By Linus Obogo
Dear Venatius Ikem,
I came across your latest Facebook broadside, melodramatically captioned “Mediocrity Wearing the Garb of ‘People First’,” and, I must confess, I read it with equal parts amusement and disbelief.
Amusement, because your talent for manufacturing outrage from thin air remains remarkably intact; disbelief, because one would think that a man so eager to pontificate on governance would at least make the modest effort of acquainting himself with facts.
But then again, this is hardly surprising coming from the same Vena, whose own public stewardship has left behind questions louder than explanations, including the well documented controversy surrounding the extravagant waste-bin procurement in Calabar in 2015, an episode that still lingers as an uncomfortable monument to misplaced priorities.
Dear Venatius, you lament the supposed absence of project commissioning, as though governance is validated only by ribbon-cutting ceremonies, loud fanfare and carefully staged applause lines. That, perhaps, is the sad tragedy of your politics, you confuse spectacle for substance.
Governor Bassey Otu may be guilty of refusing to indulge in the flamboyant pageantry that has become fashionable in Nigerian public life, but he is plainly occupied with the far less glamorous business of governing.
Quiet work, it seems, offends those who thrive on noise. Steady progress appears invisible to those whose appetite is only whetted by carnival and ceremony.
Dear Vena, not every achievement arrives with a brass band, some simply stand in concrete, asphalt, steel and policy for discerning minds to see.
Permit me sir, since your vision appears selectively impaired, to list what you somehow cannot see: the ongoing and completed road works stretching through Ukelle in Yala Local Government Area; the Mfon-Okpoma-Okuku road corridor; the Ogoja-Urban Moniaya road; the rehabilitation of Ugep Town roads; the Boki East-West road project; the Akamkpa-Orban road development; the Parliamentary Extension road; and the Adiabo-Okrika road and bridges – an ambitious project abandoned by successive administrations, but revived under the present one.
Add to these the acquisition of additional aircraft to strengthen state aviation capacity, following harrowing experiences of flight cancelations and stoppage suffered by Cross Riverians in the hands of airline operators flying the Calabar route, the payment of long-standing gratuity arrears, shamefully neglected by previous governments and numerous capital interventions quietly unfolding across sectors.
These are not rumours. They are tangible, measurable realities, unless, of course, your preferred method of observation is political blindness.
What is most curious is your practiced devotion to pessimism, the determined insistence on seeing emptiness where there is evidence of movement, stagnation where there is visible progress, and failure where there is earnest governance. You have perfected grievance into performance, criticism into habit, and complaint into political vocation.
One begins to wonder whether your endless crooning is born of conviction or simply a desperate hunger for relevance. Not every passing thought deserves public exhibition, especially when it arrives dressed in bitterness and stripped of balance.
So, dear Venatius, by all means, continue watching, as you dramatically proclaim. Watch closely, if you can. Watch beyond your prejudice, beyond your factional irritation and beyond your reflex for cheap derision.
For what history often records, notwithstanding the loud objections of habitual cynics, is not who shouted the most, but who quietly built the most.
Kind regards, sir!
•Obogo, the Chief Press Secretary to Governor Bassey Otu, writes from Calabar,Cross River State.
