I was telling you about the light, Your Excellency. In England, it never goes out. In America, the story is the same. In China, it is forbidden for the light to go out. The same is true in Japan and South Korea. The light is steady twenty-four hours of the day.
I don’t get tired of telling my friends that one of the reasons I was able to write six books within my two-year stay in England was because the light was constant. You work all day long, get tired, go to bed, and wake up to find the light still waiting for you to finish what you started. The way I see it, I will break that record if you keep the light steady for me to finish twelve books this year in a marathon that celebrates Bayelsa at thirty.
As I was saying, Your Excellency, there are certain points that need to be raised in the public interest as a mark of respect for thirty years of Bayelsa. We are already counting towards the next thirty years, and we must be frank with ourselves. There’s no need for anybody to feel jittery about any question, least of all you.
I see you differently. I see you as a man who can answer any question put to you, especially in your capacity as Governor. And it would be presumptuous of any of your friends to think that you are incapable of doing so, least of all me. Thirty years is a long time in the life of a state. Thirty years amounts to three decades. Thirty years, as I said earlier, represents a generation. If we cannot find answers to the questions that confront us today, if not now, when?
Your Excellency, I will be frank with you. I am amazed at my change of perspective. Many years ago, I used to be fanatical about 1 October, being the day Nigeria celebrates independence from colonial Britain. Today, I am more fanatical about Bayelsa becoming thirty, after its historic creation on that day in 1996. I have always had this peculiar vision about Bayelsa. I have always felt that the state is unique, quite different from the rest of the country, and will transform into a grand experiment in cosmopolitan development, a futuristic city milling about with fascinated tourists everywhere you turn. My wife thinks so too.
In 2010, I was so convinced about this evolving reality that I wrote a book length epistle to Queen Elizabeth of England to undertake an experiment in Bayelsa, in conformity with the recommendations of Henry Willink, QC, who declared that the Niger Delta swamp is a special area deserving of special attention.
I called on the Queen of England to support the construction of a Little London in Bayelsa where everything works clock-work perfect, and the light shines bright twenty-four hours every day, where the transport fare for one day’s outing is fixed at a certain limit, and the omnibuses plying the streets of Yenagoa would be measured by oyster cards.
I dreamt of trains rolling in and out of Yenagoa, conductors warning passengers to mind the gap between the train and the platform. I engaged Her Majesty in this fantastic idea about water running in every home at the turn of the tap, from Igbogene to Ovom. Call it utopia, Your Excellency, but this is what happens in England and America and China where our leaders go for frequent holidays with funds from our commonwealth.
I had another utopian idea, Your Excellency. In the days when I served as Editor of Weekend Waves Weekly (WWW), practically in the relative youth of Bayelsa, I proposed to the government of the day, in a special edition of that paper, that the boundaries of Bayelsa should be closed for a while to enable the Ijaw nation take stock of our assets and liabilities, draw out a definite road map to the future, before allowing visitors to join us.
I was thinking of what Chairman Mao did in China when he became leader of his country. He cordoned China off limits from the rest of the world, and gave room for the Chinese to look inward, to assess their resources, their human capital base, to weigh their capabilities at the corporate and individual levels, before allowing foreign interaction with the rest of the world. See where they are today. They live in the next century.
Your Excellency, you will agree with me that China has grown beyond their own boundaries in every aspect of the economy, in every sector of life, and today the Bayelsa State government is encouraging our schools to teach Chinese in the syllabus to our children. You could jolly well speak of a Chinese colonisation afoot. What would be my Chinese name when that happens, and what would be yours?
Get me right, Your Excellency. Chairman Mao set a template that has been followed by his successors right up to Xi Jinping, the current leader. This is what I expected of Bayelsa. I expected our government to follow a laid out plan, as embodied by the famous Yenagoa Master Plan, so that the advantages of a modern city would accrue to us and multiply.
Thirty years ago, if the founding fathers of Bayelsa had insisted on following a definite master plan, Yenagoa would have been better looking, and Bayelsa would have been the best among the five other states created alongside it by General Sani Abacha on Tuesday, 1 October 1996.
Even so, Bayelsa has come a long way from being run by one government of portakabins after another, to a government that is thinking in the dimensions of a nine-storey secretariat complex for its workforce. Come to think of it, the first government in Bayelsa was a government of portakabins. Every portakabin in sight had a duty to provide office space for pioneer staff of the Bayelsa State government.
Radio Bayelsa began like that. It was a portakabin radio station. It provided working space for staff in the day time. At night, it was home to Mablas, Kiddy, Nelson and their crew. I mean, Mablas would actually stack his pack of records under his head, and go to sleep. He would wake up early the next morning, say his prayers, and formally open the station for the day.
It was a dire scenario thirty years ago, and that is the more reason why it does the Douye Diri government a great deal of credit for calling up the political will to construct a media complex providing accommodation for all three arms of the Bayelsa media, and naming the complex after Nigeria’s first known journalist, Ernest Sisei Ikoli, a noble son of Twon-Brass in present day Bayelsa State.
Keep the light steady, Your Excellency, and watch wonders happen.
