Gombe 2023 and a journey of no return [Opinion]
By Mela Jonathan
IT’s an unarguable fact that Governor Muhammad Inuwa Yahaya, the increasingly provocative governor of Gombe State, is steadily chalking up points that would undoubtedly make him go down as the most unpopular administrator to come out of the “Jewel in the Savannah” since the creation of the state on October 1, 1996.
He has since shown clearly that he is no longer who he was when he was angling for a position that would catapult him to the highest political office in the state. Virtually all those who supported him promoted his cause and pacified many other leaders who would ordinarily have nothing to do with his campaign for the governorship to come to his side, are being cast aside in a most ignominious manner.
Now, from all indications, he believes he has arrived; that he is a self-made man who only listens to his own voice. Yes, a leader is supposed to be one who provides solutions.
Indeed, self-destruction is not an option any well-meaning indigene of Gombe would wish for their leader. But a governor who has chosen that path for himself and refuses to listen to the numerous voices of reason in that territory urging restraint and a conciliatory approach to matters must know that he cannot be helped.
A leader like Yahaya who relishes sowing the seed of discord at any given opportunity is not the type of administrator Gombe needs at this critical phase of its history. This is a governor who never stops criticising former governor Ibrahim Dankwambo, for instance, for allegedly piling up loans upon loans to the tune of over N120 billion during his tenure. Yet, Yahaya, in just about two years of his first term, has taken more loans than Dankwambo took in his entire eight years as governor.
In just a little over two years as governor, Yahaya, like a sailor on a never-ending binge, has borrowed more than N100bn, and the people are still counting.
While the debts keep rising, the people have continued to sink deeper into poverty. Resources that ought to be deployed to improve the lives of the people have continued to disappear. The level of decay is beginning to assume an alarming dimension.
It’s no surprise that Gombe has over the last two years deteriorated so fast that it’s difficult to recognise that this was the same state, a model in the savannah, that once held a great promise for growth and development in the North-East region. Here is the state that Governor Yahaya is beginning to turn into something else – most likely a haven for impunity and violence, a state where even past leaders fear to tread just because the incumbent has decided that it’s got to be his way or no other way.
Anyhow, he’s got to realise that he won’t be in office forever. Therefore, he needs to step back from his ways and think of the type of legacies he wants to leave as a leader. Clearly, as it is, he seems to have chosen for himself a path of self-destruction. This is his greatest undoing.
But if he truly has an eye for 2023 as it is said all over the place, this is the moment to begin to readjust his style with the aim of delivering democratic good governance for the benefit of all.
As it is, the people of the state seemed to have taken stand against the coercive mode of leadership and his micro-managing of affairs of state and the irredeemable mistake of betraying his former boss and the party leader in the state, Senator Danjuma Goje.
The development has plunged the APC into the point of no return, with many of its members and political appointees resigning, the consequence of which the party has psychologically lost the 2023 battle. Yahaya must be held as the architect of his own problems.
Jonathan, a social commentator, wrote from Billiri, Gombe State.