Even before you wake up on the first day of every month, our politicians would flood social media spaces with goodwill messages. They tell us that they love us, that they will never let us down, that they have a lot in stock for us.
This is the tradition, and in Aninri that routine is much more serious. No one pursued more promotional and malicious propaganda than the immediate past chairman of the council area, Mr. Bennett Ajah.
He talked of “all the wonderful jobs” he had been doing in Aninri and for Aninri. Yet, he was a failure in every sense of the word when you examine his actions during his stay in power.
But most of his predecessors were like that, anyway – politicians who were all talks but no actions.
Today, its exactly 7 months when Prince Ugochukwu Nwanjoku took the baton as the executive chairman of Aninri. Its only sensible that we look closely at what he has been doing with our money all this while.
Renovation at the Headquarters: Days after it started in October 2024, the Nwanjoku’s administration released the sordid pictures of the headquarters its inheriting.
To say the least, the Ndeabor seat of power was a rat hole. From the administrative building to the department offices and canteens through playground everything sat in shits of ruin.
So many people who doubted the photos went there and saw for themselves. Truly, termites occupied the offices and shelves, grinding the vital office documents to dust and the entire government business to a halt.
Rodents and dangerous insects all carved for themselves large colonies under giant and growing bushes outgrowing the buildings outside.
Ironically, this was the headquarters at which Bennett Ajah sat to steal and redistribute among his friends the federal allocations and other local revenues running in billions of naira. But today, the story has changed. See details here
Electrification: Aninri is a remote place with fertile soil and energetic but very poor agrarian natives. Many times and for so long, the needs to rethink our coexistence have arisen.
Most of the local markets are fast becoming daily markets; multiple schools are now built and they’re drawing students and pupils; the farmers, now shifting to mechanised method, produce more to sell; good and accessible roads network have eased means of transportation of goods while they also link the Aninri to major cities and other states. All these have led to growing population which, invariably, leads to increased demand.
Yet a people like these were still in darkness in the 21st century. Previous Aninri adminstrations lied they’d bring electricity. Instead, some of them even went to the extent of encouraging vandals to destroy the transformers we had.
However, when he assumed office, Prince Ugochukwu Nwanjoku repaired 13 of those transformers. During F&GPC meeting at the headquarters on April, letters from the natives requesting more transformers were read. Two weeks later, on April 28, the chairman met the challenge, delivered six transformers – three with 500KVA capacity and three others of 300KVA capacity.
Roads and Empowerment: Nearly 200 appointees are on Prince Ugochukwu Nwanjoku’s payroll today – a feat that’s still unprecedented in the annals of Aninri. With this, he doesn’t just outpace his predecessors in the area of empowerment.
But he has also chosen the workforce without prejudice as his choices cut across gender and party lines – unlike most previous chairmen. In addition to that, Nwanjoku is on top over 20,000 kilometres in more than 200 rural roads under construction at the moment.
Generally, Nwanjoku’s government is the best Aninri has had in decades. While we encourage critics to look for errors, we want them to do a good job at it. Whatever he’d like to say, its my opinion that the critic should not be lazy.
Let him go around all that the administration says it does and do fact-checking. By dint of hard-work, Prince Ugochukwu Nwanjoku is fast climbing the ladder for greater responsibilities in Enugu West politics. And there’s nothing anybody can do about it.