Why Okene Is Important

By Aliyu Bello
Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept civil strife in the guise of festivities and cultural celebrations, and wondered aloud why life was so confusing. Today, there is a similar challenge over the question of whether we can have a civilised society as seen elsewhere, where order is permanent and criminality is abhorred and punished; where children go to school without the fear of molestation; elders feel free to socialise and were accepted by the society they toiled hard to build; where businesses fear no interference by untoward influences that often lead to their disruption and where the government is responsible for the needs of the governed. We can no longer shield our society from the force of modernity that has challenged our very existence.


Incidentally, we are products of this difficult past. We start off infinitely plastic and we are formed by the society in which we grow up. However, what we take to be the problems today are just the deep-dug prejudices of our own society. Raising families, belonging to a clan, competing for few opportunities, seeing the vagaries of rituals, dancing in the dark instead of being afraid of it and jumping at the sight of a smoking gun are just the result of our conditioning. So, by what stretch of imagination do we believe these problems can be overcome? As it is now, the waywardness of the misguided youths has robbed Okene of its originality and pride of place. Despite effort by its committed leaders to project the image of the community it often comes off as unbalanced in the least.

Okene is undoubtedly the most densely populated town in Kogi State. Its bustling movie industry has set the place ahead with other areas casting envious look at its achievements. It is a multi-million naira industry that has the potential to bring back Ebiras in diaspora back home. It is sold to Ebiras to continue the debate about our existence right in our homes. The characters are shadowy and do not at all times represent modernity. Industry experts like Isah Ozi Ihiavi complained to me that the movies need to be shot with more professional touch to give it an international appeal. After that, it can become one of those movie magic viewed by world wide satellite TV audience. If the movie industry can bring back our glory, we must embrace it with open arms.


Okene itself is a large local government area with a geographical area of 328,000 hectares, and the second most populated council area in Kogi, having over two million people living in a variety of social, economic and geographic conditions. In the midst of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution, a vast majority of areas in the vicinity of the council continues to be unreached or its people marginalised. Even though the mobile revolution has reached the rural areas up to certain extent, the connectivity towards education, healthcare using the internet requires attention. According to recent statistics in the health sector, the bed-population ratio in Okene is 1:1100 against the ideal of 1:500 or less. The distribution of medical consultants in Okene indicates that almost 65 per cent is located in private clinics and 33 per cent in government hospitals and only around 2 per cent in rural health centres.


Specialist doctors working in urban areas and the privileged one in private practice are reluctant to relocate themselves to government or rural areas. As a result specialist services to the rural areas like Okene-Eba, Agassa, Ukpogoro, and many other places have become difficult. Education in the rural area is yet another area of concern. While there are current encouraging signals from the young population where 8 of every 10 is educated, the over half a million adult population are illiterate. Therefore, it has become very difficult to address problems of social amenities and welfare among this aged population. Out of 1 million children with the age group of 6-14, about 520,000 are in government schools where attention to teaching still leaves much to be desired. In this scenario, the number of pupils per teacher is around 51. More recently, as in our collective endeavours, human development paradigms have come into play where education is valued by all. Here, the emphasis is on building "freedoms"; the capacity of individual to make and implement choices that uplift their lives. So, the question now is how government can guarantee individual choice to happiness and prosperity using education to create opportunity for all.

Nearly a million natives of Okene live in the villages in and outside Ebira land and they depend on natural resources and agriculture for their livelihood. Agriculture is the main occupation for most of the people in the villages. They are the homes to largest number of the poor, marginalised, illiterate and malnourished Ebiras in Ekiti, Ondo and Kogi States. What deprives them to grow is the lack of basic amenities and services, especially those related to education, health and empowerment. What is needed is an interactive solution enabling them - to have a say in what they do and how they grow, to have access to the newer opportunities and to provide them with the right technology and information they need to improve their overall quality of life. This must begin first at home and that is why Okene is indeed important..

Bello is a journalist based in Abuja