By Paul Onomuakpokpo
When former President
Olusegun Obasanjo described state governors as emperors last year, the gibe at
the messenger tended to dim the message . The riposte was not only from the
supposedly traduced state governors, but also other citizens – he was not qualified
to speak on such a matter because he equally operated as an emperor while he
was a president. Again, continued the reprimand, why would he not consign his
epistolary obsession to the federal level and avoid interfering with the
goings-on in the states?
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| *Some Nigerian Governors |
But we must admit that Obasanjo was only
reminding us that as citizens, we have not demonstrated enough diligence in
monitoring how the states are run because we are preoccupied with the
activities of the government at the centre. After all, it is the reports on
these activities at the federal level that hug the headlines on the front pages
of newspapers. And because we do not pay enough attention to them, these state
governors easily pass as poster boys of good governance. This is the case as
long as these states do not have opposition parties that can let the larger
society know the poor governance that goes on there. Yet, the citizens live in
states where their lives are impacted either positively or negatively by the
performance of their state governments.
Thus, it is necessary for us to be troubled by
the mismanagement and brazen theft of state resources that go on as governance
in most of the states of the federation. In most cases, the governors set up
the states to fail by not allowing council elections so that they can keep on
appointing those who would do their bidding as caretakers and manipulate
elections for them. These caretakers are then sustained by doling out part of
their statutory allocations to them to spend as they like without any question
from the state governors.
