2
At the socio-economic rate of things in the Nigerian nation of today, it is safe to conclude that the visit of Vice President Kashim Shettima to Ukanafun local government area in Akwa Ibom on December 6, 2025 is still having the trapping of billionaire, if not trillionaire status. It is not because the former General Manager at Zenith bank may have billions in bank saves comfortably waiting for his directives. It has nothing either to do with the fact that the palm oil-rich Ukanafun has potentials to turn out billions on daily basis.
The Vice President’s visit has a historic reckoning in that it has made a first-of-a-kind record – the first time a second person in Nigeria’s leadership hierarchy visited Ukanafun. The closest a federal government official pay a working visit to Ukanafun, not on political junketing, was in the late 1980s by Prof Olikoye Ransome Kuti, then minister of health under Ibrahim Babangida administration. It was a follow-up to designation of Ukanafun health centre as UNICEF-recognised primary healthcare facility for eradication of what was then called six-killer diseases. Ukanafun was among few local government areas in the country then that achieved such a record.
That was when local government system in Nigeria was still functioning optimally for local governance. A clap of hands, though posthumously, should go to Nnamso Idiong, who was then the supervisory councilor for health and social welfare under the credible performing government of Asuquo Akpan. The world-renowned pediatrician, who had a robust relationship with public office holders in the ministries, departments and agencies across the country’s three tiers of government, came to see things for himself.
Shettima, an unassuming intellectual, who levels elitism by identifying with the highflyers and the hoi-polloi, came to witness a newsworthy event of N1 billion being sliced equally to 1000 people of Ukanafun and Oruk-Anam local government areas, which make up Ukanafun/Oruk Anam constituency, represented at the National Assembly by a man of Midas touch called Unyime Idem. The event, which had a tumultuous crowd akin to Messianic crusade, was the 2025 edition of Unyime Idem’s empowerment programme. Beyond the historical significances, Shettima’s visit has huge political advantage to the All Progressive Congress, APC, which is now reaping from who and where it did not sow.
Another person of billionaire status that graced the event was entrepreneur Don Etiebet, an APC stalwart, who started making billions in more than one currency from entrepreneurship at a time the wealth of the then young Unyime was not beyond a single naira digit through petty trading that he combined with his primary school education then. Being the first time that the ICT guru attended such an outing, also speaks volume of gigantic size of the empowerment event and broad spectrum of people with heartily disposition to it.
Since 2019 that he has been in the lower chamber of Nigeria’s legislative house, Representative Idem has steadily warmed himself into the hearts of the people – even far beyond his fellow constituents. His periodic empowerment schemes, which he has religiously kept date with, have been in the foursome approaches of monetary grants, economic tools, trainings and securing of jobs. They have been of immense touch on the lives of thousands of the people.
Before rolling out his series of economic empowerment projects to the people, the fifth representative of Ukanafun/Oruk Anam since 1999 has made a paradigm shift in the representation of the people of the constituency. In less than a year of being in the parliament, he sponsored five bills and moved five motions. Considering that the voices of his predecessors seemed to have been set on mute, I had described his about ten months in the legislature then as “Breaking of 20-year jinx” in the New Telegraph of April 12, 2020. That led to his being nicknamed “Jinx-Breaker”.
With not less than 20 bills, over 20 motions and several contributions to deliberations on the plenary of the House of Representatives, as well as his salient takes on critical matters, including presiding, at committee level, Idem has given a noticeable voice to Ukanafun/Oruk Anam. So, through one person’s voice, the gloomy era of Ukanafun/Oruk Anam has been put into oblivion, making the constituents to be glowing with pride over the constituency’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity to pre-eminence in the national scheme of things.
If Idem is to be sampled to freshers, learning the functions of legislature and that of the executive, the students would most likely be confused. Recently, the chairman of the public procurement committee in the House of Representatives donated 25 units of high-quality transformers to 24 wards in the federal constituency. With that development, over five years of power outage occasioned by breakdown of electricity infrastructure is about to abate.
Indeed, there should be no confusion, as the primary function of a legislator remains lawmaking laws for implementation by the executives and interpretation by the judiciary. Delving into project execution is self-task responsibility of a lawmaker. Such extra-schedule may be informed by the pressing needs to close gaps for the executive. At the instance of Ukanafun and Oruk Anam local government areas, the executive at whatever level of government the responsibility falls into, has lost a big mark while Idem has got a big bonus.
From the look of things, Unyime, whose name implies acceptance or willingness, may not have intention of getting marks from the executives’ loss of marks. He appears to be driven by the will to make differences from the past by filling gaps of failures and giving quantum leaps to the less privileged in his constituency. By getting extra marks from extra works, there is no doubting, therefore, that Idem has performed beyond what is expected of a legislator that he is.
N1 million each in 1, 000 hands, across all villages in one federal constituency, from one hand at one fell swoop on that one Saturday remains whopping and unprecedented in the part of the globe that the exercise was done, hence its newsworthiness beyond the moment! Although the APC-led federal government has, for more than ten years now, brought naira, even in millions, to its nadir, making millions of surviving Nigerians to strenuously struggle for survival, a million naira when given to a deserving hand can still move certain mountains and leapfrog the impoverished from poverty to prosperity.
In what is not far from the usualness, there has been grumbling and glowing over the N1 billion empowerment. Grumbling about those who ought not to benefit from it and those who should have been included but were not included. Glowing about those considered to have rightly merited the list because of their merciful economic fortunes. In the view of this writer, these four categories of people should not have made the list: persons who benefited through proxies; those who have potentials to make, and have been making, millions; the politicos who have been making huge fortune from the system; and those who have rendered services to the parliamentarian ought to be handsomely or beautifully paid but should not be rewarded through such platform.
While parliamentarian Idem can be exculpated, most political elites, who keep demonstrating that greed is ingrained in their character, cannot be exonerated. Another great mark is that whatever apparent loopholes are deployed by critics against the Jinx-breaker, his mannerism of tackling criticism has never been adversarial. Rather he keeps scaling up through act of learning, re-learning and unlearning, even to the consternation of nitpickers and adversaries. Unfortunately, one of the ironies of Nigerian politics that seems to trail Unyime is that the higher the performance of a political officer holder the more the green-eyed monsters, curiously from within the same political party.
Irrespective of whatever dos and don’ts might have been adduced to have characterized the N1 billion grants, the computation of the totality of what made up Idem’s 2025 empowerment, through the guide of history and contemporary occurrences, will indicate at the end point that a billionaire benchmark representation has been made. The benchmark has since become a conventional parameter through which other representatives of the people within and outside the constituency are being assessed. But Idem should not expect to escape from being measured by the new standard he is setting. His further works in the public arena will also be subjected to the billionaire benchmark.
Having achieved such a high pedestal of performance from the lower rung of the country’s legislative house, Unyime, at the moments should resist the urge to climb higher on the political leadership. The good point is that there is no constitutional term limitation to a parliamentarian, as far as his decision to continue to represent the people gets the mandate of the people at the polls. It is also gratifying that party-based politics has a tradition of allowing an incumbent political office holder the right of first refusal at party level during periodic electioneering processes. It would, therefore, be invidious and inimical, if not an affront, to parliamentary progress and intention of the letters and spirit of the constitution, if Idem decline to step up to continue in representing the people of Ukanafun/Oruk Anam in Abuja.
Ekanem sent this piece through [email protected]
