Some people accuse me that because I come from the church and because the church does not have money, we pinch money from the church and then, in governance, I am also pinching money instead of opening the entire treasury for everyone to take what they can take. I thank the church for giving me such discipline. Without the pinching, you can not rule the state.
Rev Father Hyacinth Iormem Alia, born May 15, 1966, has been the governor of Benue State since 29 May 2023.
He is the second cleric to govern the state after the late Very Rev. Fr. Moses Orshio Adasu, who governed the state in the botched Third Republic.
The governor, who hails from Mbangur, Mbadede, Vandeikya Local Government Area of Benue State, got his First School Leaving Certificate from St. Francis Primary School, Agidi, Mbatiav in Gboko local government area of the state. In 1983, he enrolled at St. James Minor Seminary, Makurdi, after which he gained admission to study at St. Augustine’s Major Seminary, Jos.
He studied for a diploma in religious studies in 1987 and a Bachelor of Arts in Sacred Theology in 1990.
In 1999, he obtained a Master’s in Religious Education (Psychology and Counselling) at Fordham University, Bronx, New York City.
In 2004, he got an additional master’s degree in biomedical ethics from Duquesne University, Pennsylvania. He received a doctorate in the same course at Duquesne in 2005,
In this interview, the cleric turned politician explains why he ventured into partisan politics and his vision for the state. He also dismissed insinuations that he is at loggerheads with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, Senator George Akume, just as he vowed not to allow the resources of the state to be shared among some few disgruntled politicians.
Excerpts:
What informed your decision to drop priesthood and join politics?
My advent into partisan politics was because too many things were wrong. I’ve lived my life as a functional priest in the last 33 years with my locals. I stayed with them, went to school, and returned to spend time with them some more. I have been in the trenches with them, and the people I loved working with, more, were the destitute, the poor masses, those who do not have a voice in the society, and those who are neglected and suppressed. When you are preaching the gospel, these are the primary things you must do. God does not want them to be lost to society. These are the people I felt should be taken care of. For years, local government teachers were totally forgotten, and I felt their pains. I had that at the back of my mind.
Again, since the creation of the state, it has been a glorified village. We didn’t even have light on the streets in the state capital. It is now that we are trying to construct internal roads because our internal roads were minimally tarred. You come into the state capital, Makurdi, and it is like you come into a village. I felt a number of things were missing, and so, there was a need for me to come and get things right.
The church is not against her priests joining partisan politics. Where it is a case of plurality of parties, the church will hold her reservations but at the same time, there is a leeway that if the church judges that the society is too dysfunctional and that the only person to salvage the situation is a priest, then, someone can spring up via the church to save the rest of the people.
Not many people understand this, and this is why I had to come in and save the souls. We had to take care of the human beings that are out there. In a number of places in the state, some primary schools are no longer functional. We need to fight for the future of Benue, which is like fighting for democracy.
We have to fight for democracy and these are the things that we have been trying to do, people need to understand that government is an opportunity to protect peoples’ lives and ensure that the people go back to their agrarian society.
Today, we are talking about food insecurity. If we do not have social and civil security, we would not have food security. These are concerning. When we fight for democracy, then, we are fighting for food security because farmers are on the farms.
You know, Benue was number one in a number of things not just in the production of yams but in the production of soya beans. So, we need to get back to this. I came to save the soul of the poor masses of the state. I came in to assure them that God loves them and that God loves them through democracy so that they can understand they and their children hold the future.
So, I came in for the state to have the fullness of democracy and the fullness of life.
In your inaugural speech, you vowed to transform the state. What difference have you made?
Very true. I declared a state of emergency on our infrastructure. Our primary schools are down, and as I speak, we have done so much at getting rid of ghost schools. Benue had more ghost schools than the existing functional schools.
Also, Benue had more ghost workers. For instance, we had a ghost school that had 95 teachers, and the least teacher on the staff was Grade Level 10, which has been there for a very long time. Just imagine how much the state lost educationally. What we did in the first month was to save N1 billion, and in the second month of our coming on board, we saved close to N3 billion from ghost workers.
We then shifted to the civil service where we saw some other things. The state nearly had more casual staff than more permanent staff. We had to weed out some of them, and it is just now that we are coming to terms with reality. That is what we are doing.
That was how we fine-tuned the system to work.
Having understudied all these in the last nine to ten months, some huge amount of shift has been made.
In terms of infrastructure, we are an agrarian state, and over 80 per cent of the people here are farmers, but unfortunately, they were never incentivized to be the best they would be on the farms.
So, we set out to do the roads that could lead from their farms to the market squares and back here to the centre.
We did 16 roads in Makurdi, and we are going to announce some 31 roads within the Makurdi township streets. At the same time, other contractors are working on rural roads across the state where we have most of our food production because that is where we want the impact to be first felt.
There are talks that you give contractors 70 per cent up front, but what is the guarantee that they will complete the job having gotten that much?
We write down that 70 per cent be given to them, but it is by installments because of the inflation we have and because of the trust that is built in there.
For the records, we do not give 70 per cent. The contractors have built themselves up and also because we have received other testimonials from other states. We also hold them at the jugular; it is not as if we just give them the contracts. It is not true that we give them 70 per cent, but because the State Executive Council said 70 per cent should be given to them, it is segmented. That is why most contractors are scrambling for Benue State.
Despite submitting reports for State Police, what steps are you taking to address the security situation in your state, especially in the rural areas?
Before we were ushered in on May 29, 2023, the security reports were horrible, and it is also on record that you heard that hundreds of lives were lost in one local government. Before you took that to heart, you heard of another one. We had tones of these deaths on our hands, but since we came in, it is on record that there has been relative peace. How do we know the indices? By the same security apparatus that we have and by the reports we get from our vigilantes, forest guards, and other security apparatus who are working in sync with most of our people. By the situation report we receive every day, we are able to measure that. Overall, we have relative peace, but at the same time, relative peace does not mean we have absolute peace.