18
TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2018 • T H I S D AY
FEATURES
Group Features Editor: Chiemelie Ezeobi Email chiemelie.ezeobi@thisdaylive.com
Bayelsa’s Many Troubles Emmanuel Addeh reports on the resistance to efforts by the current administration in Bayelsa State to reform what many agree is a hugely overburdened public service and attempts to douse the ensuing tensions
R-L: Former governor of Delta State, Chief James Ibori, Bayelsa State Governor, Chief Seriake Dickson, his deputy, Rear Admiral John Jonah (rtd) and Speaker, Bayelsa State House of Assembly, Hon. Kombowei Benson, during a meeting with the embattled Ammasoma community
“
If you want to make enemies, try to change something”- Woodrow Wilson, statesman and former American President. In the short term, change, according to leaders who have taken it upon themselves to reform the status quo, can be a bitter pill to swallow. It becomes even more complex when the reformer believes that the resistance change is not induced by altruistic motives but by selfish external influences driven by ulterior motives. The world over, it is well documented the several outright rejection of and sometimes, erection of road blocks to social and economic changes, even if they would in the long term, be of benefit to all. In Bayelsa, the current administration is grappling with an all-out hostility to its decision to refashion the civil and public service, remove the unnecessary weight it carries and redesign it for sustainability. By the last quarter of last year, the state government had concluded arrangements to rid the entire gamut of the service of people they thought shouldn’t be there. These persons, according to the several committees it set up were payroll fraudsters, credential forgers, promotion racketeers, overaged workers who have refused to retire and other misfits. To be fair, many believe that these same persons who are now seen as misfits were a creation of the same system. Bayelsa since the return of democracy and with its first civilian governor, the late Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, ran like a community, if not a family rather than a state of laws. No systems, no clear-cut rules, regulations were routinely flouted and employment into the civil and public service was more a matter of favour, a matter of giving jobs to supporters, rather than the creation of a perfect fit for existing vacancies. Indeed, the story is that even those who came back from Rivers State after the creation of Bayelsa State, were absorbed into the state civil service on grounds of sympathy. For Governor Seriake Dickson, no system survives
with such huge distortions. And so, as the civil service expanded, the monthly wage bill kept skyrocketing in a state that is perhaps, the least populated in the country. The state kept struggling with the increasing bill, rising to over N6 billion at a point and exceeding by far states that are much more populated, until the bubble finally bust during the last economic recession and Bayelsa buckled under the weight. The restructuring started in earnest when over 4,000 names were suspended from the payroll, then the committee moved into Amassoma, Southern Ijaw, Alamieyeseigha's hometown, where the Niger Delta University is situated. There, they met one of the most absurd
My heart bleeds because these are government decisions that are largely in the best interest of the people in the long run, because the survival of that school (Niger Delta University) is more important, the survival of our state is more important. l am looking at the bigger picture, how to sustain the school and the state
situations: non-academic staff, mainly cleaners, clerks, messengers etc, more than quadrupled the academic staff they were meant to support. Then the sub-committee set up for the purpose started the cleansing. That was when trouble started. Those purportedly affected, mostly community people, shut down the institution, welded the access gate to the institution, barricaded the road leading to the school for many days until the security agencies thought enough was enough. To them, the institution was their farm, their heritage. Much of the argument for retaining the status quo in the institution bordered on a so-called unwritten agreement that the land on which the institution was built was exchanged for perpetual employment for the locals. This position has been dispelled by government. A detachment comprising the major security agencies in the state, which was later to clash with the disgruntled demonstrators, was deployed. In the end, a number of persons were feared dead, some policemen were injured, while the university was looted by hoodlums that had infiltrated the group. In the meantime, the Government of Bayelsa State condemned the violence and attack on the state-owned NDU in a statement by the Special Adviser to the Governor on Media Relations, Mr. Fidelis Soriwei. The government blamed opposition political leaders for the “mobilisation of the hoodlums who barricaded the gate and disrupted academic activities.” It said that the hoodlums attacked a detachment of policemen who were deployed to the NDU and injured some of them before ransacking the Amassoma Police Station. “These mischief makers have mobilised, funded and armed hoodlums to disrupt academic activities in the school, and forcibly close it down even when negotiations on the recent retirement of over-aged personnel of the institution have been concluded and agreements reached. “These hoodlums have for the past one week stopped free movement of vehicles
and persons on public roads. They disrupted conduct of businesses in and around Amassoma by putting canopies on major roads to pander to political interests who are desperate to tarnish the good image of the government,” said the statement. Accordingly, the Bayelsa State Government warned communities to note that the institutions are the collective properties and investments of everyone in Bayelsa and are not owned by any particular host community. The situation was gradually spiraling out of hand, with a groundswell of criticisms, seemingly unjustified, against the governor who was then away from the state. The social media was awash with insinuations that the governor had deployed security personnel to murder Alamieyeseigha’s people. Sensing the implication of the deteriorating security situation and how sentiments and politics was trouncing rationality and commonsense, the Bayelsa State governor, Dickson and a former governor of Delta State, Chief James Ibori, a friend of late Alamieyeseigha eventually met with the people of Ogboin and Amassoma, over the killings. Both leaders told their audience, including traditional rulers, elders, youth leaders and management of the NDU that the meeting was necessitated by the recent happenings in the area in which some persons lost their lives during clashes with security operatives deployed to keep the peace in the institution. At the meeting which held at the Diepreye Alaimeyeseigha Memorial Banquet Hall in Yenagoa, Dickson who had earlier met with the Governing Board of the university at the Government House, Onopa, said he never ordered the killings, despite all the provocation on the security operatives. While noting that he remains one with the Amassoma people, in spite of the fact that the issue had been highly politicised, he insisted that aside the late Alamieyeseigha, no other governor had done the much he (Dickson) had for the people of the area. NOTE: Interested readers should continue in the online edition on www.thisdaylive.com