate the slippery slopes of ignorance about all things Imo. Jolly well, I’d say again. Introspection is a luxury for the cloistered but in an emergency it becomes hubris. Much like the ostrich burying its head in the sand.

And there is an emergency in Nigeria, particularly in the East of Nigeria where the governance of the public space has collapsed and where it seems like the population is deliberately subjected to some kind of “shock therapy” as a means of containment. As citizens and people of conscience we cannot afford to be the ostrich.

We can also not afford the kind of sophomoric ad hominems one could discern in Bill Obi’s response on behalf of his governor, and were I sure that Bill Obi is in fact a real person, and not a hybrid character, a masque deployed to do the work of the Greek chorus, as I suspect, I would have taken him on, on his invitation to visit Imo State soon, and I would challenge him to a public debate. But alas in Owerri, there is neither a place nor a need for civilized debate only the hokum that comes from a sinister disregard for the ordinary intelligence of the population.

Any visitor to Owerri is most likely to come away with the sinking feeling that nothing is right. The administration in Owerri is both alienated and incompetent. But far worse: it is a circus! There is no concrete achievement in the last three years and counting.

I was reminded that Ikedi Ohakim is “a man of ideas”: but an administration whose idea of urban transportation is to introduce that insult called “keke Napep” to Owerri in place of a properly organized comprehensive modern urban and municipal transit system leaves one wracked with grief. I’ve been told that Imo State will “soon” rebuild its public schools system through its Education Endowment Fund.

An Education Endowment is a fine idea, but like everything else in this administration it is a proposed mystery. Who indeed are the trustees of this fund? How does the endowment interact or differ from the normal funding regime through the state’s ministry of education? Where, in fact, is the government’s Chief Inspector of Education’s report on facility status and curriculum in state schools, the premise on which every upgrade policy and funding must be based?

By now, a more serious administration would have posted these on the website of the ministry of education for public scrutiny. Much has been said about the dredging of the Nworie river, and none in Imo State has yet seen work done; no one has seen the government surveyor’s expert report on the environmental impact of dredging the Nworie River; no Town Planner’s report on what to do with the houses already built on Nworie’s old flow path; indeed, there is no architectural or Engineering drawing to show any plans for Nworie, or the Engineering or Architectural firms involved in the design, or the cost to tax payers, or the time-frame for the project.

What has been told consistently is the billions of naira spent merely on a proposed site! The point I make here is that governance is a process that leads to clear results, but Ohakim’s administration seems confused, arbitrary and prolix.

It is long on many hackneyed ideas and hollow rhetoric but short on results. It is three years already in the making and nothing to show for it except the continued misery of the citizenry. Perhaps it could do better in these last few months doing more governing than marketing. And in saying this, I make no particular endorsement of any of his opponents, none of whom has yet shown either in any clearly thought or articulated program, or carriage or vision, that they present a clear and better alternative.

The greatest pitfall in governance in the East, it seems, is the dearth of real conceptual imagination, which added to a firm spine could provide the kind of leadership needed to re-invent the East as a political and economic powerhouse. Recently, Theodore Orji, governor of Abia State left the PPA and declared himself to the goals of the APGA. He has since been received in his new party.

But the lingering question around Mr. Orji remains: how does he account for the three years of listlessness in Abia state? The circumstance of his withdrawal from the PPA might only in part answer the question. I always found the PPA and Orji Uzo Kalu unique mysteries.

But Governor T.A. Orji’s recent revelation accounting for his resignation from the PPA, which includes the revelation of a N29 billion debt left to the state by Orji Uzo Kalu in Abia State which Lisa Olu Akerele, party chair of the crisis torn PPA now alleges weighed down on the administration in Abia gives one pause. But why did it take T.A. Orji so long in his administration to come clean? Does a switch to the APGA – and we must frankly demand of this party a broad program of action – resolve the tangle of the two “Orjis”? In my mind, it does not.

If however T.A. Orji pursues an ambitious and more aggressive initiative, that would see a new marked direction, perhaps he may prove the point that his party and his erstwhile boss in Abia were burdens on him. But T.A. Orji has failed the people of Abia State as it is, who in spite of the attempts to make him a political prisoner, elected him like Nkrumah straight from prison.

But unlike Nkrumah he has failed to rise to the demands of his time – to offer selfless and visionary political leadership. The East of Nigeria is in a unique political and social situation.

It has puny leadership. It has an active, young and highly educated population, and this is its greatest resource: not the oil and gas reserves; not the great waterways that crisscross its landscapes, not its great but declining forests; not its arable land, not in the unexplored mineral deposits in great abundance from Ugwuele to Ikom: it is an energetic and driven and technically trained population, which alas has been greatly underused and even wasted.

The East also should have gone beyond petty political frontiers as an economic zone. The boundaries of the East – including the so-called South-South areas is too contiguous and its contiguity offers great opportunities.

I have once said, for instance, that a well-established in-land port between Owerrinta and Okpala might find great use for equally active habour in Port-Harcourt, Calabar, or Warri or Onitsha, and the daily exchange of goods and people, the revival of manufacture and regional commerce at a quantum that would see the central West African loop as its ultimate zone of expansion ought to form the framework of economic and policy plans both by the individual states of the East and by a Joint Eastern council of states that could exploit the potentials of a common services.

It is time to break down those fictional and unhelpful barriers from which these states, currently made sad and uninhabitable by bad, narrow, and unimaginative governance , suffer. This is crucial as we dust up the documents and plans and programs that made the pre-war Eastern Nigeria a bellwether for economic and social progress in West Africa.

If the likes of Ohakim have any ideas at all, it must reflect this search for a grand and usable vision as well as for visible results. They must put the people back to work, and this time, not “keke Napep” work or work programs known only on billboards.