It was a skin-peeling, sunny mid-day of Monday, May 29. Rain-pregnant clouds hung uncertainly under the silver sky. Thunderstorms peeled eerily in the distance. And flies swarmed noisily all over sweat drenched spectators whose hand held paper fans did little to keep off the irritants.
The inauguration of Taraba state’s new governor Caleb Kefas was well under way. Suddenly, there was a stir. A section of the sizable crowd had broken off, shouting and saying in Hausa “Ba ma so! ba ma so!”, meaning “we don’t want (you).” Their expletives were directed at no one else but the outgoing governor Darius Ishaku whose two terms of 8 years ended that day.
How people’s moods change ever so quickly! In 2015, Darius rode to power on the crest of a massive electoral vote. Singing, drumming and dancing escorted him into the government house in Jalingo, the Taraba capital. He promised to turn Taraba into “a land flowing with milk and honey”. Four years on, however, there was neither milk nor honey. Workers’ salary vouchers piled up for months and those who were retiring got no gratuity, not to mention pension. The land was scorching red hot.
Snippets of discontent finally reached the governor’s ears. His response was a sneering dismissal. Why are these people so impatient? Don’t they ever forget they took me away from a lucrative pharmacy job in Kaduna and brought me to this God forsaken place to squeeze water out of hard Mambilla rocks. I came here in the middle of a Covid-19, remember? The federal government sent palliatives but your sons and daughters stole them all, see.
They said I said the government’s purse was too lean to provide any services but that the size of the daro (basin) from which I ate my meals had not changed. Or that my daily supply of rare bush meat had not stopped. Why should they have stopped? Look at me. I didn’t come here to starve to death. If I died, governance would suffer, didn’t they know? Democracy would die too. Was that what they wanted? My fair skin and Rosy cheeks must be sustained because I’m the picture of Taraba the outside world sees. It mustn’t be the image of a hungry, bony beggar!
Darius’ reasoning won the day. And in 2023 he was reelected, though by a smaller margin. But he did, didn’t he? INEC said so. He played on voters’ fears. I’m your son, and a Christian for that matter. Will you hand your heritage over to a “settler and slaver”? Darius, a novice of a politician was learning the ropes fast: press the voter’s raw nerves and you have him wholly committed to you, life and all.
Darius also handled deftly the case of a rebellious council caretaker chairman. The young man complained that he told the governor about cattle headers who were “maiming, killing my people and destroying their crops” but nothing was done to stop the carnage. And so he resigned. What effrontery! What ingratitude! Those were the questions in Darius’ head. Look at this young man, I gave you a job to do, so you and family could chop. You said herdsmen were killing your people. Was it not because your people stole and ate their cows? Did you want them to die while you fed fat on stolen animals and their own farm yields? My friend, it was tit for that. Humurabi’s Law on justice. Another goal for Mr. Governor.
Politically, Darius moved as swiftly as a stag against those that opposed him or sit-on fencers or both. Firstly, those not his tribesmen he took out of Takum and planted them in their “right place” in the contiguous Ussa council area. Then, those of his own ethnicity but resided and worked in the latter, he ‘moved’ to Takum. In his strange electoral gerrymandering, the map of the two local government areas looks like a twisting giant mamba. The point is to deny one group the vote while the other gets it. It worked well for Daro.
Next, Darius understood he could not create new councils much as he would have loved to. But he did something very akin to Lugard’s divide and rule. Of two linguistically and culturally similar communities, he would elevate one to a “chiefdom” and the other got nothing. Two sisterly communities now saw each other as bitter rivals. One was loyal to Darius who repaid that loyalty handsomely while the other was not and was punished for that. Again, Darius won.
However, he misplayed his hand in his dealing with his political godfather, T.Y. Danjuma. Self assured, Darius decided to go against Taraba’s chief kingmaker. That would prove to be the governor’s hubris. His constitutional two terms over, he went for a senate seat, meanwhile plotting to anoint his successor. He failed both. Now his immunity blown, Efcc is sure to call on him – sooner or later. Darius the Taraban is no Darius the Mede, after all.
