Mike Nwachukwu

s Nigerians across the different states rejoice over yet another smooth transition from one set of democratically elected administrations to another, it will be a different sense of celebration in Abia State. On Saturday, May 29, 2015, the good people of the state will sigh in relief in expectation that the siege laid on their state by two newspapers owned by one of their own will be over.

This is because though their outgoing governor, Chief T.A. Orji, has performed to their general satisfaction, this illustrious son of theirs has been unrelenting in using his two newspapers to wage a psychological war on the entire citizenry of the state for choosing to support the governor in its programme of transforming the state.

Although the quarrel between the newspaper mogul and the governor is a personal one, the former used his media prowess to paint the state in very bad light as a place where nothing works. The attacks on the state has been so persistent that but for the fact the Nigerians are familiar with the idiosyncrasy of the newspaper proprietor as a fellow who sees himself as the only shining star in the state, Abia would have since become a pariah.

The proprietary or otherwise of the media siege laid on Abians by one of their own is a topic for another day but the concern today is that even as Abians salute the man they finally refer to as “T.A.” for a job well done, it is difficult for Nigerians who never visited the state in the last eight years to believe that it is not an assemblage of never-do-wells.

Such is the tragedy of a people hitherto seen as among the most discerning and hardworking but now so psychologically battered by one man, impressing it upon them that after him no one else in the state matters.

Still, while this write-up is not necessarily an appraisal of the eight-year tenure of Governor T.A. Orji, its basic objective is to once again draw the attention of Nigerians to what the politics of hate could do to a people, who have in the last eight years collectively worked in one page under the able supervision of T.A.

The emphasis here is on the word, “collective”. For, even as the administration of Governor Orji proved its mettle in trying to improve the lives of Abians through the provision of infrastructural amenities, it will be perhaps most remembered for bringing the good people of the state to work together for their collective good. Anybody familiar with the state before T.A. Orji would easily agree that Abia was fragmented into many tendencies and that there was a complete breakdown of elite consensus.

The administration that preceded that of T.A. preferred to reign over rancor; its political elite virtually decided to dissociate itself from the state while the government of the day fancied itself as a champion of the federal republic instead of seeing to the welfare of the local citizens. But as Chief Orji bows out on May 29, 2015, it is to his eternal credit that Abia has been returned to a place where members of the political class work for a common goal, regardless of partisan differences.

There was this newspaper report some years ago quoting a certain Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and who happens to be an indigene of the state as saying that he never visited the seat of Abia State government throughout the period he served as Minister. The reason, he was quoted, was the overbearing demeanor of the then governor who saw every member of the political elite as a threat and who even tended to abandon his own duties in Umuahia to concern himself (chiefly) with matters of the federation.

But providence threw up Orji who was actually part of the previous dispensation, to correct all that. With the benefits of an insider who witnessed the oddities of the hegemonic dispositions of his then boss, the first thing Orji did was to embark on reconciliatory moves to bring the elite back to the state to work together. That moves paid off handsomely and for eight years running, it has been near total equanimity among the political class.

The first indication is that the ruling party in the state, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became so cohesive under Governor Orji and an example of party decorum. The second indication and perhaps the most significant is that Abia became the only state in the entire South-east, where you could find Senators and Ministers of the state’s origin sitting at the same high table with the governor in a function.

In the neighbouring Enugu and Ebonyi States, which like Abia are all PDP states, the governors and their ministers are hardly in talking terms. In Imo, it is war between the governor and virtually every other member of the political elite. In Anambra state, the fellow who held sway for eight years until last year did it all alone to the extent that he carried his travelling bags himself.

Political scientists all agreed on the point that seventy per cent of governance is made up of intangibles. The intangibles here include attitudes and dispositions such as allowing others to make inputs into governance. Above all, it entails consensus building and ability to ensure a stable polity, where acrimony is reduced to the barest minimum. Chief Theodore Ahamefule Orji, out-going governor of Abia State, scores quite high in this aspect which, on the converse, is where more than 80 per cent of state chief executives in Nigeria scores very lowly.

In agreeing that intangible achievements are very germane to good governance, experts point out that consensus building, which is the most significant outcome of that approach to governance, inevitably leads to the strengthening of government which should be the ultimate aim of democratic governance. In this sense, every successive administration only needs to improve on what the preceding one did with a cumulative effect on the wellbeing of the governed.

Unfortunately, the situation so far in the Nigerian experience is that each new governor comes with a mindset of outshining his predecessor. The first thing a new governor does, in most cases, is to demolish the institutions put in place by his predecessor. Even projects that are more than half way executed are abandoned and entirely new ones began at the expense of