Before We Crucify Yahaya Bello, by Nafisat Bello
In her celebrated 2018 TED Talk edition titled: “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned against one-sided narratives, incomplete stories and biased delivery of events and issues that lead to stereotypes against individuals, nations and races. According to her, a single-story breeds ignorance and makes people misconstrue isolated events as the norm just as they misconstrue individual shortcomings as negative traits of the whole.
She told her own personal story of how the wrongful notions she got from childhood mis-led her into wrong conclusions and how she overcame them as events unfolded in her evolution.
It is easier to destroy than to build. It takes days and nights, weeks, months and years of hard work, resilience, patience and sacrifices to build a solid reputation for an individual, institution or organisation. But it doesn’t cost envious people anything to rip everything apart and this can be done within seconds with just one lie or half-truth that borders on a topic which majority of people are emotional and irrational about.
The immediate-past governor of Kogi state, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, has been in the eye of the storm for weeks now over his alleged financial malfeasance for which the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has been trying to undo him. While the anti-graft agency can be said to be after Bello in line with its mandate to rid Nigeria of corruption, the ex-governor has been receiving unprecedented criticisms and attacks from all manners of people, both online and offline, from within and outside Kogi state, as if he has been pronounced guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Since Bello’s travails began, everyone on social media has become emergency activists and good governance advocates and we all know the biased points of view some of the commentators are speaking from. Some of them were ambitious politicians and their supporters who lost out in the ex-governor’s succession process. Some are ethnic champions and narrow jingoists who believe their tribe should have, as a matter of compulsion, produced Bello’s successor. They all see Bello as an enemy who stood in the way of the fulfillment of their pipe dreams and anyone or institution who goes after him or seeks to destroy him is their friend. We will see how far their bitterness takes them.
To be clear, I am not writing this in defense Bello. I am not in any way arguing that he is innocent of the allegations leveled against him, it is the court that will tell us that in the fullness of time. But since the media is supposed to be a free marketplace of ideas, in a conversation like this, all narratives and angles should be out there for people to read and for the sake of posterity.
It is common knowledge that a coin has two sides and no matter what the bandwagon believes and how bullies behave on social media, we must be heard.
I can’t say people who believe Bello was a bad leader are wrong. That must be what they saw and heard and are still seeing and hearing. They are of course entitled to their perspectives and points of view, even biases. But this is what I heard and saw and my encounter with the governor both within and outside the state has formed an everlasting opinion about his kind of person. I am willing to hold this opinion till the end of time except he presents a different perspective in the future.
A Personal Encounter
In the course of doing this job, I have had the privilege of meeting and interacting with the man in question a couple of times. I have had to study him from close range, his personality, principles and conviction as well as his idea of modern governance which were not only expressed in words but also in his projects, policies and programmes.
They say first impression matters. When I met him for the first time in his residence in Abuja with my boss and another colleague, the then Governor Bello treated us with tremendous respect due to the past relationship he had with my boss. He cut the picture of a man in power who remembers his past friends, who respects others and who treats women with utmost courtesy. This last part was later confirmed by the special way he treated women, children, youths and the vulnerable like People Living with Disabilities (PWDs) in the course of his administration.
The governor didn’t cut the picture of a mean, proud and bossy individual in which he had been painted. Rather, he looked calm, relaxed, humble, modest and down-to-earth. He listened to us with rapt attention and granted all our requests. Subsequent meetings with him were even better than the first one.
I therefore started writing and publishing weekly articles on the activities, challenges and successes of his administration.
For months, I relied on internet materials, sources and my own analytical mind to produce well researched articles which covered his management of the economy, battle with insecurity, civil service reforms, management of the state’s fault lines, reforms in education and health, infrastructural development, women and youth empowerment, political aspiration as well as peculiar interest in the welfare of PWDs.
The Management then decided that for my next set of articles, I should, alongside some colleagues, relocate to Kogi state for a few days to feel the pulse of the people, hear their opinions about the Bello administration and witness first-hand the development strides and infrastructural projects I had written about.
On arrival in the state capital, the first structure that caught our attention was the gigantic flyover, along Ganaja junction, the first of its kind in the history of the state. We saw secondary schools that looked like university campuses in Adankolo and other parts of Lokoja. Driving through Osara to Okene, back to Ajaokuta then to Itobe, Idah, Ugwolawo and Anyigba, we saw the wonders the governor did in the area of health infrastructure. We saw general hospitals and teaching hospitals. To our greatest, pleasant surprise, we saw the world-class Reference Hospital in Okene which is Governor Bello’s idea of a full and final stop to medical tourism.
At Osara, we saw the Confluence University of Science and Technology, which the Bello administration built from scratch. We also saw the College of Health Science in Idah, which got full accreditation under Governor Bello.
In Anyigba, apart from the massive infrastructural upgrade the governor gave the Prince Abubakar Audu University (PAAU), we also spoke to students and asked them how happy they were that the entire university system across the country was shut but they were in school, they expressed huge relief and commended the administration for removing the school from the bottleneck of incessant ASUU strikes.
We were also in Ejiba, Yagba West Local Government Area of the state, where the established one of the biggest rice mills in the country known as Kogi Confluence Rice Mill. The mill constructed at over N4 billion is located on 800 hectares and has the capacity to produce 50 tonnes of rice per day and create over 6,000 jobs.
We also saw some of the 100 tractors procured by Governor Bello and distributed to farmers across the 21 Local Government Areas of the State.
In Lokoja, we equally saw the Revenue House which Governor Bello remodeled and turned to an imposing edifice. This is one of the numerous reforms he championed which moved the monthly Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) from 350 million naira to N1.3 billion naira.
We also met some of Bello’s officials and they spoke glowingly about some of his closet characteristics that people may not know about – his no-nonsense attitude to work, targets and timelines, clear vision and attention to details.
On return to Abuja, there were too much to write about. So, we took our time and continued to release weekly articles about our experience in the state. In all, we wrote 47 articles which made up the content of the Book titled: “Yahaya Bello: 47 Narratives on a Change Agent,” which we presented to him as a gift on his 47th birthday in June 2022.
To confirm that the Bello story was heard beyond the shores of Nigeria, the gender inclusivity campaign we did for him was one of the reasons me and some other female colleagues won SABRE awards at the Conference of African Public Relations Association (APRA) in faraway, Lusaka, Zambia in 2023.
Contrary to the repeatedly told lies on social media, Bello did not go into Lugard House and left without adding value to the life of Kogites. He did things, erected massive structures, changed lives and touched the lives of individuals, groups and organisations.
Last Line
While the EFCC must be allowed to carry out its constitutional duties, the governor must also be allowed to insist on certain fundamental human rights which he is entitled to. The two parties have no right to be lawless in the pursuit of their agenda.
Ex-governor Bello has a duty to protect his own legacy in Kogi state and also the dignity of every Kogite. The EFCC has a duty to focus on fighting corruption and diligently prosecuting suspects after a thorough investigation, and not staging some embarrassing drama in front of camera in the name of a press conference.
Nafisat Bello, a media practitioner writes from Abuja
