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•Past govts looted Benue dry
By lukman Olabiyi
Benue State governor, Rev Father Hyacinth Alia has opened up on how the electorate in the state, which is dominated by Christians, was convinced to vote for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket at the last presidential poll.
The governor also gave graphic details of how some of his predecessors looted the state’s resources for many years before he came on board.
Rev, Father Alia, who had been a priest for 33 years before joining politics, dismissed insinuations that he is at loggerheads with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Senator George Akume. He gave reasons for putting off his priest’s cassock for the politician’s attire, saying he’s on a rescue mission to save the soul of Benue State and its masses.
What informed your decision to dump the priesthood and join politics?
Many people have asked the same question. And the one that thrilled me most was from Governor Soludo. You know, I never sleep on a single day without thinking about this; why did you put off the cassock momentarily to get into the headache of governance? How does it feel as one in cassock now into social civil governance? The answer to me is quite simple. You know the church generally has an aim and goal, and the goal is to save souls. The church does not want people to be lost. The duty of the church is to have everyone safe. The aim of my coming into partisan politics deals with that as well; I came in to save the soul of Benue; I came in to save the poor masses of Benue. Before my advent into partisan politics, too many things were wrong. I’ve lived my life as a functional priest in the last 33 years with my locals. Went to school, came back. I have been in the trenches with them, and the people I loved working for were the destitute, the poor masses, those who do not have a voice in society; those who were neglected and suppressed. When you are preaching the gospel, these are the primary things you must do. God does not want them to be lost, to be forgotten, abandoned in society. These are the people I felt should be taken care of.
The state generally was in a pitiable state. For years, local government teachers were totally forgotten, pensioners were described as dead people; they were never remembered anymore, their entitlements were not paid for months, for years. I felt their pains. I had that at the back of my mind.
Again, since the creation of the state, it has been a glorified village. We didn’t even have lights on the streets in the state capital. It is now that we are trying to construct internal roads because our internal roads were minimally tarred. You come into the state capital, Makurdi, and it is like you come into a village. I felt a number of things were missing, and so, there was a need for me to come and get things right.
The church is not against her priests joining partisan politics. Where it is a case of plurality of parties, the church will hold her reservations but at the same time, there is a leeway that if the church judges that the society is too dysfunctional and that the only person to salvage the situation is a priest, then, someone can spring up via the church to save the rest of the people.
Not many people understand this, and this is why I had to come in and save the souls. We have to take care of the human beings that are out there. We have good numbers of vulnerable in our state; some primary schools are no longer functional. We need to fight for the future of Benue, which is like fighting for democracy.
Today, we are talking about food insecurity. If we do not have social and civil security, we will not have food security. These are concerning. When we fight for democracy, then, we are fighting for food security because farmers are on the farm, and the government is making its input, giving the farmers the necessary support and encouraging them to do mechanized farming.
You know, Benue was number one in several things not just in the production of yams but in the production of soya beans. So, we need to get back to this. I came to save the soul of the poor masses of the state. I came in to assure them that God loves them and that God loves them through democracy so that they can understand they and their children hold the future.
So, I came in for the state to have the fullness of democracy and the fullness of life.
So what difference have you made?
I declared a state of emergency on our infrastructure. Our primary schools are down, and as I speak, we have done so much to get rid of ghost schools. Benue had more ghost schools than the existing functional schools.
Also, Benue had more ghost workers. For instance, we had a ghost school that had 95 teachers, and the least teacher on the staff was Grade Level 10, which has been there for a very long time. Just imagine how much the state lost educationally. What we did in the first month was to save N1 billion, and in the second month of our coming on board, we saved close to N3 billion from ghost workers.
We then shifted to the civil service where we saw some other things. The state nearly had more casual staff than more permanent staff. We had to weed out some of them, and it is just now that we are coming to terms with reality. We need to recruit, we need to have the best hands at this recruitment and that is what we are doing. A number of places did not even have workers. Like the Ministry of Works, the entire staff was not even up to 10, but salaries were being paid to large numbers. So, we introduced policy meritocracy which was how we fine-tuned the system to work. Having understudied all these in the last nine to ten months, a huge amount of money has been saved.
In terms of infrastructure, we are an agrarian state, and over 80 per cent of the people here are farmers, but unfortunately, they were never incentivized to be the best they could be on the farms.
So, we set out to do the roads that could lead from their farms to the market squares and back here to the centre. We did 16 roads in Makurdi, and we are going to announce some 31 roads within the Makurdi township streets in a few days. At the same time, other contractors are working on rural roads across the state where we have most of our food production because that is where we want the impact to be first felt.
There are talks that you give contractors 70 per cent up front, but what is the guarantee that they will complete the job having received that much?
Well, it is not that we paid 70 per cent to contractor, the 70 per cent that was approved by the executive to be giving the contractors is by instalments and it is because of the inflation. Some of these contracts were not first awarded by this administration but I can assure you that all those contractors who collected money without executing the project will be brought to book.
With the current state of insecurity across the country, how are you handling state police?
Before we were ushered in on May 29, 2023, the security reports on our insecurity were horrible, and it is also on record that you heard that hundreds of lives were lost in one local government. Before you took that to heart, you heard of another one. We had tons of these deaths on our hands, but since we came in, it is on record that there has been relative peace. How do we know the indices? By the same security apparatus that we have and by the reports we get from our vigilantes, livestock guards, forest guards, and other security apparatus who are working in sync with most of our people. By the situation report we receive every day, we can measure that. Overall, we have relative peace, but at the same time, relative peace does not mean we have absolute peace.
We have had skirmishes of attacks. Of late, we had a large number of influxes of armed herders in some local government areas of the state. These local governments are prone to insecurity because they share borders with other states. By and large, why we have relative peace, the skirmishes are there, now and then you hear of issues between the armed herders and the farmers. It becomes quite troubling now because this is the farming season. Those local governments in the frontline of attacks and insecurity had also experienced calm, but it is not the calm they wish for, it is not the calm I pray for either. I thank the Federal Government that has been helping us so much to ensure that peace is restored in those local governments. More troubling is the fact that what we are realising now is the involvement of banditry and unknown gunmen. Remember, we have traditional herders; they have lived with us all through, and we know them; they know us; they mingle with us. In fact, they are the ones who have even identified other groups, the armed herders. They assist us in sending them back from where they came from. About three, four weeks ago, we made a moratorium on the influx, so, we made people understand that armed herders came in from somewhere and they should go, that our land is made for our agriculture.
There is some other thing that needs to be addressed. Before now, Federal Government has routes where herders went through to the south to graze and to do their trade. But with the increase in our population, that has been violated. Most of our farmland has also been encroached upon by the increment in the population so, we are yet to address that as a people. The routes are no longer existing. This made it possible for herders and the armed herders to invade farms. They invade farms, destroy them, and attack the owners if they resist or raise alarm. Their trade should not be a violation of other peoples’ trade. You know Benue people are very law-abiding people, so, once we get rid of these bandits and unknown gunmen, our people will be able to get back to their farmland. Because of this, we have a lot of IDP camps in the state. The people did not bargain for their farmlands to be taken over by the armed herders and then now by the unknown gunmen. It is highly unacceptable. The Federal Government is trying. We are with them as well, trying to get our people back to their various farmlands so that we get rid of food insecurity.
Why do you think some members of your party are against your administration?
Well, in every administration, you expect those who will oppose you. I came in with a plan to rebuild our state. Some people do best when there is a crisis, and there are some political leaders who dug a hole and kept everyone in the state down there, and they don’t want anyone to see the light of day. There was no infrastructure, and no one knew where the monies given to the state were going to. They did not better anyone’s lives; they took care of their families. We have a conscience and we want a report card that we can present to the people. So, if a select few say they are in charge of the state and that before development comes, they must know when FAAC allocations comes and it must be given to them first before considering any projects for the poor masses. Who does that?
The people brought me to the seat, and they ensured that I presented to them the merits of democracy. They voted me on trust. Remember what we are talking about then, on the issue of Muslim/Muslim ticket and it seems impossible. Benue State is the most populated Christian state, how come we can tell them that it is not about the Muslim/Muslim ticket but it is about the person? Something endeared me to our current president, Ahmed Bola Tinubu. Something made me close to him, his ideology; we are talking about someone who built human capacity, we are talking about someone who saw tomorrow. Tinubu saw tomorrow, he fixed Lagos, I was so pleased to hear Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu mention that it was the master plan that was done way back during Tinubu that they are still acting on till today. That is the kind of Benue I pray for. Let all political gladiators come up with ideologies and not dysfunctionality, not developing insatiable appetite to consume everyone by taking all the money. That wouldn’t work.
We were created in 1976. Where are we? Other states have gone ahead of us. See Nasarawa here; Lafia the capital city was a village then, Makurdi had already existed before it, where are we? Every place in Lafia is lit up, structures have come up so, I have my character and reputation, I came into this game with a defined intention to work with the people and work for the people and accommodate everyone. That is what we will continue to do because, at the end of it all, I am going to be responsible for everything. So, for those who want every money to be packed and given to them, it’s not going to be possible. We have been doing that in the past but where are we now? How can you keep doing one thing all the time and expect a different result? So, I feel it is just the high time everyone gets on board with me. I am for the people, with the people, and working for them. They did not just give me their trust, this is a very serious social contract, they trusted me and I take it seriously. You have no idea when something changes in you, ask any governor, when you are taking that oath, to protect lives and the property, and then to ensure that social justice is done, to be fair to everyone, and then you say so God help me, it is deep. I am not denying the understanding of what we should do by taking care of our statesmen. We have been doing that. I think there has to be a better understanding, people voted for us, and I convinced the entire people of Benue state that Tinubu would come to support me to build our schools, to pay salary, to build roads, to take care of pensioners. Check our track records, under 10 months, what we have done, I have hanging on my head and Benue indigenes a huge debt that my predecessor left behind. You hear the so-called gladiators throwing jabs at each other on social media over allegations of corruption, I think I know better and I should be very decent than throwing similar jabs.
As much as I agree that there should be opposition, our party, APC defeated the opposition. I expect that opposition to be making noise in some corner. But what troubles me are some three individuals who want to be called the APC members in Benue State and who want all the funds in the state to be handed over to them. How can we function? We are envious of other states that are functioning very well, states whose IGR is increasing, states that are building a number of things. So, if we did not put up all the lights in town now, you came here from 6 o’clock and you met a graveyard, no light, no nothing. Makurdi stands at the centre, we have people travelling from the north to the south, and they stay over here so why can’t we make our state lively? I feel that if we consider the masses, we would have a more stable party and democracy. For the record, so far, the APC is doing well in the state, and we will continue on that path.
What’s going on between you and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Senator George Akume? And what about the court cases involving your party members?
For the record, I never took the APC to court. Those who are working for the APC in the state have not taken the party to court. Let that be clear. I am not distracted in any form or fashion because I came in to do the bidding of the party and, above all, the people. We are executing that script, so there are no distractions whatsoever, and that is why I am doing the work I am doing.
In some places, you hear people calling me Mr. 25th because their salaries are coming in by then, so from the 22nd, Benue State civil servants know they have to warn up for their salaries, from 23, 24, salaries must be paid. By 25, I don’t want to hear that salaries and pensions are yet to be paid because specific time is given. People need to understand the stability of governance. They worked for it, they earned it, and why should we keep their money?
As regards my relationship with the SGF, Senator George Akume, for the records, I don’t have any differences with him. He was the leader of the APC in the state, and he ensured that everything was done for me to win. And we won. There is no way I will talk ill of him or even complain. He was the one encouraging me to break all the records of my predecessor.
I am also happy when I read that Akume says he has no problem with me. We don’t have issues. But then, it is granted that social media is a new world on its own where some miscreants flourish there.
There is agitation by the NLC over the new minimum wage. Is Benue State prepared to key into the new minimum wage?
Yes, we are prepared. As one of the sub-nationals, why can’t we be in sync with what the entire nation is doing? We must, and I am prepared to go for that. Once the minimum wage is agreed upon, we must also follow.
So far, so good. Salaries are being paid; we are doing well with the payment of pensions, their lives are back, and I am willing to do some more for them.
