By Innocent Okon
Your Excellency Sir,
I hope this letter meets you well in all carnal and spiritual concerns. The compulsive resort to an open letter option to a public officer of your status should be understood with philosophical calibration! In a clime that believes one must be somebody or know somebody to have access to somebody of your status, then some of us who are nobody must take advantage of some cheap options to say something (satanic or righteous ) to people in exalted positions like you.
Sir, for those who may be curious like lawyers to demand my locus standi to write this letter, I humbly disclose here that I am an adult citizen of Akwa Ibom from one of the yet to be remapped villages. As at the last checks, my village still enjoys the status of a gazetted geographical expression! Permit me to also disclose here by way of introduction that though am not a card carrying member of any registered political party in Nigeria, I have been voting conscientiously in all conclusive, inconclusive and annulled elections since 1983. I hope this will help His Excellency to appreciate the altruistic mission of my letter since it has rendered inconsequential any partisan question(s) on whether I have ever delivered my Unit, Ward and Local government.
Though we are all political animals, in the lions’ den, not all lions go searching for game same time!
Sir, destiny has offered you a job which possibly you never dreamt of as a ‘Barracks boy’ decades ago. But as a man of God, I believe you know, like Jeremiah, that the good Lord ordained you for this, even when you were in the womb! Let me confesss that I have not given much attention to your A.R.I.S.E. Agenda, which am told encapsulates your vision and programmes for Akwa Ibom. My disposition is deliberate!
In our third World clime, I have never believed in political manifestos, but in the capacity, vision and political will of political leaders saddled with the mandate to drive good governance. Like the first Executive Governor of Akwa Ibom , Obong Akpan Isemin, observed in 1992, we are massively rural and massively poor! Forget about the architectural wonders that dots high brow estates across the country. Most of them are physical testimonies of mindless serial raping of public commonwealth.
All nooks and crannies of Nigeria, Akwa Ibom inclusive, need basic infrastructure for physical survival like potable water, decent accommodion, accessible and affordable medical care, and qualitative basic education.
For me, the needs of citizens are already known and needs no documentation. What the polity requires are sincerity of purpose, accountability and conscious efforts to recruit the citizenry as participants in the implementation process.
Sir, may I here humbly transit into the substratum of my letter by offering the following unsolicited advice which may accelerate the development drive of your administration. They are hereinbelow stated seriatim:
Your Excellency, there is the urgent need to review the Uyo Capital City Master Plan. At present, the capital city has expanded into many contiguous local government areas without exhausting all areas within the Uyo local government jurisdiction.
Sir, a clan called Ikono is still part of Uyo local government. As at Press time (as Journalists would say) no public infrastructural development has been extended to this ‘virgin’ component of Uyo local government. I therefore suggest that there should be a Master Plan for a new or Greater Uyo with Ikono clan as the centre piece. It will offer the capital city an opportunity to expand in a controlled, deliberate pace and phases. The envisaged new Uyo may rank among new high brow areas like Lekki in Lagos state!
The second unsolicited suggestion Sir, is the Ibom Deep Seaport and the MOR projects. These are projects that have more political contents than raw determination and resources to come on stream! His Excellency must reach out to Abuja with non-partisan lobbying machinery to achieve success.
Dear beloved Governor, the third issue in my ‘satanic verses’ of a letter is your cabinet and the people. It takes seven colours to make a rainbow! That means there’s beauty in diversity! Not all those who delivered their Units, Wards and local governments must be in your cabinet. Good governance thrives on superiority of vision and persistent pursuit of declared goals than blind loyalty and paranoid obsession with thoughts of the next election!
Since 1999, some names have become synonymous with public offices, which an endowed compact state like ours should no more perpetuate. Nobody should be allowed to see public office as pension and gratuity for whatever partisan contributions he or she voluntarily made and continues to make to bring certain individuals to political office!
Your Excellency, let me confess here that I deliberately captioned this letter as ‘Satanic’ in order to arrest the attention of legions of jobbers and sycophants in the social media who may compulsively, without even reading beyond few paragraphs, forward same to you or your key Media Aides just to earn me a place in the black book of ‘ enemies of the new government!
As a sophomore in Journalism school, decades ago, I was taught that breaking news flies on the wings of novelty and personalities! Sir, if my caption brings my letter to your attention, then the purpose of my ‘SO LONG A LETTER’ would have been achieved.
May God bless you with the capacity and team to serve Akwa Ibom affectionately. Amen.
Okon, aI journalist and lawyer, lived in Uyo
