OF late, I’ve kept wondering what would be happening in Delta today, if it was Olorogun O’tega Emerhor of the All Progressives Congress, APC, rather than Senator Ifeanyi Okowa of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, that was Governor of the state.

Perhaps rather than Senator Okowa’s administration, we would have had a people-oriented and focused APC administration determined to prove itself to the electorate as a superior alternative to the PDP. Instead of the business-as-usual approach to governance, we would on the contrary be seeing an APC Government with new ideas committed to effecting real change after sixteen years of PDP misrule.

While Okowa, who clearly prefers to remain stuck in the past in which he was a major player, is insisting we must put up with the old and failed ideas of his kleptomanic party, we would have seen an O’tega led government ensuring that public-spirited persons with fresh ideas are given an opportunity to contribute their quota in effecting genuine change in the state. Rather than our present lot, an O’tega led administration would have impressed us with a paradigm shift in governance powered by his change agenda.

Rather than our present predicament which was kick started with the sacking of more than 3000 Deltans validly recruited into the civil service of the state without the slightest adherence to due process, we would have an APC administration under O’tega which would have refrained from cruelly sending so many innocent citizens of the state into unemployment. Instead of tarnishing the reputations of these bona fide Deltans whom he hardly knows and who did absolutely nothing to offend him, by baselessly alleging that they bought their appointments, as Okowa has done, we would have seen an O’tega led administration imaginatively looking for ways of economically empowering even more Deltans rather than sadistically sacking the few who have jobs.

Rather than having to stomach the hypocrisy of pretending he knew nothing about the debt, we would have had an untainted APC administration led by O’tega determined to make a clean break with the past and committed to recovering all stolen funds in the state. Instead of rushing ahead with his whitewash of an Asaba Capital Territory Development Agency, being sold to us as an interventionist agency necessary for rehabilitating the state capital – we would have had an APC government capable of conscientiously developing Asaba, using the numberless and largely comatose agencies already on ground instead of increasing our debt burden by creating additional bureaucracies.

Yet who is to blame for our having to bear the unbearable burden of Okowa rather than enjoying the refreshing change agenda of O’tega? Happily it is not the good people of Delta at all. They had absolutely no hand in it. Deltans never voted for PDP for the electorate was not even allowed to vote in the first place!

Jesutega Onokpasa , a lawyer, wrote from Sapele.