NEWS DIGEST – It’s a lot easier to arrive your destination sleeping on a bed than running in opposite direction. This much is the case with Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State. According to grapevine, Governor Lalong has relocated to Abuja in pursuit of a blind unworkable ambition to have the Minister of Youth & Sports, Barr. Solomon Dalung removed from office for the “crime” of revealing the pathetic and messy financial situation of the state – a fallout of the recent presidential visit to the state.
From afar, the taciturn Lalong could easily pass for an intelligent man with the requisite capacity to assess situations and respond appropriately. However, the shoddy manner he’s managing the damaging revelations made Minister Dalung has settled the question of Lalong’s political and managerial capability and suitability to manage a deliberately degraded state like Plateau State. Worse, it has exposed Lalong’s shallow capacity to know which of his eggs could hatch or not.
To begin, even to a political neophyte, the idea of any Governor removing a senior Minister in the cabinet of President Buhari shouldn’t exist much less, for one to expend time and resources to actualise. With particular emphasis on Plateau State, if Governors or their henchmen could influence who gets what from President Buhari, Barr. Dalung wouldn’t be answering the privileged title of a “Minister” today going by the clannish machinations of Governor Lalong and the amount of resources expended to scuttle his nomination and frustrate his clearance by the Senate.
If it’s still beyond Governor Lalong to understand the style of President Buhari – a style that favours competence and integrity over prosaic and antiquated considerations, it should be clear to the victims of his maladministration to understand why Plateau State is regrettably sinking deeper into the abyss of hopelessness despite the enormous goodwill and public support the administration enjoys from day one.
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It’s equally ironic that after denying people of Plateau State the much awaited dividends of CHANGE, Governor Lalong is simultaneously working hard to remove their representative in the centre when he cannot guarantee retaining the slot for Plateau State. Not that I entertain any doubt about the hopelessness of the venture, just to highlight the dangerous disconnect between Governor Lalong and the wellbeing of Plateau State.
For the doubting Thomases, Minister Dalung became a Minister on his own merit. He earned the trust and confidence of Presidency long before Governor Lalong and his co-travellers realise the Atiku kite they pledged to fly to the end won’t fly, and summarily abandoned it and joined Buhari to save their skins. Perhaps, that may explain their overt celebration of Buhari alongside a covert operation to keep the Atiku flag flying in Plateau State. Keeping the Atiku flag flying in Plateau State despite the heavy odds may also explain where all the billions that accrued to the State are channeled.
This is a fair assumption going by the declaration of the Plateau State Government and the State’s Party leadership at the venue of the prayers organised for the quick recovery of President Buhari when he was hospitalised in UK. That was an indecency many considered as “politricks” meant to revive relationships between former VP Atiku and Governor Simon Lalong in anticipation of President Buhari’s permanent incapacitation and Atiku’s possible presidency. Now that the diabolical plan has been scuttled by divine intervention, it’s quite in order to expect confusion and backslides.
In any case, Minister Dalung’s neatly itemised and presented excesses of Governor Lalong were intended to generate positive response from the State not to escalate the pathetic situation to the level of Governor Lalong’s absenteeism which an average would agree could worsen an already bad case. Minister Dalung raised patriotic and clearly germane questions that should be addressed and arrested. What better chance could Governor Lalong get prove his so much bandied “transparency” – a card he is always quick to play at any given opportunity.
Unless “Akwai lauje cikin nadi”, this is a good chance for the government to match its “transparency” by transparently opening its books to match their claim for transparency with their records. Sadly, they went the normal indecorous way of engaging obscenities and poorly scripted rhetorics to address their inadequacies. That and all, the question back home in Jos would remain the same – people need answers that could explain poor dividends despite generous income in the last 3 years. People would like to know why despite all that accrued to the State in the period, President Buhari could only commission a road inherited at 70% completion level and some 40 physical tractors (representing 400 on paper).
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