Ray Edmund Oche
I read with considerable amazement Emmanuel Onwubiko’s fiery dart titled “Bala Mohammed’s blame game”. In that write-up, Onwubiko, a renowned human rights activist, allowed sentiments to becloud his sense of reasoning as he failed to see any redeeming feature in Bala’s relentless quest to give Abuja a face-lift and leave it better than he met it.
Hiding under the canopy of his column ‘RIGHTS WATCH’, Emmanuel Onwubiko, for reasons best known to him and in a manner akin to giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it, elected to tar the Federal Capital Territory minister with the unkind brush of a woeful failure par excellence! From all intents and purposes, the article was a premeditated hatchet man’s job aimed at driving a wedge between Bala and his principal and to also set Nigerians against him. Happily enough, he failed on both counts.
In as much as one would agree with Onwubiko that Nigeria has her fair share of “unpatriotic political office holders and official looters of public fund’’, however, I beg to disagree with his sweeping generalization that all Nigerian public office holders are treasury looters. Flipping through the pages of his stewardship as minister of the nation’s capital city, Bala Mohammed has consistently proven that even in the midst of this maddening crowd, one can still hold his head high above the waters.
It beats my imagination that Onwubiko is not aware that at every weekly management meeting held at his Gwarimpa official residence in Abuja, the minister has always been vociferous in hectoring all heads of agencies in the territory nay his aides to be perpetually on their toes in discharging their assignments to the extent that those found wanting have either been shown the way out of service or severely reprimanded. And with this exemplary leadership style, Bala has succeeded to a great extent in not only repositioning but also reengineering FCT to the admiration of many.
It is in the light of this reality that I also found highly objectionable Onwubiko’s uncharitable comment that “Bala Mohammed’s assumption of office and his ministerial activities over the past two or so years have been uneventful except for the bad reason that Abuja city has taken the back bench as the dirtiest city in Africa even as infrastructure and other social essential services have all gone dead or near moribund”.
Equally worrisome is the author’s description of Bala as a “non-performing minister of Abuja even as residents mourn the demise of good governance in the capital territory since this Bauchi state born maverick politician who is rumoured to be seriously nursing the ambition to be elected the governor of Bauchi state in 2015”. Contrary to Onwubiko’s statement, Bala has indeed performed creditably and justified the confidence reposed in him by his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan. We shall outline some of his achievements shortly.
It is now an open secret that where Bala erred in the judgment of his traducers is his principled stance against all forms of ‘’business as usual’’, which some of them like Onwubiko found irksome because it has denied them of reaping where they have not sown.
When Bala took over in 2010, he met FCTA lying prostrate like an abandoned hut. Bala’s efforts at freeing FCT have driven a spike into some hearts, thus creating bad blood between the minister and them.
Some of the minister’s achievements, which Onwubiko has refused to acknowledge, include re-organization, repositioning and digitalization of FCT Land Administration, which have made it possible for several cases of double and multiple land allocation to be resolved; similarly, the Abuja light-rail and the Abuja – Kaduna railway projects, which if completed is expected to transport about 700,000 passengers daily; reconstruction and expansion of the country’s most modern 10-lane multiple carriage super highways: the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (Airport Road) Expressway, and the Outer Northern (Murtala Muhammed) Expressway otherwise known as the Zuba/Kubwa/City Centre highway, as well as the dualization of the Nyanya-Abuja Expressway, all of which have attained 90% completion level.
Others are: Resurfacing/Reconstruction of aging Roads in Garki 1 and Wuse 1 Districts; completion and commissioning of major interchanges (overhead bridges) at AYA, Asokoro, Banex Junction-Jahi/Mabushi link, Karimo/Utako and Gwarinpa II – Kado/Life Camp Junction; expansion of Kuje-Gwagwalada; Gitata bypass; Karshi – Apo bypass; Sunrise – Guzape bypass; Gwagwalada-Dobi connection and the Bwari Township roads projects; the nearly 1000 percent completed Gurara-Lower Usman Dam road that connects the FCT with Kaduna State at Jere; completion of work on Tanks 1 and 6 with 40, 000 cubic centimeters storage capacity; attraction of foreign and local investments, totaling over $20 billion, among others.
The question is: Does Onwubiko need binoculars to see and appreciate all these achievements? What Bala has been saying loud and clear since he took over as minister is that the time has come to sanitize an FCTA that had obviously been ‘satanized’ by some elements that see the place as a goldmine to be plundered at will, regardless of its strategic position in the nation’s affairs. Under these circumstances, people like Onwubiko should be seen to be supporting the minister in his redemption agenda instead of playing to the gallery.
Oche wrote from Abuja.
