By Amos Aar
THE Deputy Governor of Benue State, Engr Benson Abounu, has lamented the degree of underdevelopment in Benue State which he said has spanned many decades.
Engr Abounu, who made his feeling known on Tuesday at a get-together to mark 2022 end-of-year and 2023 Valentine’s Day celebration organised for staff at the Deputy Governor’s Office Complex in Makurdi, revealed that he usually weeps each time he passed through neighbouring Nasarawa State on his way to Abuja, when he compares the level of development between the two states.
“Each time I pass through Nasarawa State, I pass through Lafia, and not just Lafia, all the towns in Nasarawa State, on my way to Abuja, I cry. And all that [infrastructural development] happened in Nasarawa State, happened in eight years occasioned by somebody. So, it is a matter of commitment and wanting to do the right thing,” Abounu asserts.
Abounu, who also disclosed that he started aspiring to govern Benue State since 1991 in order to transform the state, lamented that he tried very hard but he couldn’t succeed because somebody from his geo-political zone of the state, the Idoma area, cannot become governor in Benue State at the moment despite his wealth of experience garnered from three administrations; as Special Adviser on Special Duties to ex-Governor Moses Adasu, Commissioner of Water Resources under former Governor Akume’s administration and now deputy to the incumbent Governor Samuel Ortom.
I have put in everything that I have to put in, except one thing, to become the governor of Benue State.
“I tried and I failed. But I have garnered so much experience. I knew that I had gotten the wherewithal to turn this state around and make it a place that everybody will be proud to come from. That was what I wanted, and I promised myself that I was going to do that in the first four years. After that, I would go and rest. But I was made to understand that, at the moment, given the contemporary situation in Benue State, somebody from my place cannot be governor and for that reason, I was made not to be governor.”
The deputy governor however said he would continue to render services to the state in an informal way even if he is not in office because he is passionate about the state and feels very bad about the underdevelopment condition in which the state is.
He expressed gratitude to Governor Ortom for giving him all the opportunities to be in service in one way or the other, stating that this opportunity is “something that my colleagues in the remaining 35 states in the federation were not enjoying.”
He added that “each time he was away on official leave, he handed over to me. It rarely happened in many states. Even when he is around, he allows me to attend virtually all the meetings of the Nigerian Governors Forum, National Economic Council headed by the Vice President in the seven years getting to eight years. Even the highest council, the Council of States headed by the President himself, I have been attending its meetings. Even the events that have been taking place outside Nigeria, it’s me that he sends.
“Coming down to Benue again, the internal workings of government, virtually everything that was very important, he made me the head. If it were within his [Ortom] capabilities, he would have made me governor.”
