By ‘Bike Ogbuokiri—
It was, to put it mildly, an interesting experience to listen to the Minister of Works, Senator Dave Umahi, explain why the people of Ebonyi should reject Peter Obi and embrace Bola Tinubu. His case, such as it was, rested on a single proposition: that Mr Obi has done nothing to lift the people of Ebonyi. One might reasonably ask the mirror question — what has Mr Tinubu done to lift them? — but there is no answer to such a question, for the simple reason that no such thing exists even in the most generous of dreams.
Let us deal first with the logic. Mr Obi was never governor of Ebonyi. He was never a minister with Ebonyi inside his jurisdiction. He governed Anambra, and he governed it, by common consent, with a competence his critics have never managed to dent with anything better than insinuation. If Mr Umahi’s complaint is that Mr Obi appointed no Ebonyi person while he held office in Awka, then the mirror must be held up: which Anambra men and women did Mr Umahi appoint during his own years in Abakaliki?
The answer is not flattering. It is a matter of record that South-East governors have habitually drawn talent from across Igboland — Orji Uzor Kalu, Sam Egwu, Willie Obiano and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi all did so. Mr Umahi is not in that league. As Informed & Concerned Ebonyi Citizens put it, “his government was a family corporation wearing the borrowed robes of a state administration.”
Then there is the question of his competence to preach at all. Shortly after the 2023 general election, Mr Umahi took to national television to lament that his own family had betrayed him at the polls. He told his interviewer, in remarks widely reported at the time, that while he campaigned up and down the state for his party, every single member of his household — without exception — voted for Peter Obi. His elder brother, retired General Obi Umahi, served as chairman of the security committee of the Peter Obi campaign organisation. Consider that for a moment: a man who could not carry his own sitting room now presumes to instruct an entire state on how to vote.
He also played to the gallery, dredging up the tired grievance of how Ebonyi people were once treated shabbily by the old Anambra. It is worth remembering that Mr Umahi has never, at any point in his life, been from old Anambra. His part of Ebonyi came out of old Imo and old Abia. He is singularly ill-placed to whip up a sentiment to which he has no historical claim whatsoever.
But the deeper point is this: the real enemy of the growth, liberation and advancement of the Ebonyi people — the man who, given every opportunity, took every step to keep the commoner in his place — is Mr Umahi himself. The people of this state have a part of them that has long taken menial work, and past governors fought hard to change that orientation. Sam Egwu was key in that struggle. Martin Elechi did something too. The current governor, Ogbonna Nwifuru, has added a little energy of his own. Mr Umahi, by contrast, deepened the calamity in a hundred different ways.
Education: Between the end of 2018 and early 2019, WAEC withdrew the accreditation of 85 secondary schools in Ebonyi. Even his own commissioner for education could not manufacture a lie when the media came calling. The facilities were substandard; and the reason they were substandard was that Mr Umahi did not employ a single teacher in eight years. Classrooms emptied of qualified staff as teachers retired and were never replaced.
He built not one classroom block in any primary or secondary school in the state. Even Abakaliki, where he was busy throwing up flyovers and water fountains without water, was dotted with public schools whose roofs had long since surrendered to the elements. His own children did not attend school in Ebonyi. Workers went unpaid, so that parents could not find the money to educate their children — while his own were educated far from home. Informed & Concerned Ebonyi Citizens are blunt about it: “Umahi is the enslaver-in-chief of the Ebonyi people.”
He also froze and slashed the monthly subvention paid to the state’s tertiary institutions — Ebonyi State University, the College of Education at Ikwo and others. When he was deputy governor, Governor Martin Elechi sent 47 young Ebonyi people overseas on scholarship, most of them for doctorates. Mr Umahi inherited that programme and abandoned it. Those 47 wrote letter after letter begging for help until they gave up, resigned themselves to fate, and suffered the non-completion of their studies. Promoting education, after all, would have empowered the common people — and that was never the project.
Workers’ rights fared no better. For eight years he appointed no permanent secretaries. The labour unions — even the NLC — were effectively outlawed. No worker knew what his or her salary would be; they were paid whatever the governor felt like paying, and nobody dared complain, because the complaint meant dismissal. That is not the administration. It is serfdom with a state budget attached.
Sport: In the 2018 National Sports Festival held in Abuja between 6 and 16 December, Ebonyi was the only state in the federation that failed to send a contingent. No representation at all. Healthcare tells the same story. He did not build a single ward in any of the 13 secondary hospitals under state government jurisdiction, and he executed no capital project in the sector.
When his own campaign team published a brochure of his achievements in 2019, ahead of his second-term bid, not one education or healthcare facility appeared in it. He had nothing to show because he had nothing to show.
Infrastructure is where his contempt is most visible. Ebonyi North and Central are semi-arid; guinea worms were once a scourge there precisely because water was scarce. Governor Elechi built and completed the modern Oferekpe water scheme, executed by Gilmor Engineering, an Israeli firm of real standing, with the capacity to supply both regions of the state and the capital.
It was handed over ready for use. Mr Umahi — who had been deputy governor when it was conceived — locked it down. He set up a five-man committee to “assess” it; the report was never made public and, for eight years, the completed scheme was never switched on.
Then there is the privatisation of the state for himself and his family. Every white elephant was delivered by direct labour, between him and his siblings. Let him name a single contractor from Ebonyi handled a state project for the purpose of empowering local enterprises. Ninety per cent of the flyovers he built are not in use — including the two in his own village, a kilometre apart.
At Nkalagu Junction, Ezzamgbo Junction, Aba Omege Junction, Amasiri Junction, between Ezzamgbo and Presco, and the two at Uburu which have not seen a vehicle ply them in six years: monuments to vanity, paid for with money that belonged to the poor. He demolished the modern market Elechi built in Abakaliki — a market ironically constructed by his own company, Brass Construction Ltd — declared it substandard, rebuilt it, and named it after his mother. He built a university in his hometown with public resources and named it after himself.
This is the man instructing Ebonyi on how to vote. Ebonyi people are discerning and they know what they want. They voted massively for Mr Obi in 2023, with Mr Umahi sitting in Government House. It took two days to mutilate those results, with the connivance of a middle-aged lecturer from Ebonyi State University who made himself an instrument of criminality, until a false figure was extracted to hand Mr Tinubu his 25 per cent in the state.
Mr Umahi’s power extends to collecting money from the presidency. It does not extend to forcing Ebonyi to vote against its own conscience. The enslaver-in-chief of the Ebonyi common people simply does not possess such powers. He never did.
