Group describes Governor Wike’s awards as ‘a celebration of mediocrity, inferiority’

A Pan-Rivers media watchdog, The Inter-ethnic Network for Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, INCRA, has described the Sun Governor of the Year Award bestowed on Governor Wike as a celebration of mediocrity and inferiority.

A statement issued on February 24, reads: ‘The Sun Newspaper, in a bid to promote ardent enterprise in governance, instituted the Sun Governor of the Year Award in 2003 with the major considerations for conferring the Award on recipients touted to be selfless commitment towards sustainable projects and infrastructural developments evenly distributed across major areas in the State and notable contributions towards national development.

‘While we understand completely that the Sun and Silver bird Man of the Year Awards are private Awards conferred by the Sun Newspaper and Silverbird TV on any individual who satisfies their own conditions, we are totally dismayed over their choice of Governor Wike as the recipient of the award on the grounds that he does not satisfy the stated requirements and conditions for the conferment of the Award as explicitly spelt out by the Sun Newspaper and the Silverbird in reality.

‘A more thorough and undistracted assessment by the Sun Newspaper and Silverbird would have readily revealed the lack of tact, vision, focus and direction of the government Wike runs in Rivers State. The said Awards are in sharp contrast with the prevailing situation of affairs in the State and clearly put a huge question mark on the awarding organizations.For instance, Governor Wike has never undertaken any major project conceived and initiated by his government. He is either resurfacing existing roads that are in good condition or completing roads that were almost at its stage of completion before he assumed office. Besides, most of his purported projects are concentrated in two LGAs within the Port Harcourt metropolis.

‘Schools, Healthcare Centres and other economically viable enterprises and promising programmes and public policies inherited by the Wike-led Government have all been abandoned, altered, and discontinued without putting better alternatives on ground. Our Primary, Secondary Schools and Universities are all under infrastructural and administrative decay with little or no intervention from government.

‘Workers are owed months on end and are subjected to endless biometric exercises under stringent and inhumane conditions. The Economy of the State is on a downward slide due to lack of feasible economic policies geared towards building an alternative economy. Rivers State is rated number one on Misery Index, Number one in Poverty Index, Number one in Unemployment rate at 61.4% (the highest in the history of the State) and Number one in crime rate and insecurity. The State is now rated 23 in Primary Healthcare from 1 in 2011.

‘Obviously, Governor Wike’s Awards come as a slight on the sensibilities of Rivers people and every non biased Nigerian observing the political terrains of the State. We can not make out the rationale for these Awards except for the fact that the Governor has a knack for mischief and is a master of the circuitous routes and may have facilitated the conferment of the Award through the deployment of fiscal tools.

‘For us and the rest of well-meaning Rivers people these Awards bestowed on Wike are at best, a recognition of his mediocre abilities and achievements. It is a memorial of vitiation and an evidence of deceit’.