Why Yahaya Bello deserves re-election

In less than four years, Governor Yahaya Bello has delivered good governance, life touching projects, peace, political cohesion and redirected Kogi state to God. Statistics shows that our state’s industrialisation policy is blooming and many abandoned industries have been revived.

As we speak, local governments that have not known any state road projects for the past ten years now have completed or ongoing road projects.

Governor Yahaya Bello stands for trustworthiness, forthrightness and commitment to good governance in Kogi. He is the epitome of a new type of politics dispensation in Kogi state.

Yahaya Bello has a perfect blend of knowledge, reliability, and simplicity which epitome good leadership.

Leaders may emerge with attributes to a lesser or greater degree but none can achieve perfection.

Governor Bello is no philosopher king but it can be observed that he possesses a sincere disposal to lead well, a disposition to serve the people and a political will to take difficult decisions for the good of the people and to follow through with them.

Governor Bello has shown good promise in his first term and he has convinced all by his track records that he remains the best option for Kogi state to move forward and towards a brighter future for our state among the gladiators seeking that office.

His economic blueprint is being pursued vigorously, resulting in various partnership arrangements meant to harness the abundant natural resources and equally reviving some of the abandoned hitherto flourishing government enterprises in order to create employment for all categories of Kogites.

Fidelity to Yahaya Bello is love for a peaceful Kogi, where everybody has the right to dream and aspire to reach where his dream can take them. Your love for Bello is a worthwhile one. He has shown that government is about development in all its physicality. He has shown this by the construction of good roads in Ankpa and the Saudi Arabian model Mosque constructed by the state government in that town. His 28 major projects to mark the celebration of Kogi at 28 attest to this fact.

Finally, he is one of the youth friendly governors in the history of Kogi state. He has given the youths that are qualified the incentives to grow.

When Yahaya Bello was elected as the governor of Kogi state under the platform of the APC, there were those who wagered that he may not live up to expectation of the electorate for a better and a much more developed Kogi state. Some see him as a political neophyte or just a new kid on the block who ascended the throne by sheer divine luck. They said his administration will be defined by pauses, such as the perfunctory rituals of being governor-no motion, no movement, mediocre-like, not by visible and sustainable development. How wrong they were.

 Today, Kogites marvel at the breath-taking pace in which development has enveloped and travelled farther and faster down the nooks and crannies of the state in just three and half years. This is despite the emergence of the recession which whittled down the resources of a lot of our sister states, forcing them to cut down on their development agenda, this was not so in Kogi under the headship of Yahaya Bello.

These projects and services, which represent such meaningful development as well as Bello’s body language that the best is yet to come, unleashed the calls and appeal for a well deserved second term for him. Now, there is no more powerful expression of a people’s evaluation the performance of an elected democratic public office holder than to elect or reject him at the polls.

So, for the cynical, that is the naysayers, the doubting Thomases, who are obviously in the wallowing minority and offer nothing other than primitive notions of contestations, I will roll out other superior reasons why Yahaya Bello deserves a second term in office as executive governor of Kogi state.

No other governor has done better in the area of harnessing the human resources of the ordinary citizens of the state than Yahaya Bello. We now see this in the prompt payments of the salaries and pensions of the state workers and retirees after the painstaking reforms of the state wage systems. The payment of the backlog of pensions represents a sad narrative of governments in this part of the world in the way they treat those who gave part of their life in services to the state or nation. This was immediately tackled by the pragmatic welfarist in Bello, resulting in their clearance.

Infrastructure, another major fulcrum of the Bello administration, has received a fillip with the seamless deliveries all over the state. The list is endless but we shall make out a list of some of these achievements here. The construction of roads across the local governments of the state which serves as bottlenecks a couple of years ago, building of classrooms and new schools in the whole local governments of the state, construction of hospitals and clinics in the nooks and crannies of the state, etc are evident. These are uncommon testaments to Bello’s infrastructural savvy.

He successfully equipped the Kogi state police command with some fighting gadgets and officers serving in the state police commands have better welfare, insurance and deaths benefits, among others to help them discharge their duties of protecting life and properties of the people.

Under Bello, the internally generated revenue of the state has increased tremendously. The government subsidises payment for the WAEC and NECO school examinations fees for our secondary school students and the structural development of higher institutions received great attention.

Muswady writes from Abuja.

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