A Tithe for Pastor Umo Eno: The Unfortunate Incident in Ikot Ekpene and the Battle Against Old Habits

A Tithe for Pastor Umo Eno: The Unfortunate Incident in Ikot Ekpene and the Battle Against Old Habits

By Celestine Mel

I have barely finished laughing one of those deep, belly-shaking laughs that reset the soul after reading Sahara Reporters’ latest so-called “exclusive.” Their startling revelation is that Pastor Umo Eno, Governor of Akwa Ibom State, has been deducting tithes from the salaries of his personal assistants. Not the biblical ten percent that even Sunday school children know by heart, but an otherworldly fifteen percent. According to this tale, Akwa Ibom’s payroll has now been converted into a celestial collection plate.

The absurdity is so glaring it does not require the mental gymnastics of Einstein’s cousin to unravel. The story is riddled with gaps wide enough for a convoy of elephants to pass through. What was once a platform of courage has reduced itself to the comic relief of our political theatre.

I do not speak lightly. There was a time when Sahara Reporters was fire and fury in Nigeria’s democratic struggle. In the twilight years of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (God bless his soul), when a cabal held the nation hostage and mainstream media pawned its conscience for crumbs, Sahara Reporters was the gadfly that would not let tyranny rest. They brought truth into our living rooms with the relentlessness of a village witch and the sting of an angry wasp. They streamed the darkness of Yar’Adua’s mortal midnight return into Nigeria, when even the runway lights at Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport were mysteriously switched off. In those days, Sahara Reporters was the conscience of the republic.

I remember my own encounter in 2009 when I wrestled with institutional corruption. I reached out to Omoyele Sowore, and he listened. He was thunderous, fearless, a rock that would not bend. That is why it wounds me today to see his platform descend into the gutter, trading its hard-earned credibility for clickbait dressed in cassock.

Let us humor their claim for a moment. A tithe has always been, and will always be, ten percent. It is immutable. Ten percent is to tithe what oxygen is to breath. Anything outside that is yam pottage without yam. Therefore, a payslip showing a tithe deduction of fifteen percent should have triggered alarm bells in the newsroom. But Sahara Reporters, with journalistic haste but unusual intellectual poverty, rushed to publish fiction.

Beyond that, every student of government knows governors do not process salaries. Salaries are paid electronically through civil service systems with audit trails more visible than footprints on wet sand. To imagine that such phantom deductions could be laundered into an offertory basket without detection is to believe that the sun can be hidden under a basket.

The Commissioner for Information, Rt. Hon. Aniekan Umanah, has already dismantled this tissue of lies. Appointees themselves have confirmed the deductions in question are statutory PAYE taxes. End of story.

Yet, a deeper question rises: who is orchestrating this smear campaign against Pastor Umo Eno, and to what end? If an aide is dissatisfied with his pay, the honorable thing is resignation, not the peddling of poison. If a similar pre-election “tithe story” did not bend his initial election in 2023 when he had not shown the good works that he is doing now, then I bet, it can only amount to more nothings, this time.. They should try harder.

The Ikot Ekpene Tragedy

Even before the laughter from the phantom tithe story could die in our throats, dawn broke with grief. A woman registered for antenatal at General Hospital, Ikot Ekpene went into labor. Complications set in with horrendous antepartum bleeding. The doctors had unconscionably closed shop because it was the weekend. Hours rolled by as blood gushed. There was no one to open the theatre; no urgent referral; no hands stretched to save her. The emergency ambulance stationed at the Hospital by Pastor Umo Eno had no instructions from anywhere to evacuate the dying helpless woman. At last, death entered like a thief, and another mother was lost in childbirth.

Anyone who knows me, knows my reverence for the dignity of women. To lose a woman in childbirth is to extinguish two lights in one stroke: the mother and the unborn child. Our forebears captured it in a proverb: “when the hen dies laying eggs, the barn loses both mother and offspring.”

I learned from the Commissioner for Health, Dr. Emmanuel Ekem, that he rushed to the hospital at midnight when he heard the news, carrying grief like a weight. The governor himself kept vigil until almost 4 a.m., seeking succor for the bereaved family and answers to the negligence. A panel of inquiry is being convened today. But what panel can erase the cries of a husband watching his wife bleed to death, or two children left behind, staring into a tomorrow without a mother?

And yet, out of the ashes of grief rises resolve. Pastor Umo Eno is not a leader who shirks responsibility or hides behind excuses. He knows that healthcare in Akwa Ibom is the right of citizens. That is why he birthed the Health Insurance Scheme that has drawn multitudes into the hospital system, exposing both the hunger for care and the fragility of the infrastructure. His response is not cosmetic. He had earlier authorized the recruitment of 1,000 new doctors, a figure unprecedented in the state’s history. He is expanding nursing schools, refurbishing dilapidated hospitals, purchasing diagnostic equipment, and retraining medical staff. The forgotten Community Health Center in Midim my community is one of 31 Model Health Centers, spread across the 31 LGAs. He is building them from scratch to extend access to the rural unreached population. Yet, he knows that the greatest battle is not just against scarcity of facilities, equipment or personnel, but against the culture of negligence that has festered for decades in the hearts and minds of a few of the health professionals. The governor has made it clear: one cannot swear the Hippocratic Oath in the morning and abandon patients by nightfall. The death in Ikot Ekpene is not only a tragedy; it is a line drawn in the sand. Negligence will be punished.

I have learned from the Health Commissioner, himself an activist within the medical industry who battled injustice to a standstill, that incentives are being improved just as the mechanisms for discipline are leaving no one in doubt. Apathy will no longer be tolerated, he said. The health sector must be rebuilt not only in brick and mortar but in the conscience of its practitioners.

On his part, Pastor Umo Eno knows this is a generational battle. He knows brain drain continues to siphon talent, morale is low, and inherited rot runs deep. Yet he has chosen to sharpen his cutlass like the farmer facing a stubborn forest, hacking away until light breaks through. He may not sit under the iroko tree he plants today, but he has resolved to plant it nonetheless. For when a society saves its mothers, it saves its future.

Final Musings

So, in the span of a week, we were offered both farce and tragedy. One was a comedy of errors, the phantom tithe. The other, a calamity, the needless death of a mother and her unborn. Together, they reveal the paradox of governance in Nigeria: a leader battling malicious rumor on one hand and inherited decay on the other.

Pastor Umo Eno carries a heavy cross. But his burden should not be made heavier by manufactured lies. If he must be judged, let it be on the battleground of reform, where lives hang in the balance. Condolences to the bereaved family and godspeed to the reforms.

We must rise…..

Celestine Mel writes from Abuja, FCT.