Kogiflame
By Simon Obochi
No doubt, Benue state since it’s creation have battled to survive as a state under poor leadership, amidst threats to it’s developments. Its people today mistrusts and distrust their leaders, whether they are political, traditional or faith based clerics.
As we approach the 2023 general elections in the state because of the signs that we are today almost a failed state, we must reflect as active followers of the challenges in the polity,bemoaning the fate of our troubled state by electing the right leadership resources to put us back on the tracks of development.
As citizens and progressive observers we must call attention to what must be done to increase the population of those who have seen power in the state with a view to serving the people and launching the state on an irreversible path of development in all it’s physicality.
We must reflect on what is the place of values in politics?.How can transactional politics be replaced with that which is transformational in our state?.How will our state institutions be strengthened to ensure checks and balances?.What should be done to promote peace and developments?.
How can the leaders and the led work together? What systems and processes must be put in place for genuine empowerment of the people towards the attainments of their full rights?
In short, how can excellence become the habit in our beleaguered state? It is for this reason our present leaders in the state should be worried because their ability to rule effectively is going to be seriously undermined by the desertion of the average citizen from the public space, deepening the crisis of legitimacy in the state presently. This crisis of legitimacy,we must be reminded cuts both ways.
We have the type of leadership we have when we voted them in the first place without checking properly on their antecedence and this has made our democratic institutions less effective and ungovernable as it is today.
OUR PEOPLE’S EXPECTATIONS.
For too long, our leaders in the state have perpetuated the myth that being strong leaders they can bring about the needed changes singlehandedly-rather than convert the formal authority derived from legitimate electoral mandate into a process of democratic and development renewal for the state.
Real leadership ought to involve motivating people to solve problems rather than re-enforcing the over-lordship of our present leaders in the state.The authoritarian residues of politics continue to see leaders as magicians with answers to all our state problems hence the immeasurable disappointed when we fail to leave up to this exaggerated expectations.
We hoped for real and immediate dividends in health care, improved education, employments, rehabilitated roads and food on the table but cannot get them because we get the type of leadership we deserve. Our people in the state have not generally enjoyed democratic dividends since the return to democracy because of bad leadership let’s tell ourselves the truth.
There is pervasive despondency, despair and disillusionment about material dividends of democracy.
STRONG DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS.
The most practical way to link individual choice to collective responsibility is to participate in the institutions that influence our live. We must ensure in the next election we choose a leader that would allow the formal and informal institutions in our state to be democratized and giving more responsibilities for exercising their constitutional rights.
To do so, we have to see the state as a permanent Enterprise that has to be fought over and restructured in order to provide cover for the people. We will achieve this by making political discourse more positive especially at this time that we are approaching the elections, so that we do not turn ordinary people off politics as many people grow more cynical and stop paying serious attention to politics because of the present non performance of leaderships in the state.
This is a crisis that democracy is presently experiencing in the state with it’s expected low turn out in the polls amid scant regards for political leaders.We must tell our people that yet if we as citizens chose not to be involve or play a part in this process of activism by using our vote wisely, we will get the leaders we deserve, allow the hijack of political realm by the same special interests in the state, religious bigots, and ethnic jingoist only keen in the promotion of their narrow agenda’s.
We must remind our people that being political is being patriotic and in the next election they must leave their comfort zone to embrace engagements for a better Benue state.
We must now look towards the candidate of the NNPP in the state, Professor Bem Angwe as the leader that will exit us from the transactional politics that our leaders have played for so long to transformational politics.
This is because he is a leader that genuinely believes that genuine democracy ought to rest on a much richer ecology of associated and organisational life and should be nourished and reproduced through the everyday struggles of the citizens.
He is a leader that has come to realise how detached our people are from the institutions and the structures that ordinarily empower them to engage the state.He is a servant leader that is coming to give the people the empowerment they need to oversight over the state institution and agencies.
As a visionary leader, Professor Bem Angwe has proven that he can when elected see beyond the immediate by proffering solutions to the many lingering problems and questions daily begging for answers and a way forward because he is prepared for the job from day one.
DEVELOPMENTAL DEMOCRACY.
MY PEOPLE, MY PEOPLE.THE ONLY WAY FORWARD.
The politics in the state has not bred the radical politics expected in the state but radical religious, ethnic, and opportunistic agenda’s.
Those who in the last decades would have erked out a living in the informal economy of the state are beginning to turn to the criminal economy to effect redistribution of wealth through the rising tides of armed robbery, assassination and kidnapping which from the backdrop to an increasingly brutalised state.
Our unemployed youths when they do not become criminals, now join vigilante organisations which supplants the job of the security forces dealing out direct justice-at which point, threatens the state’s supposed Monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Also they becomes thugs for hire,abused in their vulnerability by our scheming politicians and leaders, who expend them in political fights over electoral wards or dispose of them for a few hundred of naira in order to destabilize opponents for selfish political gains.
The immediate challenge for all of us as citizens of the state is to concentrate on how to rescue our state from bad leadership and it’s attendant bad governance of the PDP and the APC in the state. Unless the critical mass of our people cutting across age, gender, zones,party and political affiliations adopt the same position, with a more clearly defined collective agenda by voting the only way forward leadership of Professor Bem Angwe as Governor of the state in the next election, the current approach to solving our problems will not suffice.
There is an urgent need to build a coalition and a permanent platform which the NNPP presently represents in the public space that is beyond party and personality to vote out this inept parties and leaders. The NNPP is all embracing enough to accommodate those who subscribe to the core values of integrity, honesty, and dedication to transformative leadership for the state.
The task of an all embracing platform will not be limited to reforming the institutional framework of the state alone by Professor Bem Angwe but also focus on leadership and conduct in public life, public sector Management’s, transparency and accountability in governance, as well as visible economic progress and wealth creation for the ordinary people of the state.
Professor Bem Angwe is a leader that is convinced that our people in the state are committed to democracy and genuinely wants to see it work and here in lies his hope for the future of the state.This hope of his on the future of the state is not bleary eyed optimism.
It is not even optimism that the crisis of governance of the state would simply disappointing, it is not the hope that political impunity would stop being the name of the game overnight.He is talking about the hope of our founding fathers in the struggle for the creation of the state and freedom. He is talking about the unshaken belief in our inalienable right to change the leaders we don’t deserve come 2023.
Professor Bem Angwe is a leader who have a clear vision for the future of the state,who see character as destiny,who advocates value-driven orientation, who would not just mouth transformation, but is compassionate about changing the decrepit plight of our people, acts with integrity and ethics, a leader who creates an enterpreneural mindset and capability in followers, sees leadership as service and responsibility and not connected to mediocrity.
Benue state must move forward from transactional politics to transformative leadership by voting Professor Bem Angwe as Governor of the state come 2023.
Simon Obochi
Sec NNPP
Oturkpo LGA
