The ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) have traded words over the performance of the Benue State Governor in his first 100 days in office.
While the PDP said it saw the performance of the Hyacinth Alia-led government thus far as a fusion of emptiness and disappointment, the APC said the governor’s performance has been credible.
According to the Benue State Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Bemgba Iortyom, it is an incontrovertible fact that Alia has achieved the worst take-off in office of any governor of the state, both military and civilian, since its creation in 1976.
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He said PDP’s assessment of Governor Alia’s performance derives from the template of promises he made during the campaigns and after he assumed office, chiefly which were to return persons displaced by herdsmen, genocide (IDPs) back to their ancestral lands as well as to clear arrears of salaries and pensions to workers and retirees, all within his first 100 days in office.
“Not only has the governor failed to make good on any of those promises, he has evidently not even considered them a priority since their pronouncement,” he said.
“If Governor Alia has achieved anything in his first 100 days in office, it is, perhaps a counterintuitive manner of governance which has seen him lock up all government financial accounts, giving as his alibi a fear of “hyenas and hawks” whom he says are waiting to devour the contents of those accounts.”
“Yet himself has been drawing from the same accounts since he is possibly a ‘lamb and dove’ who won’t touch the funds even as he administers them without the institutional supervision prescribed by law.”
He said if there must be anything ascribed to governor Hyacinth Alia as performance track record in his first 100 days in office, it will most likely be a disregard for due process and the rule of law which has brought upon his regime an avalanche of court cases from parties injured through his serial infractions of the law.
PDP called on the governor to wrap his head around the fact that he has a date with history, no matter how short his time in office might likely be, and put in place a legacy which can only be in the form of governance that will positively impact the lives of the people, and not the ostentation and vendetta which so far is his trademark.
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However, in his reaction to PDP statement and its 100 days in office, the APC said as practicing democratic trend in the states, successive administrations have always made it necessary to identify and give accounts of their stewardships in the governance and administration of Benue State.
The Special Adviser to the Benue State governor,Mkor Aondona said the administration of Alia has a lot to account for in his first 100 hundred days in office.
He said it will be recalled that at the instance of his acceptance speech as the duly elected sixth democratically elected Governor of Benue State, Alia highlighted his immediate priorities, among other fundamental objectives, to include the immediate payment of salaries and arrears of civil servants owed by the immediate past administration of former Governor Samuel Ortom.
He also identified the return of internally displaced persons back to their ancestral homes in Benue State as part of his cogent priorities.
He reeled out the governor’s achievement to include the immediate payments of salaries and accumulated arrears of Benue State civil servants owed by the Ortom administration which he said included the payment of pensions and gratuities to retirees in Benue state civil service.
Mkor reviewed that the construction of 16 roads in the Makurdi metropolis of Benue state was awarded and works will commence soon.
“Bearing in mind the aggravated rot of the township roads in the state capital as abandoned by the past PDP government.
Editor Paul Akhagbemhe
