By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I am not from Kogi State, but I have strong opinions on former Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello—as most Nigerians do. There is no doubt that few politicians in Nigeria are as universally reviled and despised as Yahaya Bello because of how he turned governance into a violent infant play, denuded it of even the faintest pretense to sanity and respectability, and developed an uncanny capacity to incite raw rage in people.
That’s why there is mass excitement in Nigeria over his current travails with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Most people see his fate as a richly deserved karmic retribution for his eight years of incompetent, anger-arousing, profligate, and terroristic governance in Kogi State, the consequences of which transcended the bounds of Kogi State.
He began his tenure as governor as the symbol of hope for youth inclusion in governance. But he soon became a byword for recklessness, malfeasance, ineptitude, incivility, violence, and the greatest betrayer of the youth constituency. He shouldn’t have been governor—or, for that matter, anything in politics.
He had no guardrails on his tongue. Like a spoiled, over-indulged, ill-bred, and uninhibited child, he blabbered whatever inanities caught his febrile fantasies with no care for consequences. He insulted elders at will, humiliated traditional rulers who dared to show some independence, ridiculed civil servants, and terrorized opponents with full-strength viciousness— as if he would remain the governor of his state forever.
He even nicknamed himself—or was nicknamed by his flunkies—as the “white lion.” But when the EFCC came calling, the “white lion” transmogrified into a pitifully frightened, yellow-bellied chicken. Now the white-lion-turned-chicken is fluttering and hiding like he has gone insane.
A wanted notice has been issued for him by the EFCC, the Inspector General of Police has withdrawn all police officers assigned to guard him, and the Nigerian Immigration Service has placed him on its watchlist. I can’t wait to see him brought to justice for all the crimes he committed while he held sway as the governor of Kogi State.
In a 2022 article, I described him as an ignorant, incorrigibly petulant child who was trapped in an adult’s body, who was destroying the littlest semblance of decency left in government in Kogi State, and who thought he could democratize his infantilism nationwide by seeking to be president.
According to several Kogi State civil servants, Bello didn’t pay full salaries for most civil servants for most of his tenure as governor, yet he is being hunted by the EFCC for allegedly laundering up to 80.2 billion naira, presumably the money he should have used to pay the salaries of workers.
Bello signaled from the inchoate stages of governorship that he wasn’t in it for anything other than personal enrichment and aggrandizement. In less than one week after he was sworn in as Kogi State governor on January 27, 2016, according to a May 13, 2016, Premium Times’ investigation, Bello approved N250 million naira for himself as “security vote” and another N148 million to “furnish” and “renovate” his office. At that time, Kogi State workers hadn’t been paid their salaries for months.
Bello’s spokesman at the time by the name of Kingley Fanwo said the raiding of the state’s treasury in the name of security was justified because Kogi had become the seedbed of crime as a result of its location.
