OPINION: The Welder and the Farmer in Dr. Dennis Otuaro, By Enewaridideke Ekanpou

By: Enewaridideke Ekanpou

Chief Dr. Dennis Otuaro is well known in all the communities that make up the Niger Delta. He is a young man from Gbaramatu and Obotebe kingdoms in Delta State who has brought fame to Nigeria right from the day of his appointive engagement as the Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme. Even at the embryonic stage of his engagement, he has already outperformed his older predecessors in the PAP office through his innovative and dedicated touch to all the programmes geared towards the success of the PAP. Dr Otuaro commands a performance success story that outshines Okonkwo of Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In Otuaro one can locate the landmarks of a farmer and welder at work with the right tools.

The Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is multi-faceted. Multi-faceted, the implementation framework of the agenda is pragmatically engaged at various levels by political appointees, ministries, commissions, parastatals, agencies and departments that constitute the Nigerian government.Tinubu needs reliable personalities to drive his Renewed Hope Agenda at the different strata of society so that the masses can feel the impacts of the envisioned and gradually implemented reforms in the economy of Nigeria. Predictably, engagement of reliable personalities would create spaces of honey-like endearment for Mr President in the execution of his transformative policies. Like High Chief Dr. Tompolo and Tantita Security Services Nigeria Limited, Otuaro does exactly this in varied colours and shapes when viewed from observations tied to his pragmatic moves within the confines of the Presidential Amnesty Programme.

Otuaro is a study in multiple performance shapes about whom every observer goes home with a uniquely different story. He is the whale in job-performance whose ‘performance meat’ is inexhaustible and to whom everyone journeys as a dependable supportive frame. He welds humans and resources to Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda with his many programmes. He clears and ploughs a mechanised farm for thousands of Niger Deltans to work on and have a sustainable source of income to negotiate the economic undulations in the country. As a metaphorical welder and farmer he works vigorously for the success of Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda.

Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda is meaningless and unworkable without the performance inputs of Otuaro and others who work from different appointed directions to guarantee the success of it. On scholarship, training, empowerment and human resources development and orientation seminars, Otuaro dishes out the right radiations. He always awakens Niger Deltans to the right path away from restiveness and criminal thoughts because it is only such orientation engagements that can eliminate crude oil theft and pipeline vandalism in Nigeria.

Otuaro always engages his assigned Amnesty work with the professionalism and certainty of a welder with the right tools.He provides the spaces for people to be trained in Nigeria and outside Nigeria depending on the availability of the preferred course of study. These educational spaces are created through rigorous processes that recognise capability and intelligence, without the tendencies of nepotism infused into the exercise. This transparent and merit-based approaches endear Tinubu to Niger Deltans as they are welded to the Renewed Hope Agenda through the capacity-building engagement programmes mapped out in the PAP.

As a welder does his work excellently and expects good results from the welded rods so does Otuaro anticipate great results from his engagement tasks because the capacity-building and educational advancement programmes are seen as welded connecting rods that bring President Tinubu and the Niger Deltans together as progressive partners committed to the success of the Renewed Hope Agenda.

A farmer frequently goes to farm with the right implements to clear and prepare the land for the planting of seeds. A well cleared and ploughed soil quickens seed-germination with a highly productive dance in yields. Like a dedicated farmer, Otuaro has cleared and ploughed large hectares of land for the Amnesty beneficiaries to be differently engaged for their economic and educational advancement. The various empowerment and skills acquisition programmes the Amnesty beneficiaries are exposed to by Otuaro become the equivalent of his envisioned mechanised operations on the cleared and ploughed land for agricultural revolution. For anything Otuaro does in the PAP, he always produces a better version when comparatively viewed against past records of others in similar positions.

In the language of figuration at the job-performance level, Otuaro appears irrevocably glued to an avowal to make the Renewed Hope Agenda ring transformative bells at the grass roots level so that the impacts of Tinubu’s visible reforms in monetary and fiscal policies, oil and gas sectors of the Nigerian economy can be felt in positive dimensions. Both as a welder and farmer on job-performance, as metaphorically attested to by Otuaro’s principled approach to the Presidential Amnesty Programme, even the children of socially inhibited and degraded parents who have no privileged connecting rods at the corridors of power are offered spaces of participation in the scholarship programmes. The principled devotedness of Dr. Otuaro parallels welders and farmers who do their work excellently.

In job-performance Otuaro cuts the image of a welder and farmer. As a welder and farmer, Dennis Otuaro has become a dependable vehicle of President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda.

Well-built, sophisticated and dependable vehicles are needed for the transportation of Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda in Nigeria. Otuaro has one of such sophisticated vehicles purposely built to do both the work of a welder and farmer in his various PAP engagement programmes. If Dr. Otuaro drives Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda through metaphorically varied clothes of a welder and farmer, teleguided narratives created to demarket Otuaro and render him jobless before the statutory expiration of his tenure are a mere envy-laden diversion likely to make him more popular as the Amnesty boss with a clear vision and mission.The canoe of Otuaro will never never recede to nautical miles of obscurity however the proliferation of teleguided negative narratives on the Amnesty boss.

Dr. Ekanpou writes from Akparemogbene, Delta State