By Ethelbert Okere
This January 15, 2025 makes it exactly five years Senator Hope Uzodimma mounted the saddle of leadership in Imo state. The story surrounding his ascendancy to office is too well known to be repeated here but what nobody would be tired of drumming up is the fact that he has performed quite creditably well as governor in the five years under review. The conventional procedure for authenticating claims like this is to tabulate all the physical evidence: roads, school buildings, water taps, electrical wires hospital building etc and in this regard the researcher would have little or no difficulty. Still, even though Governor Uzodimma has scored quite highly in the provision of physical infrastructure, the latter alone does not paint the whole picture of the capacity of a state chief executive to perform.
As a matter of fact, it has since been established that a governor can, for example, pave the roads in the entire state with gold and still stand accused of lack of capacity. To say the same thing in a different language, capacity to govern goes beyond the provision of physical infrastructure and the good people of Imo state are practical students of this lesson. The last but one chief executive of the state, Rochas Okorocha, littered the landscape of the capital city, Owerri with edifices majority of which were of little or no economic value; but left the state in a deep social and political distress.
Needless to say, what sets the Uzodimma administration aside is that it exhibits a beautiful amalgamation of providing quality physical infrastructure and an uncommon capacity to hold the state together especially when viewed against the backdrop of the extremely debilitating circumstances it took off.
In other words still, most analysts and commentators argue that the provision of physical infrastructure should actually not constitute much of the basis for evaluating the performance of a political administration; since, according to them, “wiring and firing” are the basic minimum below which no government should operate. The more critical areas to consider, they say, is the ability of the governor or president, as the case may be, to, for instance, control his emotions, to empathize, to bring a human face into his assignment, to motivate both the work force and the people generally etc etc.
In appraising Governor Uzodimma’s five years in office, a good guide would be the wise saying that what matters in life is not the height one climbs to but from where he or she started climbing from. Governor Uzodinma took off with nobody to ask question about what was where in the state. By the time he took oath of office on January 15, 2020, Imo had witnessed a cumulative period of eight years during which there were no handover notes. He did not receive any handover note from his immediate predecessors, Chief Emeka Ihedioha, who stayed put in Abuja after the January 14, 2020 Supreme Court ruling. In turn, Ihedioha did not receive a handover note from his predecessor, Rochas Okorocha but he, Ihedioha, had the opportunity of having a transition period of over ninety days, from March 10, 2019, the day he was declared winner of the 2019 governorship election, to May, 29, 2019, the day he was sworn in.
In contrast, Governor Uzodinma did not enjoy the luxury of a transition period unlike each of his predecessors in office from Achike Udenwa to Ihedioha. He was sworn into office just the next day after he was declared the authentic winner of the March 10, 2019 governorship election. Thus, apart from not having an opportunity to pass through transition period as dully provided for by the nation’s constitution, Uzodinma faced the added challenge of carrying the burden of the cumulative effect of lack of handover notes for two consecutive transitions.
What this absence of formal handing over in the state meant was a crass lack of institutional memory on which to set up the new administration, a problem compounded by the fact that Okorocha operated for eight years without documentation, since by his own admission, he did not believe in due process. The resultant effect was that Senator Uzodimma found himself in a situation whereby he had to form a government without records of what was where in the state for a period of twelve years, since the last hand over notes was the one made by Governor Ikedi Ohakim to Okorocha.
The point, therefore, is that the first area Governor Uzodimma scored it big, and perhaps the most significant, is that he was able to take off at all; that is, in spite of having to work with a public service that had no records for twelve years. This is besides the fact that he did not have even one day to ask questions, unlike his predecessors who had transition periods during which they put things together before plunging, head on, into the difficult art of governance. That was a feat perhaps far more significant than the construction of roads and other forms of edifices. Such a situation was capable of making even the most determined governor-elect to step out the wrong foot right from the first day.
The second feat was in successfully battling the covid-19 pandemic which broke out as soon as he assumed office in January 2020. Unlike the other twenty eight or so governors who had put in over seven months in office before the outbreak, Governor Uzodimma was not given a breathing moment by the debilitating and devastating effects of the pandemic especially the abysmal drop in revenue accruable to government, both at the federal and state levels. Yet, there were the lives of over five million people to protect from the deadly virus.
Cursorily, the opposition in the state saw the pandemic as a handy weapon with which to begin a fight with the governor. It cooked up stories with which it fed the media, especially the social media, to the effect that Governor Uzodimma was deliberately not talking enough measures to protect the people of the state from the pandemic. At a point, some elements of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) came up with a “fake news,” accusing the governor of smuggling into the state “fake” Chinese medical experts whom the federal government had earlier rejected!
Such was the type of challenges Uzodimma faced barely a month after assuming office. This, coupled with the big problem of grossly inadequate revenue earnings, whether from the federation account or from internally generated sources, made matters extremely difficult for the new governor. Yet, Imo recorded one in the lowest cases of the COVID-19 pandemic by the time it receded several months later.
The third early feat was the contrived security crises. At the fit of anger over the January 14, 2020 Supreme Court ruling, some key elements in the ousted PDP administration made a declaration to the effect that they were going to make the state “ungovernable” for Uzodimma.
Initially, it was taken as one of those “empty” boasts but little did the governor good people of Imo state realize that they were dead serious. Even though it is practically impossible to make a state “ungovernable” even for a weakling, and despite the fact that that crop of politicians did not have what it takes to make good their threat, later events showed that they did all they could to achieve their objective.
Since details of security breaches and those involved are usually highly guarded from the public, the state government under Senator Uzodimma was highly circumscribed from disclosing details of the plots and those involved to the people. At a point, however, the governor at a stakeholders meeting promised the people that he was going to name names but he was severely constrained by the fact that, strictly and legally speaking, such disclosures are the prerogatives of the security agencies. Yet, even the deaf could hear some of the opposition elements cheering the criminal elements each time they struck; and there were many such instances.
Each time the “unknown” gunmen went on rampage, the PDP hierarch would quickly issue a statement to rationalize the attacks, which they glibly attributed to a proof of the people’s anger over the “imposition” of Senator Uzodimma on them as their governor. But it was a huge blackmail on the peace-loving people of Imo state who had absolutely no hand in those sordid episodes. It was the height of perfidy on the part of the PDP party leaders. The Supreme Court ruling that made way for Senator Uzodimma’s ascendancy to the office of the governor of Imo state was given more than seven clear months before the spate of killings and destructions in the state. Granted that not every Imolite was happy with the ruling, there was no single record of protests, either peaceful or violent, save a half-hearted, make believe one staged in faraway Abuja by some protégés of the ousted governor. The question then was, why did it take the people so long to begin to protest if their problem was the Supreme Court ruling.
However, contrary to the expectations of the anti-people elements to smoke out Governor Uzodimma for a fight, he remained calm but resilient. There was not a single case of harassment – either by design or default – of these elements. By nature, Hope Uzodimma is a tolerant and accommodating fellow, who is not easily distracted. He has the rare gift of remaining calm even at the height of provocations. In the five years under review, what the peace-loving people of Imo state are witnessing is the direct outcome of those God-given attributes.
The situation was perhaps the most vivid illustration of the Biblical story of the two harlots and a child. While the fake mother wanted the child to be divided into two and shared between her and the real mother, the latter refused because she didn’t want her child to die.
This metaphor can be applied to illustrate the fact that those who lost out in the power game in 2020 wanted the state destroyed rather than accept their fate. Hence, their consistent antic of trying to provoke the governor into taking precipitate actions that might have resulted in a huge conflagration. But Governor Uzodimma beat them to their own game. He realized that regardless of the provocations, he owed the people the duty to maintain peace in the state.
Thus, even though the governor tactically approached the federal authorities to come to the aide of the state by provoking it with more security personnel and materials, it was basically his personal charisma and natural disposition to peace that saw the entire state through that turbulent period. Agreed, some parts of the state are still vulnerable to the nefarious activities of criminal elements, but Imo state is today generally calm and peaceful compared with the situation in the first years of the Uzodimma administration.
The point, therefore, is that beyond the giant strides his administration has made on infrastructural facilities, this singular capacity to hold the state together in the face of a fierce determination to make it “ungovernable”, is the biggest collective accomplishment of the government and people of Imo state under the watch of Senator Hope Odidika Uzodimma in the last five years.
Governance experts have since established that over 70 per cent of good governance is derived from the intangible. In the preceding paragraphs, it has been established that Governor Uzodimma scored very highly in that area. Of the 70 per cent on the intangible, Governor Uzodimma, going by what we have seen above, scores a comfortable 60 per cent. Of the about 30 per cent that comes from the tangible, the governor is comfortably scored about 25 per cent. So, if we add 60 per cent of the 70 on the intangible to the 25 per cent of the 30 per cent of the tangible, we have a whopping 85 per cent; which means that Imo state, under the watch of His Excellency, Senator Hope Uzodimma, is sitting pretty on an 85 per cent good governance index.
It would be incomplete to end this segment of this two-part essay without interrogating the aspect concerning the state’s civil and public service. As already noted, the Imo state public service was ran for eight years without records. As a matter of fact, civil servants in the state were left idle while hired consultants took over the job of the top professionals in the system. At a stage, civil servants, during the Okorocha era, were asked to report for duties only three times in a week and those who failed to obey were punished, to say nothing of the fact that workers were paid between 50 and 70 per cent of their normal salaries.
Although Okorocha’s successor was apparently determined to bring about a change, he did not have enough time to do much. The over result was that Governor Uzodimma, upon assumption of office, met a civil service that was very low in morale. But realizing that the public service would serve as the engine room for the actualization of his Shared Prosperity Agenda, he promptly went into action to re-energize it. He immediately gave directives for the purchase and delivery of thirty Hyundia 32-seater buses to facilitate the daily movement of workers under the Free Staff Mass Transit Scheme. Twenty two brand new salon cars were also purchased and distributed to all Permanent Secretaries.
But by far the most spectacular was the introduction of biometric verifications which enabled the digital capture of relevant data of all personnel and the computerization and automation of the emolument process under a centrally controlled system. Even though it took a few months for the salary automation system to be put in place, it paid off handsomely at the end. For not long after, delays in the payment of salaries became a thing of the past and have remained so till date. Of course, the introduction of a centralized computerized staff emolument system put an end to the perennial issue of ghost workers which had ravaged the public service for several years. (To Be Continued)
