What the Minister of Interior, Comrade Abba Moro lacks in body frame, he makes it up with unbridled courage and this explains the speed with which he has hit the ground running since he assumed office.

The Minister made a strong case for the Federal Government to arm the Civil Defence Corps. As you read this piece, members of the corps are already under- going training in the use of arms in Zaria. The Minister has held meetings with senior officials of the Ministry, heads of agencies or parastatals under his ministry and declared his zero tolerance for corruption and indolence. He also read the riot act to officials of the Ministry to promptly treat all files. Reports from the Ministry attest to a general attitudinal change to work on the part of staff.

The Minister has promised to reposition the Ministry with special attention on the Nigeria Immigration Service, Prison Service and Civil Defence Corps. So far, officials of the Ministry say the Minister has walked his talk!

This did not come to me as a surprise because as union leader, Chairman, Okpokwu Local Government Council of Benue State and Chairman, Governing Board of Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi, he delivered on his promise.

Yet some pundits have suddenly forgotten the man we rightly called the Comrade chair. Or so they claimed. A rookie reporter who watched Comrade Moro’s screening on NTA sat beside me at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja and queried why the Senate would just ask Comrade Moro to take a bow on account of his being the Campaign Director General of the Senate President, Chief David Mark. The journalist insinuated that the real reason behind this could be to conceal the Minister’s “ineffectiveness and poor grasp of national issues”.

That was not all. A Lagos-based magazine erroneously tagged Comrade Moro a “round peg in square hole”. I believe if the upper chamber had grilled him, Nigerians would have seen the genius in Minister Moro.

It is for the latter reason that I have decided without seeking his permission to tell the story of the Minister’s rise, having extensively reported him for many years.

Before his appointment as minister, Comrade Moro was a household name in activism and Benue politics. He was Executive Chairman of Okpokwu Local Government Area and Chairman, ALGON, Benue State Chapter between 1998 and 2006. Always decked in green khaki fatigue and sporting a Fidel Castro type of mocking beard to buttress his progressive leaning, he delivered concrete developmental deliverables to the grass roots with strict adherence to due process. In one of his public outings in Benue State he declared: ‘‘The temptation to loot the treasury is high but we must resist it for there is great wisdom in service to the people who have reposed enormous confidence in us”.

By April 2000, when the then governor and current senator, Dr George Akume paid official visit to Okpokwu, he praised Comrade Moro for transforming Okpokwu and for making accountability and transparency his watchwords as ALGON boss.

At this period when most council chairmen were yet to settle down to work, Comrade moro had completed many projects for Governor Akume to commission. They are five clinics in Ejoga, Ede , Oklenyi, Ogene, Otobi, Jerico, Ojapo Ogodumu, Effiom and Ogege; tap water projects, several bore holes, bridges and culverts were constructed across Okpokwu. The most strategic of them is the Odenigbo bridge linking Benue and Enugu states .

He also constructed an ultra-modern multi-purpose centre, the first of its kind in Okpoga, the council headquarters. Till date, this edifice together with the acquired Trafalgar Executive Hotel and Yamanga Hotel Ugbokolo are veritable tourism sites in the area. His purposeful leadership saw the council’s internally generated revenue soar from N100, 000 to N400, 000 monthly.

Wide drainages were constructed in Ugbokolo, one of the commercial nerve centres of the state to arrest the perennial flood that had held inhabitants hostage. Comrade Moro embarked on massive renovation of primary schools as well as building of additional classrooms in primary schools across the council. Teaching aides and teachers aides were provided to ensure the smooth running of public primary schools. Students of Benue State Polytechnic, Ugbokolo would not forget in a hurry the hostels and lecture halls built for them by the council under the watch of this progressive politician.

These feats may have made the World Bank to crown Comrade Moro as one of the best performing chairmen as well as providing aides and counterpart funds to Okpokwu. It is also to the credit of Comrade Moro that staff of the council were trained and retrained in capacity building for optimum productivity.

As the clamour for Benue State governor of Idoma extraction gathered momentum, he resigned from his seat and threw his hat into the governorship ring in 2006. He came third in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, primary election after Governor Gabriel Suswam and the former super perm sec, Chief Mike Onoja, respectively. His impact was so profound that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua appointed him Benue State Coordinator of his presidential campaign.

Mr. FRANCIS OTTAH AGBO, a journalist and public affairs analyst, wrote from Abuja.