By
Mark Adebayo
“Remember, there are always two sides to every story. Understanding is a three-edged sword. Your side, their side and the truth in the middle”
– J. Michael Straczynski
Default assumptions are integrant to the single story phenomenon. As the saying goes, don’t keep quiet if you know the truth. That’s what informs this article.
Straight up, I want to say that Yahaya Bello has been an arbitrary victim of the single story paradox, and there are contingent variables that actuated the hostile media profiling of Yahaya Bello from Day One in office as Kogi State Governor in 2016. I will attempt a thematic disaggregation of the tangibles in this short article.
Yahaya Bello’s emergence as the Executive Governor of Kogi State was against the run of play, if you will. It was an improbable imponderable. It was an unprecedented political contingency since the return of democracy to Nigeria in 1999.
Yahaya Bello had contested the governorship primary of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in 2015 and came second to the eventual candidate of the Party, Prince Abubakar Audu, who was coasting to victory unhindered during the governorship election proper but then, the hands of fate struck.
While the process was nearing conclusion and his victory was hours from being affirmed by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prince Abubakar Audu kicked the bucket!
Kogi State was thrown into palpable confusion, moreso his Party, the APC. To the layman’s mentality and public expectation, it was assumed, albeit peremptorily by many that, Prince Abubakar Audu’s running mate, Honorable James Faleke, was naturally to benefit from the sudden hiatus created by the irreversible verdict of fate. But the APC leadership opted for the constitutional provision that states, unequivocally, that in the event that the main candidate of a Party is unable to compete or complete the electoral process, the one who comes second during the Party’s primary automatically steps in to complete the process as the Party’s candidate.
Not a little controversy was generated when the APC chose to toe this path of the law rather than follow popular assumptions. Yahaya Bello it was who had come second at the Party’s primary and was the one the Party’s leadership settled for to occupy the vacancy created by the sudden demise of the Party’s candidate. Naturally, a lot of people, most especially Honorable Faleke’s camp, kicked vehemently against this decision of the Party and all manners of threats were issued. The situation became so volatile that some people openly declared that such a decision would never stand and vowed to do anything and everything to ensure that Bello had no peace nor a place to enjoy his bestowed mandate.
From that moment on, Yahaya Bello became a target for bad media. No matter what he did, he was always going to be the twin brother of the devil himself. He was forever cast in the light of a usurper who must be satanised even if he acted angelically. Nothing can be good about him. Nothing good must be seen, heard or spoken about him. He was marked for negativity perpetually.
Shortly before Yahaya Bello assumed office as the Executive Governor of Kogi State in January 2016, snippets of security reports suggested that two formidable terrorist organizations, the Islamic State of West African Province, ISWAP, had decided it was moving into the North Central Zone of Nigeria and had chosen Kogi State as their critical operational base. They already set up Forward Operating Bases in bushes around the state at strategic locations. The fact that Kogi State’s status as the confluence state bordered by about nine states and the major gateway between the North and the South of Nigeria places it at a strategic advantage for the terrorists to lumber Nigerians with maximum horror. Kogi is always a busy thoroughfare for most travelers in Nigeria 247.
A thriving terrorist campaign in that corridor meant a jugular hold on a significant percentage of Nigeria’s commerce and inter-regional movements. For one, food supplies to the South from the North and, vice-versa, fuel and cargo to the North would have suffered unmitigatable disruptions. GYB, as he is fondly called, attacked that menace head-on. He set up a formidable security network of the military, police, paramilitary agencies and local hunters who uprooted ISWAP’s FOBs, got rid of local warlords and political thugs who had hitherto held the state to ransom. In all of these operations, he led from the front following operatives into bushes and thick forests to command their operations. Even though a civilian, GYB played his role well as the chief security officer of his state. For this, also, he made enemies. Formidable enemies. The godfathers of the thugs and sponsors of terrorism in high places both in and outside government in Lokoja and Abuja saw him as a threat to their evil scheme and decided to unleash relentless bad press on him. To a large extent, they succeeded in making the gullible buy their trash misinformation about the White Lion. His political opponents recruited unscrupulous civil servants to do havocs as much as possible. Bad news travels faster and wider and easily believed peremptorily by the public.
While he remained focused on governance with unequaled capacity, he also had ravenous wolves of distraction to contend with.
His political foes multiplied when he dared to declare interest in running for the office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. His audacity to run for that office was an affront to the sensibilities of Nigeria’s power cultists who feel permanently entitled to govern Nigeria or decide who does. He was seen as a threat to the political status quo of political oligopoly in the country which has dynasticized political ascendancy in Nigeria. It was a deeds derring-do that the power cliques found minacious to their iron curtain against outliers in the political scheme of things.
He started systematically and sure-footed, marching across the country and garnered significant youth following nationwide. He became a darling of the media. He broke intergenerational barriers by reaching across board appealing to all shades of opinion which consolidated his place as a formidable political force of reckon. He was henceforth put in the crosshairs of political victimization by power and ethnic hawks who were determined to sunder his rising political profile.
Now, they have managed to instigate a bodeful series of allegations against him bordering on corruption and unleashed the antigraft agency, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on him like a pack baying for blood.
One element of these puzzling allegations is that Yahaya Bello stole over Eighty Billion Naira first in 2015 before he became Governor but later amended to 2016 that within two months of assuming office as Governor of Kogi State the said amount was misappropriated. This is curious in the sense that available records have shown that the financial profile of Kogi State as at the time Yahaya Bello took over as Governor in January 2016 was less than ten billion Naira – some sources say less than five billion Naira.
It is even more backasswards to allege that an amount to the tune of N80. 246 billion was stolen from a total annual budget of 99.9 billion Naira for the fiscal year 2016. They might as well say that the Governor pocketed the entire budget. It is as ridiculous as they come.
The germane questions to ask here are, wouldn’t the state have collapsed irretrievably had the entire been stolen? How did the state manage to survive in 2016 if the Governor had pocketed the whole budget? How come all the state’s institutions and agencies functioned throughout that year? Those who concocted those allegations must be extreme duffers in the practice framing people up on phantom allegations.
However, in the scheme of political victimization and ethnic profiling as this Yahaya Bello case has assumed, there is no limit to the amount of laughable and untenable allegations that cannot be raised. The target has always been, “get him at all costs”.
When you see state institutions ride roughshod over the rule of law and established rules of engagement to go after an individual and breaking all known legal protocols, it is not farfetched to understand that whatever shenanigans playing out is not about the subject matter being canvassed publicly.
We have seen how all the reliefs sought and granted by a Kogi State High Court have been disobeyed, disrespected and violated by the EFCC after another Court of coordinate jurisdiction decided to act against established rules to rule in a manner vacating the orders lawfully dispensed by another Court of law that it is not superior to.
But when the judiciary is fraudulently seconded to serve political interests, the scales of justice are tilted awkwardly to achieve a predetermined end.
In simple truth, this is what the Yahaya Bello versus EFCC brouhaha is all about and our democracy and criminal justice system are on trial here. On many fronts in recent months, the judiciary seems to be shooting itself on the foot thereby compromising the sacredness of its identity. If it’s not Kano emirate crises, it is untenable corruption allegations in Kogi State and elsewhere.
Those who currently manage Nigeria’s affairs at the highest levels must realize that when they weaken state institutions and break rules for the sake of bringing an individual considered a political enemy down, what they are doing is digging the grave of democracy itself.
This is dangerous.
Very dangerous!
ADEBAYO SENT THIS FROM LAGOS
