The governorship contender on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ahead 2027 general elections in Benue State, Chief Bemgba Iortyom, in this interview offers reasons why he wants to succeed incumbent governor of the state, Rev. Father Hyacinth lormem Alia. Iortyom who is the immediate past Publicity Secretary of the PDP in Benue State said he has prepared himself for a long time for the job. He also bared his mind on some other issues affecting the state. CEPHAS IORHEMEN reports

You have thrown your hat into the ring to contest the 2027 governorship election to succeed Governor Hyacinth Alia. However, people see you as someone’s forerunner or a spoiler. How do you react to that?
The few who might hold such a view of me as anyone’s forerunner are those who have little or no knowledge of my person, my pedigree and my antecedents. I have prepared myself to run for Governor for quite some time. I have gone about it deliberately, yet quietly. I have armed myself with in-depth knowledge of the Benue society, particularly its lower echelons. I have connected myself with the people in a way and manner that has rooted deeply into the grassroots of the state. I am not a mercenary in politics, but I am a development crusader who has worked all his adult life to harness the opportunities that politics hold and to deploy same to the upliftment of the quality of life available to the ordinary people. There is not one single person who will run for Governor of Benue State in 2027 that will come better prepared than I am.

So, who is that person that I am forerunning for?
All I am asking the leaders and faithful of the PDP to do is give me the party’s Governorship ticket for the 2027 race and I will lead the charge to return the party to Government House Makurdi. The Benue electorate are waiting for me, and I am fully aware of that. I have prepared myself adequately for this opportunity and the people of Benue State are equally prepared, 2027 represents a breakthrough to the state with me as Governor.

What are your antecedents?
My antecedents are predicated on a number of planks. First, I am a practicing Christian whose belief pattern and worldview is based on the fear of a Supreme God Almighty as the creator of all things. From that belief, I take bearing in all I do and in my relationship with fellow humans.
And that leads directly to the second plank, which is my being a community-oriented activist and developer. I have a deep passion for the well-being of my neighbour, in line with the scriptural injunction to “love your neighbour as yourself”. I have committed the better part of my adult life to the quest for development of my community. I see myself as a local village man from Mbagba in Ushongo Local Government Area of Benue State. I have used the social collateral I have amassed through the course of my life sojourn to attract development projects to my local community. My conviction is that if you fix the life, giving opportunities in the villages, you would have brought about a more practical real-time quality of development. I believe that the government has for too long neglected the rural areas in an urban centric preoccupation. If I am Governor, I will change all of that. I will be a rural centric governor.
Thirdly, I have been a media practitioner with a decent track record in that field of endeavour, mostly with the community-based pen fraternity in Benue State. I had cut my teeth as a pen pusher with The Alternative Newspaper in 2006 and rose to Managing Editor before going on a Leave of Absence to take up appointment as a Legislative Assistant in the National Assembly to Hon. Barr. Chille Igbawua who represented Kwande/Ushongo Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011. I then afterwards published my own community tabloid, The Umpire Newspaper, from 2012 to 2014 before going back again into active partisan politics to work with Prof. Gabriel Tivlumun Nyitse who was running for the 2015 Governorship of Benue State as Director Media and Publicity of his campaign. This aspect of my antecedents directly dovetails into my active political pedigree.
In 2016, I was elected to the office of State Publicity Secretary of the PDP) and won re-election to a second term in the same office in 2020, serving out two terms of cumulatively eight years. As it stands now, there is no village in Benue State, no matter how small, that there won’t be found a good number of the inhabitants to whom the name Bemgba Iortyom is known. As a result, those eight years served to take care of the introduction part of my ambition. Every political ambition consists in the introduction of the aspirant and the actual race.
Then on another plank, I recently graduated as a lawyer, and this is a massive weapon in my arsenal for the governorship race. Being equipped with knowledge of the law deepens considerably my capacity to tackle the problems associated with the arrears of underdevelopment in the state. There are quite a lot of issues of our quest for development as a state which are rooted in right application of the rule of law. The current administration has shown such a shocking disdain for the requirements and tenets of due process and rule of law. That cannot be found with one knowledgeable in the law. As governor, I will bring back the train of governmental administration to the tracks of due process and rule of law. Only through adherence to the dictates of due process and rule of law can there be put in place sustainable development.

Do you have enough resources to prosecute your governorship ambition?
I have all the resources needed to successfully prosecute the ambition of my governorship of Benue State in 2027. The social resources, the material resources and my pedigree are all intact. As I had pointed out earlier, I am solidly grounded within the party, both in Benue State and at the national levels. I have amassed a huge war chest in terms of the social collateral available to me. A position as massive as the governorship is a stake holding position. It must be built by people of like-minds coming together to pool their resources in all forms to win it. It is not an individual enterprise. I am properly groomed and prepared as a person, and I am securely connected in the right places and all through the structures of society to run this race. I do not have a problem with resources.

But your party doesn’t seem to be interested in returning to power in the state, come 2027, because of the internal crisis that has shredded the party to pieces. How do you overcome that?
There is nothing happening in the PDP in Benue State and at the national level that is alien to the extant political culture of Nigeria. What anyone may see as the party being “shredding to pieces” is only a circle running, and it is not exclusive to our great party. Once a party takes power, it immediately moves to weaken the party it considers as its major opponent at the next round of elections. It has happened to PDP; it has happened to APC. It’s nothing new. But at the time the electoral contest is ripe, alignment and realignment of forces takes place for the emergence of the victors and the vanquished.
Is the APC even as the ruling party not having its own internal problems? Isn’t the situation in PDP a replica of that in the APC, both in Benue State and at the national level? The same appearances of fractionalization you have in one party is replicated in the other. In Benue, you have the Alia faction of APC and that of the Abuja based leaders of the party. They are like cat and dog. The governor insults the Abuja based people as “Ubokoti Mbaiorov” meaning empty noise making vessels, and accuses them of all manner of ills including writing letters to invite killer Fulani herdsmen to the state. In Abuja, former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El Rufai just left the APC and joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and is loudly lambasting the ruling party, urging everyone to leave it and join him in the SDP. But that is politics the way it is played in our societal setup on the contemporary basis. PDP will get its acts right when the time is ripe. The chicken will all come home to roost when dusk is at hand.

There appears to be some problems retarding the progress of Benue State? What do you think these problems are?
Insecurity. Fix insecurity in Benue State and you would have fixed more than half of the problems afflicting the state presently. Insecurity has taken away the capacity of the ordinary resident of Benue to pursue their livelihoods. More than half of the rich arable land resources of the state are currently inaccessible to the people. People who were once successfully fending for themselves and their families are now marooned in camps for displaced persons and living in destitution. Their ancestral lands have been taken over by killer herdsmen. Many lost loved ones to the herdsmen; many families had their breadwinners taken away cruelly. Insecurity has disfigured the life of the ordinary Benue man, woman and child in such painful ways as can only be imagined. Insecurity is at the root of the poverty and hardship currently bedeviling Benue State. Do away with insecurity and you would have freed Benue State from the shackles of slavery.

What is your vision for the state if elected governor in 2027?
I have a well-thought-out vision to free the rural communities of Benue State from poverty and backwardness through deliberate interventions in the areas of infrastructure, social amenities and socio-cultural re-orientation. I have already stated that my administration will be rural-centric as a departure from the current trend which is urban-centric in preoccupation.
Through the infrastructural linkages of massive rural roads construction, I will link up every party of the state, I mean linking up every one of the 276 wards of the state to one another through quality feeder roads. This is doable. Roads are a weapon against insecurity. Insecurity is thriving in most parts of Benue State due to inadequate access to even deploy security intervention. Going hand in hand with the road construction will be rural electrification. The base vision here is to empower the rural people through the provision of the critical enablement they need to be able to work to harness the wealth creation opportunities around them. I will give the sort of attention to the rural areas that will uplift the quality-of-life conditions there and make them attractive enough to halt urban migration which is rooted in the decaying quality of life in the villages.