Over the last few weeks, something has been sitting heavily on my mind: two observations that I believe are worth putting on paper, because they speak directly to where Akwa Ibom State is, where it is going, and who among us is genuinely invested in its journey.
The first is this: you cannot reason rationally with an angry person. You can try. You can bring facts, figures, logic, and goodwill to the table. You can present your case with patience and precision. But none of it will land. An angry person has already decided what they believe, and every piece of evidence you offer only confirms what they want to see. At that point, you are better off talking to a wall, because at least the wall won't misquote you.
I have made peace with this. Not because I am indifferent to contrary opinions, but because I have learned that not every argument is worth having, and not every critic deserves a response. Some battles are won by continuing to work, not by continuing to argue.
The second observation, however, is the one that genuinely concerns me, and it should concern you too.
Not everyone advocating for good governance actually wants good governance.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. We assume that the voices loudest about accountability, development, and people-centred leadership are the ones most committed to those ideals. But lived experience, particularly in Akwa Ibom's political space, has taught me otherwise.
The truth is that the number of people who truly want things to work, who wake up every day genuinely invested in the progress of this state, far outnumber those who have positioned themselves as advocates for the same cause but are motivated by something else entirely: financial interest, political positioning, or personal vendettas dressed up as public concern.
And here is why this second category is dangerous: they are harder to identify. They speak the right language. They post the right things. They show up at the right events. In the short term, it is almost impossible to tell them apart from the genuine ones. In fact, it becomes very easy for them to become the loudest voices on morality, simply because they are unencumbered by the complexity of actually wanting results.
But time is always the great revealer.
These so-called advocates of good governance inevitably begin to unravel. And in my experience, I say this with full confidence because I have it on good authority, the unravelling almost always happens close to elections. Watch the space. You will see it for yourself.
We saw a version of this as far back as the 2023 elections, when some of these self-appointed voices of conscience began openly campaigning for an incarcerated man to become governor of Akwa Ibom State. Let that sink in. People who had spent months lecturing us about accountability, rule of law, and good governance were simultaneously asking us to hand over the leadership of our state to someone behind bars. The contradiction was staggering. But it told us everything we needed to know about the true motivations beneath the noise.
Meanwhile, the man who actually took office, Governor Umo Eno, got to work. And that is worth saying plainly, not as flattery, but as a point of contrast that the political atmosphere in Akwa Ibom rarely allows people to make honestly.
Governance is not glamorous work. It is procurement delays and contractor disputes. It is bureaucratic resistance and competing priorities. It is making decisions with incomplete information and being held responsible for outcomes you only partially control. The people who have actually sat inside that process understand this. The people performing outrage from the outside rarely do.
What separates a government that is genuinely trying from one that is not is not the absence of problems; every administration has problems. It is whether the direction of movement is honest and whether the people at the helm are accountable to something beyond their own interests. Those are the questions worth asking, and they require patience, observation, and a willingness to update your views based on evidence rather than emotion.
These are not perfect programmes. No government's work ever is. But they are real. They are visible. They are the product of governance actually being done, not performed for an audience, but executed for a people.
And that distinction matters enormously.
Because here is what I want to say directly to the advocates, the real ones and the performative ones alike:
If you genuinely believe there is a better path for Akwa Ibom, then show us. Not at the last minute. Not in the heat of election season when you have already made your deals and set your positioning. Show us now. Present your alternative on time, so that the people who look up to you, who trust your voice, can scrutinise it properly. Give them the respect of time and transparency.
I know your plans. Make them known to the people you claim to serve, on time, openly, without the theatre.
The people of Akwa Ibom deserve advocates who are consistent regardless of the political weather. They deserve voices that are not suddenly silent when power changes hands or suddenly loud when opportunity knocks. They deserve honest, sustained commitment, not seasonal performance.
As Governor Umo Eno's administration continues to lay the foundations that the ARISE Agenda promises, the question each of us must answer honestly is simple: are we here for Akwa Ibom, or are we here for ourselves?
The answer will become very clear. It always does.
May God bless our Akwa Ibom State.