2nd Niger Bridge: How Jonathan suckered Ndigbo By Steve Osuj

Fisrt Published on March 21, 2014

Jonathan

A native saying in Igboland interprets to the effect that if you make yourself a house rat, the pussy cat will have you for meat. There is no doubt that the current crop of Igbo leaders has morphed into ignoble rats and President Goodluck Jonathan has been playing cat with them. We all remember how the Ohaneze under the leadership of Chief Ralph Uwechue (recently demised and may his soul find repose) personally signed those obnoxious adverts endorsing Jonathan on behalf of Ndigbo. It was unprecedented in the history of Ohaneze or any other major socio-political group for that matter to

issue such blanket endorsement. But that was what a sordidly compromised Ohaneze did in 2011. And that is how the southeast states handed Jonathan the highest votes in that election. That is how Ndigbo spread across the country contributed immensely in giving him victory (25% of votes cast) in many states.

If you thought Ohaneze was compromised three years ago, today, whatever is left of that much-debased body has been handed over to the presidency for a cold, sodden pot of pottage. It does not matter that hardly any of the promises President Jonathan had dished out to Ndigbo from 2007 has been met but have we not seen a stream of even more endorsements gushing from our so-called leaders for Jonathan’s second term even before he has formally declared? As many Igbo leaders scurrying around Aso Rock know, Ndigbo are more deprived now and kept in the fringes under Jonathan’s administration than at any other time. Records show that under this dispensation, the southeast zone got the least vote and disbursements for capital projects.

Jonathan made numerous promises to Ndigbo but we have come to know that his promises are forgotten the moment he is done reading his speech. Name them: dredging of the River Niger and completion of the Onitsha Inland port (the twain haphazardly executed and abandoned); the dualisation of the Enugu-Abakaliki highway, construction of a dry port in Aba and completion of the power plants in Alaoji and Egbema, to name just a few. Today, there is no power plant functioning in the entire southeast, the private effort by Prof. Barth Nnaji is being frustrated and the much celebrated international airport in Enugu is no better than a wretched domestic wing of an airport.

But in all these, the most galling is the Second Niger Bridge. The first misconception about this bridge is that it is a southeast project, but we say no; this is a strategic national monument that bridges the divide between the north and south of Nigeria. Remember former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s vote- for- project caper over this same bridge. Obasanjo promised Ndigbo this bridge during his 2003 election campaign among several other projects. It was bad enough that he forgot to deliver it; a few days to his exit from office in 2007 he staged an elaborate ground-breaking ceremony which turned out to be the mother of all deception and mockery of a people. After Obasanjo was gone, the Ministry of Works revealed to a shocked world that the ceremony at the Niger Bridge was a ruse as there was no file to start with.

A second bridge on the great River Niger is a vote catcher any day in the Southeast. This explains why when Jonathan came along in 2011 he played the same old bridge trick on Ndigbo. I will build this bridge for you before the end of my tenure if you vote me, he told the gullible tribe down the banks of the old River Niger. Now totally disconnected from his previous pledges, he had gone to Obi of Onitsha recently for a rehearsal of the 2015 election campaign when he was reminded about the bridge. Yes, the bridge, the bridge! It actually ought to be nearing completion. Pronto, the project was ‘kicked-off’ in an elaborate ceremony about two weeks later. It is to be a PPP to be completed in 2018 and the bridge will be tolled for 25 years by the concessionaires, Julius Berger.

What manner of arrangement is this that allows for 25 years tolling? Will the bridge be paved with gold slabs? Who controls this 25-year bondage? Yet Igbo leaders gushed with appreciation; one particularly who spoke at the occasion of the ground-breaking said, “President Jonathan has demonstrated an uncommon love for Ndigbo and Nigeria at large by the commencement of work on the second Niger Bridge.”

But Igbo wu Igbo unu mu kwa anya? Will you allow yourselves be suckered again. Ta bu gboo; what you do not get now you may well say goodbye to.