By Dele Sobowale

“If out of 36 governors….food first, health second, education third, infrastructure comes next.” Dele Sobowale, SUNDAY VANGUARD, June 22, 2014.

Daily, if not every minute, people all over Nigeria are passing remarks reflecting their assessment of the performance of their elected officials. President Jonathan, who, unfortunately, is the first President to rule during the Age of Facebook and Twitter, had been known to lament that he is the most insulted President in the world today. He has my sympathies. But, I can assure GEJ that the lashes he is now receiving will be love pats compared to what his successors will experience in the future – if that is any consolation.

In many respects, the President and Governors in every state of Nigeria are given performance appraisal by millions of people who have not bothered to define their metrics for performance appraisal. For card carrying members, the decision is made depending on what favours their political party. Thus, Jonathan or any governor is adjudged to have performed well, or badly, by Olisah Methu or Lai Mohammed, depending on whether the person belongs to PDP or APC. Invariably, commendation and condemnation are both total. The most common statements are “he has performed better than anybody before him” or “he has done absolutely nothing; he is a total disaster”.

The funniest thing about these statements is that the people uttering them actually expect to be believed.
Thank God, late Hubert Humphrey, 1911-1978, Senator and Vice President of the United States, had warned those who utter such extreme statements bordering on falsehood, that, “The right to speak does not include the right to be taken seriously.” For the most part, I personally discard such utterances. As I learnt during my MBA programme in Boston, that there is no such thing as a “good” manager. The vital question is “good for what?” Certainly, it is impossible for anybody to sit in the President’s or Governor’s office for a year, not to talk of four or eight years, without doing anything.

Clearly, a fair assessment must take into account all the things the Executive officers had done, as well as the resources available to get the job done. Furthermore, the person undertaking the performance appraisal must announce, upfront, his criteria for judgment. The rest of us don’t have to agree with him, but, at least, we know the yardsticks for assessment. Two weeks ago, writing under OCHENDO AND INSPIRATIONAL LEGACY PROJECTS, I set out the criteria, food, health, education, and distant fourth, infrastructure, listed above, as mine for appraising governors. The reasons for these choices are simple. Everybody must eat to survive; be in reasonably good health to perform any task and have a minimum of basic education to function in an increasing global village. Infrastructure, meaning roads and flyovers, power supply, pipe borne water, landscaping etc are secondary to the basic needs. Given the percentage of people living in poverty and who are denied adequate nutrition, basic health services and even education (10 million Nigerian kids are out of school), it is my position that governments should tackle those issues as the topmost priority. I then cited Governor Orji’s award as the Agric. Governor of the year 2014 as well as the Excellent Diagnostic Centre at Umuahia.

Most of the responses were favourable except three. They all came from Aba and they said the same thing. ‘The governor had done nothing in eight years; come and see Aba Roads’. Unfortunately, these are well educated people. Their response also revealed to me why Nigerians students fail WEAC in large numbers. People approach issues with pre-conceived notions and don’t read what is before them before putting pen to paper to write. Even if Orji had not touched a single road in Aba for eight years, which I know is not the case, because I was in Aba at least six times this year, does that negate the fact that he had been singled out by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and NAFDAC – among other sponsors – to receive the prize for best performance in Agriculture? And one would like to ask, since when had it been decreed that the Governor of Abia State is in office only to tar roads in Aba? I have lived around roads in Lagos Island which had not been touched by ANY Governor since Jakande. It would be selfish of me to determine the performance of Fashola on that basis alone.

I have dwelt on this story because it reveals the shallowness of thought most people bring into the assessment of the President and the Governors. Seldom, if at all, do they even consider the resources at the governor’s disposal. One of my fellow columnists entered Abia State from Rivers State and concluded that the River State Governor is a better governor. My fellow pen-pusher, deliberately or inadvertently, failed to reveal that River State receives almost six times the revenue of Abia State. How on earth can someone expect to be taken seriously for making that sort of comparison? So, for everybody’s information, I will again publish the revenue collected by each state from Abuja. Then, I will group the states accordingly. Ekiti, Gombe, Ebonyi and Taraba states should not be judged with the same yardstick as Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers States. Lagos State is in a class of its own. No state can be compared with it.
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“Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are”..
When someone in a Honourable position does or says things that are dishonourable, he immediately forfeits the right to be so addressed. When President Jonathan went scouting for a Minister to represent Osun State, he was warned about Jelili Adesiyan, now Minister for Police Affairs. But, GEJ would not listen. Adesiyan’s alleged recent utterances regarding his encounter with Senator Adeleke has shown the man in his true colors. If true, even a professional thug would be ashamed to be publicly heard to utter the words allegedly attributed to our Police Affairs Minister. The whole world must be wondering how that disaster occurred.