By Bilyaminu Mustapha
Former Attorney-General Abubakar Malami’s October 1 address was meant to sell him to the people of Kebbi state as the man to occupy the Government House in Birnin Kebbi come 2027. It did the opposite. It damaged the ambition it was built to advance.
He looked unprepared. He paused for breath between phrases, shifted in his seat on end, and delivered lines that seemed forced into his mouth.
The manner was timid, doubtful, and visibly unsure. The slurred pattern of the speech did the rest. It did not read as the composure of a man asking to be trusted with a people’s destiny.
The outing was a disaster. The struggle to stay calm and focused exposed an intemperate, immodest delivery that never met the politics of Kebbi or the temper of its people. He spoke as if he had smoked something.
He promised a robust mass-housing policy. His record points the other way. When he had the chance to build a Federal High Court in Kebbi, he, instead diverted billions of allegedly stolen money into building mansions for his children, hotels, private schools, and businesses far beyond the means of the people he now asks to govern. The promises he spewed in his address to the people of Kebbi state and his odious past do not sit in the same sentence.
He spoke of civil-service welfare and higher wages. The charge against him is that he took, in public office, more than he or his children could spend, while the poverty he now laments sat in plain view under a government he served. A wage promise from that record is not policy. It is theatre.
The portrait that emerges is of a man whose public posture has been anti-people: little piety, a self-serving habit, and a tight fist over wealth he did not earn by toil. It is the portrait of someone who puts accumulation first and the masses last, with no visible fear of the hereafter.
Let us make a comparison between him and Dr Nasir Idris. Across Kebbi, Dr Idris is known as a compassionate man whose charity does not stop at the state line. The cleanest test is local. Walk the two neighbourhoods. Ask half-brothers and half-sisters, neighbours and friends, how each man treats the people closest to him. The answers separate them. Dr Idris has stayed in the good books of his own. Malami, for years, has drawn anger for tightfistedness and a lack of compassion.
When he talks of houses and an easier life under a Malami governorship, look first at blood and affinity. Brothers and sisters have left him for the APC and for Dr Idris. Their grievance is plain: he is said to have shut them out because they do not share both parents with him.
Then the friends. Four close associates died in a car crash about two years ago, returning from a visit he had invited. Their families were left with the loss of breadwinners and with debts still hanging. With billions said to be put away, he did not steady even those households.
Is he totally useless?No. A narrow circle – All of his four wives with the first as the most notorious, and his children, infamously chip off the old block have engrossed themselves into the kill. They hold the levers. That is the model on offer: if he wins, Kebbi will run the same way, tightly held, for the few already inside the gate.
Let him have his say, either through a meaningless October 1 address or caricatured electioneering-campaign balderdash. But we in Kebbi must dodge this bullet. Otherwise, he and his co-travelers of a family would not only make a kill of our money, but make a kill of us.
The choice is entirely ours to make.
