By Maik Ortserga

I woke up to find the social media a-glow with a running stream of rejoinders pushing back and forth against Governor Hyacinth Alia’s fire-horse of utterances at a church function in Ikpayongo Gwer-East Local Government Area recently.

During the said function, the governor had made very weighty accusations, employing sarcasm and ridicule, declaring publicly that the former Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Professor Joseph Alkali is a thief. He did not just stop at calling the renowned professor a thief. He also accused him of stealing state information and selling it to outsiders.

Many expected that the governor would go ahead to substantiate his utterances with a detailed validation of the theft, but he did not, making everyone confused. These utterances have attracted a rebuttal from Professor Alkali himself, who said he is not a thief, and went ahead thoroughly defending himself.

As someone who has known the governor over the years and even wrote his biography, I took a supreme effort believing what I was hearing and seeing on social media spaces. I found it difficult to understand because Governor Alia is not just an ordinary person in society now. As the governor, he has become a political symbol, someone who many people look up to, someone whose name the masses swear by. With his kind of status and the good work he is doing, therefore, any negative stuff that comes out of his mouth is capable of causing a ton of damage. This is why Professor Pita Agbese said “The governorship is a sacred institution. Irresponsible use of the office can be very damaging to the state as a whole and to the specific victims of misuse of office.”

All my doubts were soon to vaporize when I saw the video clips with my very eyes. This was incredible. In several moments of tension, great leaders like our governor have doused potential conflagrations of strive with verbal civility.

As Alia’s biographer, I had the opportunity of interviewing him on several occasions prior to his becoming the governor of Benue state and his responses about people, even those who had hurt him, had always been civil. I had an admiration for him for his verbal civility. However, he currently uses language that is insulting, ridiculing, or harshly critical, turning virtually every discourse into a fierce atavistic club-fight, especially when it is about those who do not agree with him.

You can imagine my consternation when I saw him calling a professor who he himself had invited, based on good recommendation to come and work as his SSG, a thief without any legal backing, and at a time the man has resigned and is resting quietly out of the government.

As I continued to ponder on this development, the words of the poet Niyi Osundare began to assail my thoughts that” Power is a sweet but sneaky wine which quickly leaves the stomach for the haughty head. If care is not taken, the power- wielder soon gets lost in a maze of tingling fantasies: He starts relishing his craven images by palace toadies, he starts fighting phantom battles and ghost enemies: his mirror grows too small for his image, and he begins to think, and really believe, he is a god.”

I wondered if the image I saw in that video was really that of the Alia I knew. Governor Alia himself should be surprise at the massive outpouring of condemnation across party lines trailing his recent outing. I preened and scanned the defence emanating from his media handlers, and I observed how little his media could do in screaming a defence this time.

I began to ask myself how the governor would have felt if he had seen Nelson Mandela, for example, addressing a former political associate publicly as a thief. Nelson Mandela was known for his thoughtful and measured use of language. Throughout out his life, he demonstrated a remarkable ability to balance passion with restraint, often using his words to inspire and uplift rather than to inflame or divide. Even at the height of his fight against apartheid, and even in the face of intense opposition and hardship, his commitment to civility of language was not lost. This is reflected in his famous statement, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

Governor Alia should read about great leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. Instead of going headlong in attacking those who oppose him, he should as Jawaharlal Nehru lamented in his autobiography, “when enthusiasm wanes and we weaken, there is always a tendency to go back a little, to compromise, and it is comforting to call this the art of winning over the opponent.”

However, my intensive reading of the histories of great leaders has shown me that by vindictiveness and poltroonery, a leader loses some of the noblest characters that should help in driving his vision. This is why, we often learn from history that the betrayal of one’s comrades often turns to suicide and if one’s soul is not deadened by pride, one would appreciate this quotation from Nnamdi Azikiwe’s “Renascent Africa” that: It takes courage to speak the truth, when by a little prevarication you can gain some advantage…

I am very much aware, even as I write, that Governor Alia’s words are often reflective of the times and circumstance in which he finds himself, yet they reflect the strengths and weaknesses of his personality as a public figure.

What our beloved Governor needs now is to employ the services of good Special Assistants on speech writing, and to ensure that all his public speeches, even if they are funeral orations, are carefully penned down before reading them at public functions in order to rein in his emotions. This way, he will save himself the embarrassment of saying things that he would not be proud of afterwards.

Maik Ortsega is the National Secretary of Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA).