.. orders immediate construction of three Motorized boreholes in community

Wakama Community in Nasarawa North witnessed a large turnout on Thursday as supporters and residents received the campaign team of Rt. Hon. David Emmanuel Ombugadu, amid renewed political engagement ahead of the senatorial by-election.

The visit, according to community representatives, was marked by discussions on urgent development needs, particularly access to clean water, a challenge repeatedly raised by residents during the engagement.

The Youth Chairman of Wakama, Anyabuga Auta while addressing the gathering, outlined the difficulties faced by the community and appealed for immediate intervention.

“We have suffered for too long without reliable access to potable water,” he said. “Our people deserve urgent action, not promises that delay.”

In response, Ombugadu was quoted as directing his engineers to map out plans for the construction of three motorized boreholes, stating that work would commence on Monday.

“I do not need to be a senator before I provide water for the people of Wakama,” he said. “The work will commence on Monday. The chairman and all those involved should kindly follow me to my house so we can map out the locations for immediate intervention.”

The announcement was met with enthusiasm from residents, many of whom described the pledge as a practical step toward addressing a long-standing community challenge.

The community is widely regarded as part of the local political base associated with former Minister Labaran Maku, adding political significance to the outreach visit as campaign activities intensify across the district.

Local leaders at the event maintained that while political alignments remain diverse, priority will be given to candidates who demonstrate concrete commitments to infrastructure and basic services.

The campaign train is expected to continue engagements Wamba and Akwanga in the coming days as candidates intensify efforts to win voter confidence ahead of the poll.

By: Aondoakaa Tersugh Daniel | 11/06/2026

There is a certain desperation that comes over a man when he finally sees the writing on the wall and cannot erase it. Governor Hyacinth Iormen Alia is at that point. And rather than govern, he has chosen to fight.

Before now, Alia turned his attention to his predecessor, Chief Samuel Ortom, mobilising committees and panels to investigate the Ortom administration, hoping to drag the former governor through the mud and emerge looking righteous. The strategy collapsed under its own weight. Nobody paid serious attention to it. The noise faded. And the irony that stung the loudest was this: the same Samuel Ortom, whom Alia tried desperately to discredit, had the foresight and the capacity to construct an asphalt road in Vandeikya, the very local government that produced Alia, the sitting governor who cannot point to one completed road project in that same community.

Now, having failed to bury Ortom, Alia has reached deeper into his political hat. This time, he has pulled out the ICPC. His administration has orchestrated the filing of complaint before the anti-corruption agency against Mikap Nigeria Limited, the company owned by Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa SAN, the PDP gubernatorial candidate and the man that every reading of Benue’s 2027 political weather positions as Alia’s successor in waiting. Let us be honest about what this is. This is not anti-corruption. This is panic wearing the costume of governance.

Here is what makes Alia’s gambit particularly revealing. Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa founded Mikap Nigeria Limited. Chief Gabriel Suswam, who is now a celebrated ally and political bride to Alia himself, founded Ashi Rice and the broader Ashi Conglomerates. Both companies were established in the same year. Both companies, at different points, supplied rice to the Benue State Government. Both exist within the same commercial and regulatory universe. Yet when Chief Alia went searching for targets at the ICPC, Suswam’s Ashi Rice was not summoned. The Ashi Conglomerates were not disturbed.

That selective amnesia tells the full story. Alia is not fighting corruption. He is fighting competition. He is fighting his own fear.

Mikap Nigeria Limited is not some obscure shell operation. It is an award winning company in Nigeria with a verifiable business record. Attaching an ICPC invitation to its name is intended to do one thing: soil the image of Aondoakaa SAN ahead of an election that Alia can already see he is losing. It is a political instrument dressed in the language of accountability, and the Benue voter is not obligated to be deceived by it.

There is a perception that Alia’s so-called legacy companies may have been threatened by the international recognition that Mikap Nigeria Limited has earned. Aondoakaa’s company was among 131 companies from 23 states of the federation to receive the prestigious ARSO Quality Mark Award, conferred by the African Organisation for Standardisation and certified by the Standards Organisation of Nigeria. Of those 131 companies, Mikap Nigeria Limited received Grade 1, the highest classification in that entire award cycle. Contrast that with ZEVA, which plasters its branding on a brewed product assembled elsewhere and has received no recognition beyond Makurdi. If envy has a face in Benue State today, it is wearing Alia’s expression.

That same envy is the force that has driven the prestigious Benue State University to her knees while Alia pours energy and attention into promoting the university he founded in his hometown. This is not governance. This is a man protecting his ego at the expense of a state.

Many who watched Alia step into public life with the language of a man of God have privately nursed a growing suspicion. This ICPC move against Aondoakaa has turned that private whisper into a public question. If the governor’s conscience is clean, why the selectivity? Why does the probe go only as far as the man standing between him and a second term?

There is also the matter that Alia himself cannot afford to open. His own administration’s record on contract handling and financial transparency is not one that invites scrutiny from a man of courage. The allegations that trail his government’s procurement processes and contract awards are not whispers. They are documented concerns that are growing louder with time. When the season of accountability finally arrives for Benue, and it will, Alia will not be exempted simply because he held the executive pen.

What Alia has done by firing first is actually a gift to Aondoakaa and to the historical record. When Aondoakaa returns fire in 2027, nobody should call it a witch-hunt. Nobody should frame it as persecution or political score-settling. Alia drew first blood. He opened this account. Whatever accountability comes his way when the Alia administration is eventually sitting on the other side of power will be a direct consequence of the aggression he chose today.

A frightened man does frightened things. Alia has confirmed what the 2027 election numbers already suggested. He knows what is coming. And he is not ready for it.

By: Aondoakaa Tersugh Daniel | 10/06/2026

There are moments in a nation’s legal history that pass without the public fully grasping how close the edge was. Nigeria stood at one such edge, staring down an $11 billion liability that could have triggered a financial catastrophe of generational proportions. That it did not happen is not accidental. It is, in very large part, the story of one lawyer, one former Attorney General of the Federation, who refused to let Nigeria be robbed in a suit and tie.

The case in question is the P&ID dispute, arguably the most dangerous legal and financial threat Nigeria has faced in its post-independence history. Process and Industrial Developments Limited, a company floated by two Irish businessmen, anchored its claim on a Gas Supply and Processing Agreement signed in 2010. The terms were straightforward on paper: Nigeria would supply wet gas, P&ID would build and operate a processing plant in Calabar, Cross River State. Nigeria allegedly failed to supply the gas. But there was no site to make the supply in the first place, because no construction had been done anywhere in Calabar for such purposes. P&ID went to arbitration, won, and the award ballooned from approximately $6.6 billion to nearly $11 billion with accumulated interest. For context, that figure at the time represented a significant fraction of Nigeria’s foreign reserves. A judgment of that magnitude, enforced against Nigerian assets abroad, would have been a national catastrophe.

Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa SAN was Attorney General of the Federation when that agreement was allegedly signed in 2010 under the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. When the crisis matured into a full legal emergency years later, he stepped forward and made the argument that unravelled the entire arrangement. His position was precise and prosecutorial: the contract was never subjected to Federal Executive Council approval as required by law, the deal bore the fingerprints of fraud from inception, and a coalition of Nigerian officials and foreign actors had conspired to engineer a liability that the Nigerian people would be made to pay. The office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice was not consulted on the contract. Neither was the Infrastructure Regulatory Commission. That argument gave Nigeria the legal and moral ground to fight back. It is on record that his intervention was central to turning the tide of a case that had appeared already lost. It was a case of fraud. Aondoakaa was drafted into the legal team to defend Nigeria. Nigeria won.

That history is not being recalled here for sentiment. It is being recalled because it is directly relevant to what is happening in Benue State today under the Alia administration.

The questions surrounding how contracts have been awarded under Governor Hyacinth Iormen Alia, why projects sit stalled at mobilisation stage, why garnishee orders are freezing state accounts, and why a N68 billion road looks more like an excavation exhibition than a construction site, all of these questions bear an uncomfortable structural resemblance to the P&ID anatomy. Inflated figures. Questionable approvals. Mobilisation paid, work abandoned. The public left staring at broken earth. It is alleged that some of these contracts have been padded by as much as 140% above their legitimate value. If that allegation has any substance, it means Benue State is carrying a fiscal weight that was artificially manufactured to benefit a few people at the top of the food chain.

And it does not stop at the major contracts. It is also alleged that the Governor has directed council chairmen across all 23 local government areas of Benue State to award N5 billion road contracts covering five kilometres in each area, at a flat rate of N1 billion per kilometre. That flat rate is applied uniformly without any regard to the varying soil types and topographic conditions across these 23 local government areas, factors that any competent engineer or quantity surveyor would insist must reasonably and necessarily affect cost from one location to another. A road through the hilly terrain of one local government area does not cost the same as a road across the flatter landscapes of another. When a government ignores that basic reality and fixes a uniform price across the entire state, the question is not whether padding exists. The question is how much and who is collecting it. Across 23 local government areas, a flat and unjustifiable rate of N1 billion per kilometre has the potential to manufacture billions in artificial expenditure, all of it traceable to a single directive from the top.

There is approximately one year left in the Alia administration. That window may not be enough to complete what has been deliberately left incomplete. Any contractor banking on the continuation of the current arrangement to escape scrutiny should now begin to think differently. When Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa SAN becomes Governor of Benue State, he will not be arriving as a newcomer to the business of unravelling fraudulent contracts. He arrives as a man who has already done it at the level of an $11 billion international arbitration dispute. He saved Nigeria from that exposure. The question that should now keep contractors and their accomplices awake at night is this: what would he do to a local contract padded at 140% in a state he is coming to govern?

The answer is not difficult to find. An Aondoakaa administration would conduct a full reevaluation of every contract awarded under the current dispensation. Projects found uncompleted would face fresh scrutiny on their terms, their award processes, and their payment histories. Projects completed but with outstanding payment claims would be examined against their original contract sums and the going market rates for similar work. Where padding is established, the demand would not be for sympathy. It would be for refunds.

Contractors who chose to participate in a system where mobilisation funds were allegedly siphoned before work could begin are not entirely blameless actors. They signed contracts. They collected funds. They broke ground to create the appearance of work, and then they stopped. A state that has had its accounts frozen by garnishee orders because of those arrangements deserves a government that will trace every naira back to its source and account for where it went.

It should be clearly understood that money has DNA and its end users can be traced. This is where the Tiv adage finds full expression: when you pull the tail, the head comes along. Alia is setting himself up for what many may be persuaded to call a witch-hunt when his four years are over, but the questionable contracts are a problem the masses are not seeing now. Those who are potential accomplices should take note. When the time of reckoning comes, the office of the Attorney General of the state would be dragged into it. The procurement office would be dragged into it. All contractors would be dragged into it. All local government chairmen would be dragged into it. At the end, Alia himself would be brought to question. Make no mistake, Alia already has a place in the prison and is only waiting for the time the pronouncement would come. The case of Suswam is far more tolerable than what Alia is currently doing.

Chief Aondoakaa rebuilt his national reputation on exactly that kind of reckoning. Benue is a smaller theatre but the stakes for its people are no less real. The man who defended a nation against an $11 billion fraud is more than equipped to defend a state against its own internal version of the same disease.

The P&ID case taught Nigeria that fraudulent contracts, no matter how cleverly dressed in legal language, can be unwound when the right person is willing to stand up and pull the thread. Benue’s contracts are waiting for that same hand. It is coming.