Uzodimma and Imo IGR: When Lying Becomes a Hobby By Collins Opurozor

When a supposed leader has nothing to do, idleness makes him do the unthinkable. And when he has nothing to say, lies become inevitable. In search of what to do in office, Chief Hope Uzodinma today again gathered his friends and party members and named them “Imo Stakeholders”. He said to them that he had accomplished the impossible. And, thanks himself, the internally generated revenues (IGR) of Imo had hit N1 billion per month. To emphasize the praiseworthiness of such feat, he told his listeners that the immediate past administration of the Rt. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha handed over an IGR profile of N600 million to him.

On May 5, 2021 this same Uzodinma, not represented by anyone else, was on Channels Television. There, he told the world that N400 million was handed over to him as monthly IGR. It should not surprise anyone if tomorrow he comes up with different figures. The man is now helplessly in a covenant with perfidy and falsehoods. You will be disappointed to expect any truth from him.

Beyond the falsehoods being peddled up and down by a man who has no mite of honor to hold a public office among decent humans, the Ihedioha Administration met the IGR of Imo State at N253.6 million in June 2019 and by December of the same year, the Administration declared N1.1billion as IGR. This was owed chiefly to the regime of fiscal discipline, investor confidence, improved business climate, enabling environment, security and credible governance which summed up the Ihedioha Administration. It is shocking, just as it is embarrassing, that Uzodinma could congregate a people as enlightened as Imo people and reel out lengthy, bare-faced and completely infantile lies before them. Uzodinma must learn to give credit to whom it is due.

But, these false and contradictory IGR figures which he has continued to parade should cause Imo people to ask relevant questions about the way the Omuma-born politician has managed the finances of the State. To be sure, also, his fruitless efforts resort to moonlight tales about the subject under discussion may offer an insight into the ongoing festival of fraud often wrongly called governance in Imo. Yes, if after inheriting a whopping IGR profile of over N1 billion yet Uzodinma willfully hid the true accruals from the people for eighteen months, the big question is: what has happened to the undeclared sums?

Going by his May 5, 2021 statement, that he met just N400 million as monthly IGR, which means from inception he had chosen to underreport the IGR of the State by over sixty percent, Uzodinma urgently owes Imo people explanations. He must tell them the whereabouts of over N10.08 billion which is the sum total of the unreported IGR in eighteen months. And, by his latter confession, that he met N600 million, Uzodinma must also disclose where he kept well over N8.6 billion, which represents the disappeared portion of the IGR under his chaotic reign. The financial hemorrhage going on in Imo is second to none.

In explaining to Imo people how their IGR accruals are being frittered away, Uzodinma should disappoint us for once by telling Imo where his friend and Commissioner for Transport, Rex Anunobi, was caught and arrested, what his offence was, who secured his release, and who went to Magistrate Court 2 at Shell Camp during the JUSUN strike and erased his name and replaced it with that of an innocent bystander. That particular case represents one out of a thousand ways Uzodinma and his cronies have recklessly feasted upon the IGR of Imo State which the Ihedioha Administration laboured to rebuild. This is the reason for the lies. But, in the end, the truth is unimpeachable.