The Ortom administration which started on May 29, 2015, and will end on May 29, 2023, started with blame games and will end with blame games. At inception, the recession and paucity of funds was the veil, when the country pulled out of the recession, the governor turned his search light on what he called the loot of public funds by the government of Sen. Gabriel Suswam. He later blamed his benefactor and godfather. Even the evil spirits were not spared. Interestingly, at the commissioning of a meager 3.5-kilometer road, barely ten days to the end of his infamous tenure, the same governor blamed paucity of funds as reasons for his inability to complete more projects.
Ortom’s ‘quarrels’ were manifold; first, it was with his predecessor, Gabriel Suswam, which culminated in the setting up of the Justice Elizabeth Kpojime judicial panel of inquiry. Sen. George Akume, Ortom’s benefactor, became the next punching bag. He made unsuspecting Benue people believe that his inability to perform was because he was under the fangs of Sen. Akume. When Akume lost his re-election bid to the Senate, Ortom boasted that he had retired from politics. This battle too, he lost as Akume was shortly appointed a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
