Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta State Gov

 By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA


Whenever it rains in Asaba, the entire city floods to the torment of indigenes, residents and wayfarers alike. Whenever I happen to be in Asaba, I refer to the unnatural disaster as River Uduaghan, a fitting metaphor for the diabolical brand of dividends of democracy the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, has to offer. Needless to say, what was River Uduaghan is now River Okowa. 
In the first place present Delta State Governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa having been a commissioner, Secretary to the State Government, SSG, and Senator, was part and parcel of the execrable PDP government of the past sixteen years that pretended to be developing the town. Okowa is now the Governor – hopefully only temporarily – and pretend as much as he may that he is the solution, everyone in Delta knows that he is without a doubt a chief participant in the creation of the problems he is presently hypocritically trying to blame solely on his predecessors.

 Okowa is now posing as the would-be savior of the same Asaba with a smokescreen and conduit pipe he calls the Asaba Capital Territory Development Agency, conveniently forgetting that the sorry state of our Olympic swimming pool of a state capital was caused by him in concert with his predecessors in whose administration he significantly participated and indeed, that the current number of ministries, departments and agencies the state is at pains to keep afloat are more than enough to rescue Asaba and the entire state if well managed. Amidst all the fake posturing, the innocent citizens of Asaba remain stranded between the River Niger on one side and River Okowa on the other with the electorate of the entire state wondering if only it was O’tega and not Okowa in Delta!

In its first hundred days in office, Dr. Okowa’s young administration has already decomposed into a very big disappointment in the estimation of the vast majority of Deltans who never voted for him in the first place. One of his first acts as Governor was to sack over 3000 Deltans from the civil service of the state in a hideous display of executive sadism. These Deltans being bona fide and unionized workers cannot be whimsically fired without recourse to extant laws, civil service rules or being accorded fair hearing. Okowa claims he sacked them because, according to him, they bought their appointments. So far Okowa has not produced a shred of evidence to substantiate this wild allegation and at any rate bribing anyone is a crime and no one can be sacked for committing a crime unless and until such person has been found guilty by a court of law.


Of course, across the state, the consensus is that Okowa is only trying to avoid having to pay workers so that the savings made from not paying them will be shared by PDP politicians while these Deltans remain unemployed and hungry in flagrant mockery of his laughable Prosperity for all Deltans mantra. Many of these Deltans are now said to have already crossed the Sahara Desert and are now presently in Libya waiting to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean into Europe thanks to the heartlessness of their own state government!


Apart from sacking these innocent workers, other achievements of Okowa thus far, include almost setting the entire state ablaze thanks to a most controversial, suspicious and ill-motivated attempt to amend the principal law regulating the Delta State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission, DESOPADEC. Okowa succeeded in annoying and dividing Deltans so profoundly with this misguided escapade that the people of the oil producing areas are still up in arms threatening to shut down the oil industry.


Alongside these acts of executive excesses, Okowa imperiously stormed the Delta State House of Assembly, shedding crocodile tears and pontifically lamenting that his predecessors, Ibori and Uduaghan, had saddled the people of Delta State with a debt burden of some 700 billion naira! Okowa’s command performance at the House of Assembly was simply macabre. How does a Governor storm the House of Assembly to complain about a colossal debt of 700 billion naira he collaborated in amassing and must have been a chief beneficiary of? How did his predecessors accumulate such a herculean debt profile unless they were involved in financial recklessness, unbridled embezzlement, brazen money lifting and insane contract inflation? How can we be certain that part of this gargantuan amount was not deployed by PDP towards rigging its unmarketable candidates into power as witnessed in the heinously rigged election that brought Okowa himself into Government House, Asaba?

Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Sapele.