OPINION: FROM PROMISES TO PUZZLES: ONE YEAR OF LOCAL LEADERSHIP IN CROSS RIVER STATE
By Anthony Ekpo BASSEY
It has been a year since our Local Government Chairmen took the oaths of office with pomp, power, and pledges. One year of banners, banquets, and booming budgets. Yet, as the calendar completes its circle, the question crackles in the public square: where are the fruits of the funds, the footprints of the federal flow, the harvest of the hopes?
From Bekwarra to Bakassi, from Akamkpa to Obanliku, the stories are strikingly similar. The government coffers are said to be full, yet the grassroots groan in lack. The roads remain rough, the schools still shiver in shameful states, and the health centres continue to heave in helplessness. The common man counts the cost while the council chambers cheer themselves hoarse.
In the corridors of as some councils, what was meant to be cooperation has turned to confrontation. Chairmen and councilors, once comrades in campaign, now clash in cold combat. Accusations fly like angry arrows, financial misappropriation, high-handedness, and hushed-up embezzlement. Some chairmen, once hailed as harbingers of hope, are now whispered to be wallowing in wanton waste.
Councillors cry of exclusion, of budgets buried in backroom bargains. And the people, poor but perceptive, watch with weary wonder, asking, “Where is the dividend of democracy when development is detained in documents?”
It is painful to praise progress that barely breathes beyond the office gates. Yes, a few projects have sprouted here and there, boreholes bubbling in some communities, renovated halls hosting new hopes but these are droplets in the desert of demands. The supposed development, like a shadow, stops short of the people’s doorsteps. The palm of progress cannot pat the people if its fingers never reach them.
One year gone, yet too many promises remain in the waiting room of words. The chairmen must be reminded that governance is not a gala of greed but a garden of goodwill. The essence of leadership is service, not self-satisfaction. To whom much is given, much is demanded; and the federal allocations and internally generated revenues entrusted to their care must not become monuments of mismanagement.
Let them remember: the chair they sit on is not a throne but a trust. The people’s patience is not perpetual, and the ballot box has a long memory. If they fail to feel the pulse of the people, the people will surely find their voice when the next whistle blows.
The time for tales and tussles is over. Let the local governments lift the lowly, light the lanterns of livelihood, and leave legacies that will last longer than the loudness of their campaigns.
For in the end, history does not remember the noise of office, rather it remembers the nurture of the ordinary. And those who waste today’s wealth on vanity will weep tomorrow when their names are written in the dust of disappointment.
Let our leaders listen, learn, and lead with love, before the people’s patience turns to protest.
