By Ibrahim Dangana
Senator Muhammad Adamu Aliero, the former two-term governor of Kebbi State and three times senator representing the Central Senatorial District of the State recently won a pyrrhic victory when a split decision of the Supreme Court granted him the PDP’S ticket to contest for the fourth term.
However, his return to the Red Chamber via votes remains even more uncertain than ever.
He has been in the eye of the storm after allegations emerged that he serially cornered and diverted at least three gigantic constituency projects worth more than one billion Naira.
The Senator representing the Central Senatorial District of the State now in his third term in the upper chamber of the National Assembly was alleged to have used his clout to corner the direly needed developments meant for the District to his farm and that of his crony.
According to the list of approved Constituency Projects in the 2017 Appropriation Act executed by the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, the projects include the construction of Feeder Road which was awarded to Aliero’s Great Northern International Company (GNIC) at Gante for evacuation of agricultural products from farmlands to towns and cities in Kebbi Central Senatorial District worth N200,000,000.
Another project cornered by Senator Aliero was the supply and installation of Central Pivot Irrigation Pumps with sprinklers also in Gante village of Kebbi Central Senatorial District worth #264,000,000.
The angst of people in Aliero’s Senatorial District is that Gante village is under Lafagu/Gante ward of Kaoje District in Bagudu Local Government Area of Kebbi State. Aliero’s Labana Farm at Gante is under Kebbi North Senatorial district of Senator Yahaya Abdullahi, the incumbent Senate Majority Leader.
The questions on the minds of everybody in the Kebbi Central Senatorial District is how much will be enough to satisfy the Senator and his callous cohorts and when will the dividends of democracy begin to trickle down to the people for whom the projects were meant and who really need them?
With the 2023 General Elections just around the corner, the hapless electorate are poised to show Senator Muhammad Aliero the way out. And unless he makes restitution, their next move may be to legally confiscate what rightly belongs to them. Only time will tell. He has been switching from one party to the other.
For example, he re-decamped to PDP after spending about a year in CPC in early 2012.. He later moved from PDP to APC in 2014.
He and some of his close associates since 1999, like Sani Zauro, who was also former State Chairman of defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) Board of Trustees (BoT) in Kebbi State also quit PDP for APC.
Aliero’s futile political peregrinations may best be described by the Hausa adage: ‘shure-shure ba sa hana mutuwa.’ Desperate movements cannot stop death. It is not the court judgement that is important but the counted votes of the people.
Dangana writes from Koko Besse Local Government.
