A group asked why Governor Alex Otti brought back professionals and technocrats to kickstart the running of his admnistration. My answer further compounded their curiosity. “He is on a healing mission,” I responded rather confidently. “What healing? Are the people at home sick?” they querried. “No. The people are not sick but the state is a patient in need of some remedies. Doctors draw a triangle while diagonizing a case. They start from one face of the triangle to apply their remedies,” I affirmed. My lecture threw them into a loud guffaw. Yes. The Governor is running a deliberate strategy and thought it wise to start with professionals and technocrats as the first face of the healing process. There is a second face of the triangle of state healing.
Doctors proceed from the first face of the triangle to the second and to the third. The Governor’s employment of professionals is a strategy to create a rainbow of novelty. It resonates with and reinforces the picture of the New Abia. In creating a new state, Otti intentionally positioned personnel that would reflect the newness of the entity – new state, new people and new culture. I see it as a form of branding of transition from one organic development to a new organic state. If, indeed, he is driving a New Abia, he must do so with totally new structures, new symbols, new ideals and a new mental painting. Thus, the technocrats are concrete displays of a new painting on the canvass. All things have become new!
But, beyond the branding concept, it is essentially a strategy to elevate the standard of governance to global best practices. The Governor wants veteran drivers with a pedigree of performance in their fields to key in with him to heal the state from a dysfunctional state to a systemized workable structure. He wants a team to help transmute a functional and orderly state. A team to change the Abia narrative from a folklore of backwaters to a place of reviving hope. Thus, the first face of the triangle are transition men, men as Steven Covey, postulated “Who stop the flow of bad”
But, this is but one face of the triangle. After this initial diagosis and admnistration of remedies, Otti would surely move to the second face of the traingle which will be the engagement of people with institutional memory, people who are on ground as the cliche goes. These are the political brokers, experts in moving the machinery of politics. Thus, I consider the professionals and technocrats as a taskforce team on a rescue mission to drive an overhauling process. As we inch towards the elections, Otti will expand the scope and deploy foot soildiers of politics, veteran of political wars, people who are well schooled in the wily ways of power struggle and election engineering in this clime.
The third and final face of the traingle, I suppose, would be the period of consolidation of the social reconstruction efforts. The professed dress rehearsal would have given way to a new era of the harvest of the huge accomplishment. It will be the period when the New Abia has been properly set afoot and the sun rises for Abia. Abia would have become the new global destination for trade and commerce. Everything is falling in according to plan, according to the bluebrint long drawn by the leader. There is no afterthoughts. There is no omissions. Governor Otti knowns where is headed.
