Retirees plight: Okowa, you cannot mock God

By Zik Gbemre

Governor Ifeanyi Okowa is always quick to call the name of God, in vain, for every action he takes in his clannish and partisan government that feasts on the commonwealth to incite deprivation of the majority over Delta state.

Okowa is commissioning shoddy roads projects that collapse within weeks of public use, he praises God for it. He is unleashing thugs on the streets of Delta in the name of Revenue Task Forces, Local government council levies, scaring investors and killing existing businesses, he says God does it for him.

He believes in God Who decides every of his action, yet under him, secondary schools have no Mathematics teachers while he deliberately delayed of recruitment of teachers that he may or may not pay more than months before transferring the burden to his successor.

Perhaps God is also the one supporting his clannish pushing of major projects to his native home in the Ika community and spreading shoddy contracts of bloated budgets that are either abandon or made to collapse even before they are commissioned.

Thanks to Igbide-Irri, Isoko people who have insisted on not allowing the execution of a shoddy road contract Okowa gave as kola-nut, a euphemism for partisan favour to incompetent party associates. The stalemate on that project is the emblem of a reminder of Okowa’s preference to shortchange the Delta populace outside Ika land with fake, overvalued projects. He believes God supports this.

Perhaps, in no sphere of stewardship, is the deliberate governance of Okowa more inciting than in the neglect of retirees. Can Okowa say God is with him and happy to see civil servants suffer denial of benefits upon retirement?

The neglect of pensioners, some of whom are dying in deprivations under Okowa’s government has become a cause for alarm. His rental praise singers will say it is not peculiar to Delta, but why should that be an excuse to let the elderly who have toiled for the state to die piteously from deprivations.