Nigeria Content Online

The ancient city of
Benin has experienced its share of ruin and I am not talking about the
British sacking, destruction and looting of the arts and sacred
artifacts in 1897.

We can point to the
British expeditionary attack and say the white man came and stole from
us and destroyed our heritage and sent our king into exile in an
inhuman manner, where he was to die and be buried like a pauper. And we
can also say the white men that carried out the actual raiding of the
Oba’s palace in Benin did so because they did not really care about a
monarchy that was not theirs. Let’s even come to recent history and say
during various military administrations, non-indigenes were sent by
dictators to rule the state and they did not care if there was
development or not. But what do you say of some elected citizens of the
Edo State who have done worse than anything the British colonialists or
military regimes did to the state in general and the capital city in
particular?

The most terrible
and degrading years for Benin as the capital city of Edo State were the
eight years Lucky Igbinedion was the governor. The ruin that befell the
city was worse than any it has ever experienced in its long history of
existence. His mismanagement of state funds is not a secret and it is a
common joke that even after his failed his first term as a governor,
his father Gabriel Igbinedion asked that his son should be allowed to
go for second term, because if a “student fails a class he repeats it”.

Well Lucky did
repeat the “class” for another four years which enabled him to loot
some more and clean out the state coffers properly.

Those were the
locust years of Edo State, because money that came to the state was
“eaten” by the voracious pot bellied dullard. While infrastructure and
roads were in the worst state they could possibly be, workers were owed
months of arrears in salary, touts took over the city and harassed
innocent citizens to pay illegal fees – the governor was building
mansions round the world and throwing lavish parties in Caribbean
countries. Millions of naira worth of state funds was allegedly used in
buying houses in London and other foreign cities while erosion took
over the state capital.

One cannot put the
entire blame of the backward years of Edo State on Lucky’s head,
because other politicians’ directly and indirectly pillaged funds for
their personal use.

State Assembly
members made phony trips to foreign countries with funds meant to
develop Edo and Igbinedion as the steward did not see anything wrong
with this, because his own elaborate foreign trips financed in the same
way, were legendary.

In 2008 the EFFC
finally arraigned Igbinedion in a court sitting in Enugu accusing him
of laundering funds totaling about N4 billion during his eight-year
stint as governor.

The 147-count
charge count that was brought against him listed embezzlement,
stealing, conspiracy to defraud and use of several phony companies to
maneuver billions of naira from the state. The fact that there is not
development to show for all the money allocated to Edo, as an oil
producing state should have been enough to nail him but today Lucky
Igbinedion is a free man, enjoying his stolen billions.

One cannot really
say what his successor, Oseriemen Osunbor, would have done better
because his administration was ridden with crises and he eventually
lost the office. But barely four years after the wasteful years of
Igbinedion in Edo State, certain photographs surfaced in our newsroom
in Lagos recently. They were images of multiple water fountains
beautifully lit with iridescent colours in what looked like a public
park. The images were taken at night, which helped accentuate the
changing lighting of the fountains. Our arts and culture editor, Molara
Wood, who showed me the images asked jokingly if I knew where they were
taken, I told her no. “So you don’t know your city anymore…they were
taken in Benin City na!” I couldn’t believe her at first but it was
true. It was part of the new face-lift and renovation of the King
Square. Adams Oshiomole the governor of Edo State has caught the
Fashola beautification bug. The photographs I saw led me to visit Benin
City last weekend and I was shocked beyond words at what the city has
become. The fountain I saw was just a tiny bit of what Governor
Oshiomole’s administration has turned the city into. I took time to
drive round (Edo has also cured it’s kidnapping sickness, would you
know) and realised it was not just the King Square, but the entire city
had been rebuilt. I learnt the governor had vowed in 2009 to restore
the ancient city to its past glory. The comrade has definitely borrowed
a welcome leaf from Governor Fashola of Lagos because at the rate the
man is going the city will soon recover fully from the years of ruin.

Each time Lucky
Igbinedion drives through the beautiful city, he couldn’t do anything
about in eight years; he should cover his face in shame.