The Benue State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) yesterday criticized the first 100 days in office of the Governor Hyacinth Alia’s administration describing it as indeed days of emptiness and total disappointment to the state.
The party said that the governor has achieved the worst take off in office compared to any governor of the state, both military and civilian, since creation of the state in 1976 with neither direction nor content to be found in anything he has done so far.
The main opposition party in a statement by its State Publicity Secretary, Mr. Bemgba Iortyom assessing the governor’s performances, said it derived its assessment from the governor’s “template of promises he made during the campaigns and after he assumed office, chiefly amongst which were to return persons displaced from 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 fail to make good on any of those promises, he has evidently not even considered them a priority since their pronouncement.
“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 his possibly a ‘lamb and dove’ who won’t touch the funds even as he administers them without the institutional supervision prescribed by law.
“This Benue State Governor has run the most bizarre government ever known under Nigeria’s democracy, with his failure to appoint an Executive Cabinet well after the 60 days required under law, yet did award contracts to the tune of billions of naira within the same period, well above his lawful spending limit of N50 million and without the administrative procedure of Executive Council approval or legislative appropriation.
“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 from his serial infractions of law”.
The party lamented Governor Alia’s continued attack and witch-hunt of his predecessor, Chief Samuel Ortom under what it called assets recovery crusade and other opposition elements, and implored him to rather strive to leave enduring legacies that can speak for him after the might have left office, ‘and not the ostentation and vendetta which so far trademarks him’.
The PDP therefore “sums up his performances as a fusion of emptiness and disappointment”.
