Unproportional Development In A State Deserves No Applause, And Guarantees No Second Tenure.

Unproportional Development In A State Deserves No Applause, And Guarantees No Second Tenure.
Monday (Orie) 28-04-2025.

Integrity and transparency are essential ingredients of constitutional democracy. The two ingredients give value and justification to democracy.

Integrity and transparency guarantee proportional development in any given society. Proportional development leads to a multi-sectoral growth.

Of course, proportional development implies a quantifiable growth rate that is commensurate to resources available to an authority that presides over the affairs of a State or any other human society, at any given time.

Since the emergence Most Distinguished Senator Bola Ahmed tinubu on May 29th, 2023 as President of Nigeria, and his spontaneous courageous removal of the corrupt regime of Fuel Subsidy, State Governments have had their fiscal allocations tripled, if not even quadrupled. A State like Abia, for instance, that previously hardly received more than Three Billion Naira as monthly allocation, currently receives about Twenty Billion Naira on a monthly basis.

Despite the much talked about inflation in Nigeria, inflationary rate in Nigeria has never exceeded 0.22% since the emergence of President Tinubu.

According to National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, inflation has decreased by, at least, 10.32 percentage point. The above decrease was arrived at in juxtaposition with Consumer Price Index, CPI.

Apart from the unprecedented humongous monthly allocations from the Federation Account Allocation Committee, FAAC, smart State Governments make huge revenues from their internal sources. This is more in a State that operates a Treasury Single Account, TSA, and every money paid in the State goes into a dedicated bank account that the State Governor is a principal signatory to, and is the only signatory that receives alerts of transactions made on the said account.

In such a State, development should not be anything less than quadruple, compared with what it was during the Buhari Administration that allowed Nigerian Citizens to be emasculated by the corrupt regime of Fuel Subsidy.

If in such a State the Governor hates empowerment of the youths of the State, as Special Advisers, Senior Special Assistants, Special Assistants, and Personal Assistants to the Governor, as it was the case in a previous Administration, then there should be visible windows of substantial development in the State, even though 90% of the youths of the State are left unemployed and uncared for.

If the Governor of such a State had unilaterally and unlawfully cancelled Electoral Wards duly created by the State’s Independent Electoral Commission, SIEC, and, by so doing, had unwarrantedly defeated the good essence of such creation which was to deepen democracy in the grassroots and, thereby, create windows of of both direct and indirect opportunities for employment of the teeming unemployed youths which triggers economic activities and development, much development strides should be expected from such a Governor, as he holds all monies meant for such purposes.

Despite President Tinubu’s insistence that Local Government Councils should receive their fiscal allocations direct from Federation Account Allocation Committee, some State Governors have sworn that that will never happen while they are in charge. They have succeeded in coercing their stooges they planted as Local Government Chairmen to be surrendering the Allocations to the State Governments. To add salt to injury, some of the State Governors have greedily dispossessed the Local Government Councils of their constitutionally stipulated revenue items. That is why there is no iota of development in majority of the Local Government Areas. It is also said that in some States, the Governor, after releasing money for paying salaries of Local Government Council Staff, only gives a paltry sum of One Million and Five Hundred Thousand Naira to his lackeys, the Council Chairmen that he unconstitutionally refers to as Mayors, to manage the affairs of a whole Third Tier Government. In any State where such is the Situation, development should not just be quadruple but decuple.

In a State where transparency has been forced to be opaque, and a State Governor falsely and deceitfully claims to have invested huge amounts of money on invisible projects, running into Billions of Naira, it is indicative of high level of corruption and fraud.

In 2027, many indices will be put on a scale of balance to determine the suitability of any present first term Governor that may be craving for an undeserved second tenure.
A Governor that calls every other person a ‘rogue’ yet had opened a Bank in anticipation of being elected as Governor in 2023, with the Bank having only One Branch before his election but today has astronomically multiplied to Twelve Branches nation wide, should be counting his days as Governor, as giving such a corrupt, fraudulent and deceitful Governor a second chance will bring out the worst element of dishonesty, corruption, fraud, hostility and brutality in him.

Equity Global Reporters Ltd.