Birnin Kebbi:Under Gov Dakingari's Jackboot!

Birnin Kebbi:Under Gov Dakingari’s Jackboot!

Written by admin // September 18, 2012 // 0 Comments

dakin gari

By MALAMI MAIBINDIGA

When former governor Muhammed Adamu Aliero started getting his just desserts from his successor soon after appropriating power, quite a number of Kebbi State indigenes felt that it was a case of good riddance to bad rubbish. For all the people cared, Aliero can go hang and the reasons are not farfetched:
To begin with, everybody was in the know that forcing Governor Dakingari on the people in 2007 even when it looked quite unlikely owing to the fact that a certain Gari Malam had been penciled down for the job was only meant to serve self-serving ends.
The idea was to make a village and taciturn Dakingari governor in order to ensure that a protégé will simply surrender keys of the treasury to the habitual and chronic looters. So, when Dakingari wised up and recanted, it became simply a case of dog eating dog. But soon afterwards, pundits believe that Dakingari’s true colours began to manifest in the form of a man out to destroy not just his benefactor, but the entire fabric of the Kebbi state.
“He was clearly not at war with the Aliero’s because he wanted to protect the state or the people; he was at war with every corner of the state. He dealt a fatal blow to the civil servants and today the civil servants of Kebbi State are Nigeria’s most impoverished. Every facet of Kebbi life has nosedived so much that no one can convince you that Dakingari was not commissioned to bring the state to its knees,” said a legal practitioner in Birnin Kebbi.
“In every state or community in the world, the capital city or state capital is the ultimate pride. In Kebbi State under Dakingari, the reverse is the case. His hatred for Birnin Kebbi and its people is as clear as day. The roads in the capital city are Nigeria’s worse. And roads are essential infrastructure to develop and drive the economy of an area to greater heights. That is apart from the fact that well laid roads are the parameters to gauge how beautiful and serious a people are. Of course, roads are crucial to the development of an entire state including the nooks and crannies, but a distinction must be made that the state capital is the metaphor for judging how a state is faring.
But in the over five years that he has been in power, Dakingari is credited to have constructed only 15.3 Kilometres of roads in Birnin Kebbi; and each of these kilometres are sub-standard all the way. The so-called dual carriageway from Majalisa to Badariya is less than three hundred meters and already in bad shape.
The one from Kofa Sabuwa to Takalau as well as the ones at Gesse I and Gesse II were not designed to serve any purpose to drive the city towards development or to move it an inch closer to its peers like in Yobe and Jigawa or even its juniors like you have in Gombe. These are the only roads that he has built and we challenge him to disprove that there is more than 15.3 kilometres or the other fact that they were deliberately made sub standard, almost all without proper drainages or street lights or walkways or utility piping to ease movement and to preserve them,” the legal practitioner opined.
Public commentators in Kebbi State believe that most of the actions of the Governor on the issue of road infrastructure are geared towards destroying the state and punishing the people unduly. They said when he destroyed people’s houses along old prison road that terminated at Illelar Yari years ago, the belief was that he was going to dualize it, even as some locals clapped, but today the same people are crying because no road was built and the entire neighbourhood had been submerged by intermittent flooding which has further destroyed many more houses because water in the area is stagnated.
There is also the issue of the important Sani Abacha byepass road that was built by Adamu Aliero. This road is so important that it holds the key to preserving other township roads in Birnin Kebbi because heavy and loaded trucks of all kinds have been routed out of town. Our checks indicate that from the beginning to the end of it, this dualized road is dotted with numerous potholes all the way. Each roundabout or interjection in Birnin Kebbi as at today is surrounded by avoidable cracks and potholes such that easy movement is just impossible.
Residents told this reporter that every entry junction to Bayan Kara area and others like it are dotted with wide gullies and sharp edges that have ruptured the bottom plates of many cars. “All it will take to deal with this is a functional roads maintenance Unit in the Ministry of Works, which is just lacking.

The so called N7.7 Billion Dukku – Makera – Kangiwa road is just a distraction and a conduit pipe to siphon money under a guise.
The road has no direct bearing to the needs of the people and no study, feasibility or otherwise was conducted to determine its desirability and suitability to the economy of the state. It leads to nowhere near any economic activity of worth at all. Like all other negligible projects that have been initiated, this road has not been completed neither does it look like it will be completed going by the deliberate slow speed of work,” a civil servant told our correspondent, adding that “Whenever it rains along KBTV to Abasco Filling station road in Birnin Kebbi, you will need a canoe to paddle your way through.
Many cars have too often broken down on that road due to the stagnation of water and a few fatal accidents have also occurred claiming some lives simply because a state government does not have the initiative to construct a drainage there all these years.”
As we were about going to press with this report about the total and deliberate neglect of Birnin Kebbi in the area of befitting road network, a news flash just reached us to the effect that a top political associate of Governor Dakingari, Alhaji Ibrahim Masta Yauri escaped death by the whiskers when his Peugeot 406 car was hit by a Mitsubishi truck whose driver tried to avoid one of the numerous potholes dotting the Sani Abacha by pass behind the Central Market in Birnin Kebbi in the evening of Friday 14th September 2012. The Dakingari associate was taken to the Hospital unconscious where he was still on admission as at the time of this report. This tragedy underscores the critical nature of township roads in the Capital city.
The civil servant likened Kebbi State with Gombe where he said Governor Ibrahim Dankwambo is just one year in office but within that period he was able to construct 65 kilometres of roads within Gombe Metropolis and more than 80 kilometres around the state. “The thickness of the roads in Gombe is world standard, but the thickness of the 15 kilometres in Birnin Kebbi (in 5 years) is sub-standard that some of them have started eroding,” he said as according to him Kebbi is older than Gombe and Kebbi gets more than Gombe from the federation account.
He observed that under Dankwambo’s one year in office, a total of N3.4Billion was spent on capital projects in the education sector, while in Dakingari’s 5 years in power less than One Billion Naira went to the same sector, and no one can pinpoint the specific projects in detail and their specific costs. He said the story is virtually the same in every other younger or peer state around the country, adding however that “before the assumption of office by Dakingari, Birnin Kebbi was a bit far ahead of places like Damaturu and Dutse, but today Birnin Kebbi is just like a local government headquarter like Nguru in Yobe or Birnin Kudu in Jigawa. If you see the township roads constructed in Talata Mafara in Zamfara in just two years, you will weep for Birnin Kebbi. That is how bad it has gotten”, he said.
Why is it that Dakingari is notorious for not completing any project worth the name? Why is it taking such a long time to complete the 200-bed hospital along Kalgo road that has now become home for reptiles and criminals? Why is it that he has not completed the 200 units of sub-standard houses that had been ongoing and have in fact been abandoned along Kalgo road? These houses are the only ones that have been initiated by Dakingari anywhere in the state. In fairness to him, Adamu Aliero was on record to have built more than one thousand houses in his eight year misrule – even when it took a certain Governor in Borno just three years to construct two thousand world class houses. The implication is that no civil servant in Kebbi has ever benefited from one single room in any part of Kebbi State in the 5 wasted years of Dakingari.
The only visible achievement of Dakingari, according to pundits, is that he has been able to move the Orientation Camp of the NYSC to his village of Dakingari even though the village is without one single photocopier anywhere. And as God the Almighty and the seer of all things will have it, a wide segment of the structures built to accommodate the Corps members have been brought down by flooding due to sub-standard work there. The maladministration of Dakingari knows no bounds. “While a more selfish Adamu Aliero went the whole hog to cite the state University in his village and provided structures to ensure that the self centred legacy lasted, Dakingari could not protect an NYSC Orientation Camp he cited in his village. It came down like a pack of cards, the same way every other structure he built went crashing down or uprooted,” pundits averred.
Meanwhile, Dakingari as gunner has shifted his barrel to the local government council elections in the state which was slated for last week. In every local council, the Governor has anointed candidates that were not popular. In all the councils’ candidates with wide acceptance within the ruling party and amongst the people have deliberately been sidelined and replaced with mediocre candidates. To the governor, the popularity of a candidate is his greatest undoing. In Argungu, for example, Bello Dantani is the preferred candidate of the people but the governor has imposed one Salisu K.C., who is alleged to have no following at all. The same thing applies to the other councils as the governor went about uprooting popular candidates. Their offence is that they are popular.

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