February 21, (THEWILL) – The countdown to 2023 is dawning with tempers and tempests, rearranging old variables and sentiments, and pulling the sands off the feet of Governor Lalong, with a prospect that the luck that catapulted him to power has vanished, and the times could revenge on him. UKANDI ODEY writes on how the forces aggregated from the governor’s own indiscretions and tactlessness
Time and bad conditions, they say, do not favour beauty. And that is how Governor Simon Lalong’s political seductiveness and succulence have withered and diminished, to the effect that, like Joshua Dariye and Jonah David Jang, low rating, popular public anger, and choking negative perception would be his lot as his gubernatorial tenure is timing out.
In the same period under review in 2015, then Governor Jonah Jang, irrespective of his tall infrastructural records and good governance, had lost face with the incendiary and irascible organized labour and civil servants as a result of months of unpaid salaries and emoluments as a result of the national cash crunch deriving from the global economic melt down. As a matter of fact, in a tight connivance with the civil servants, the organized labour went into tacit collaboration and conspiracy with the raging, rampaging, and menacing opposition, leaked vital documents and classified information from government records, and did everything conceivable – including blackmail and cheap name calling, to boo and humiliate the Jang administration out of power.
With the emergence of the late Senator GNS Pwajok as the Peoples Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate with a huge prospect to succeed Jang, the fires stoke further and enlarged their coast and scope to the state’s entire geographical definition, and the name “Jang” became a seeming and seething anathema in the sociology of Plateau, just as it became even ‘sacrilegious’ to be Berom, the ethnic tribe of Jonah Jang and GNS Pwajok who was looking good to succeed him. The conspiracy was so profound that organized labour literally started arranging a transition and inauguration programme with the opposition, and proceeded on an industrial action never to resume till after the new administration was ushered in on May 29, 2015.
The same gullible and manipulable labour who had played the same card against Joshua Dariye to woo in Jang in 2007, used the same old fashioned pettiness to seduce Lalong in 2015, and proceeded to brand him curiously and imprecisely as “governor alert”.
With barely a year to go, the season is certain, and it is like the old bottle is back with the old wine too. As usual, organized labour is playing the agent provocateur,, in a political drammatis personae and cast this time that includes hiccups incurred from the mileage and travelogue of Lalong’s own vicious politics and convulsive governance.
As Governor and leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC in Plateau State, the party has veritably expired in his hands, austere of hope and bereft of electoral value. Having entered the ring with a grabbing and greedy mentality of winner takes all, and with a manacled electoral body, PLASIEC,as a puppet enabler, Lalong used the opportunity of party nomination and primaries for candidates for the local councils polls to entrench himself and dismember the party and scamper its followership and potential. Ostensibly, the process of diminishing the party was set in motion. The framing, humiliation, and sentencing of the then APC Chairman in the State, Latep Dabang, was mostly to intimidate and extinguish a tradition of opposition and alternative opinion in favour of a culture of yesmanship and subservience as the party ethos and modus operandi. Eventually, the party primaries for the election of candidates for the LG polls were merely so called: a brazen sham that captured acute miscarriage of democracy which preceded the most controversial local government polls on October 10, 2021.
The Plateau State APC is yet to recover from the exercise – and it is arguable whether the party will ever recover and outlive the contraption which trauma is subsisting intraparty litigations and animosities, with even Lalong himself gasping for breath and a breather in Langtang North local government area.
Not even the emergence of a state executive for the party bears some semblance of reprieve and quietude for the party. Rather, the last state Congress was bungled by Governor Lalong as leader of the party. He superintended over an acute emasculation of the exercise begining with making nomination forms artificially unavailable to getting the ‘anointed’ to fill their nomination forms after their affirmation by voice vote in a captive Congress.
While the animosities and ill feelings of having been coerced and oppressed in the name of a state Congress was yet to abate, uncommon audacity by the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Rt Hon Abok Ayuba, engendered new grounds of belligerence with Lalong’s executive bullishness that has left the House and the business of making laws for good governance in indeterminate and anomalous status up to this day.
The contraptions and lack of space and intolerance to alternative aspirations that characterized the primary for the emergence of a candidate for the Jos North/ Bassa Federal Constituency by-election, culminating in an embarrassing stalemate or inconclusive election, is an elixir that has extirpated the process of decay and receivership in the APC. The rerun of the primary two days later on February 4 at the Prestige Events Centre, Bassa, did not assuage the rage of emotions. It was boycotted by delegates mostly from Jos North, and the aggrieved aspirant who claims he won the primary in the first ballot, Suleiman Yahaya Kwande, said so pungently in his petition to the National Secretariat in which he dismissed the rerun and accused the national electoral officers of compromise and cunning conduct. Besides, it should be more than instructive for Lalong that for his former Commissioner for information, Nazif Ahmed, to have addressed a deflected press conference on February 9 in reaction to the stalemated primary is a serious indication that market momentum has dropped, and both buyer and seller are deploying desperate strategies .
Last fortnight’s ‘Great Movement’s event in Langtang North in which a former Chairman of the APC, former House of Assembly members, and a whopping 12,000 others defected and collapsed into the opposition Peoples Democratic Party in the State is not complementary of Lalong’s posturing and handling of affairs of the APC in the State. A General who feels comfortable losing troops on the eve of war is a General without strategy. With the huge number of gubernatorial aspirants on the platform of the APC, more sensitivities will grind with more sentiments, with a propensity to knock the party’s electoral engine and leave its already cracked chassis more vulnerable.
With reports of owed salaries, not only have the alerts ceased, organized labour is booting, the anger and bitterness around the state are worsening, and more are going to ambush Lalong on different platforms on his way out. What goes around, comes around is a line and verse in times’ revenges.
