A very good high honor and heavyweight title for the Story of the Month award: There is no potable water in Otuoke but ogogoro, the hometown of Goodluck Jonathan, the immediate past president of Nigeria.

But I do not think Elijah Ateki, the chairman of Community Development Committee in that backwater town in Bayelsa State, was trying to add to the former president’s woes when he made that startling disclosure to the News Agency of Nigeria last week. He was only drawing attention to the

sorry state of social infrastructure and standard of living in the town where Jonathan recently built his multi-million naira country home.

“Otuoke community depends on rivers and now that all the rivers are polluted by oil, it is difficult for us to get potable water here,” he told NAN correspondent whose apt headline for the same story, ‘There is no drinking water in Otuoke’, has sensationally drawn attention to the 16 years spent in positions of authority by Jonathan who happened to be a former deputy governor and governor of the same Bayelsa State.

Why should a small town from a ‘minority’ ethnic group that produced the president of Africa’s most populous country be made to suffer this type of neglect?

A youth corps member’s account of the hard times in Jonathan’s hometown is even more gripping: “You will not believe that here in Otuoke, we use water from an unused suck-away pit dug near our lodge for washing clothes and bathing,” she told NAN. “For cooking and drinking, we buy sachet water. We spend the bulk of our monthly allowances on water. We need government’s intervention.”

But which government’s intervention was the young lady referring to? The administration of Seriake Dickson, the Bayelsa State governor, who is believed to have fallen out with the former president’s family, or that of Jonathan himself who had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to touch the lives of his people, particularly his kinsmen in Otuoke, but rather chose to create billionaires that preferred to invest in Port Harcourt, Lagos and Abuja or even overseas?

Or could the ‘youth corper’ be referring to the administration of the self-styled Governor-General of the Ijaw, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who chose an Otuoke ‘intellectual’ as his deputy but is now reading in the newspapers, 16 years later, that the Otuoke son-of-the-soil forgot to provide potable water or have the roads there tarred?


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