By Sufuyan Ojeifo
The interviews granted by a former governor of Edo State and National
Chair of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole,
to select Television stations, on Friday, September 6, 2019, were
historic because they enabled him respond to sundry questions and to
counter the series of complex narratives woven round the Edo House of
Assembly crisis by the other party.
Oshiomhole’s counter-narratives were downright frank, expansive – and
he threw down the gauntlet, which Obaseki has yet to take up. He brought
clarity to his actions. His grouse about Obaseki and his governance
style was weighty and certainly, the weight of evidence is on
Oshiomohle’s side. His claims against Obaseki and the supporting
evidence have yet to be rebutted by the governor.
Obaseki’s silence is not golden and his dodgy directive to
administration officials not to respond to Oshiomnhole’s claims
doesn’t equate virtue in silence. It is clearly indicative of his
inability to fault Oshiomhole’s claims and counter narratives to the
earlier narrative spun by him and his officials that political leaders
in the state wanted him to share the state’s funds to them.
That was the scurrilous narrative marketed within and outside the state.
It could only have taken a perceptive politician and marathoner to hold
back for long before electing to dismantle the self-imposed culture of
silence or to shed the self-restraining garb. The specific challenge to
Obaseki by Oshiomhole couldn’t be simpler: name the political leaders
pressurising you to share the state’s funds to them.
Media professionals had attempted to insinuate Oshiomhole into the
subject of the allegation, but in a riposte, he had clarified that
Obaseki did not refer to a political leader; therefore, his generic
reference to political leaders could not be construed to refer to him
(Oshiomhole) as a leader. Oshiomhole also countered the narrative that
he was controlling the governor, asserting that he nominated only a
commissioner to the cabinet the governor dissolved in the wake of the
crisis over the nocturnal and controversial inauguration of the state
legislature.
Interestingly, Oshiomhole clarified that Frank Okiye, purportedly
elected Speaker of the House, was not validly elected to the position.
Pressure continues to mount on Obaseki to issue a fresh proclamation for
the proper inauguration of the State Assembly. The governor chose a
desperate course, after failing to produce many of his unpopular
aspirants, as candidates in the 2019 national and state legislative
elections.
Those who secured the tickets of the party through direct primary
election were the popular aspirants that served in the administration of
Oshiomhole with Obaseki and whom he related with as Oshiomhole’s boys.
Oshiomhole had kept mum for so long. Many had said his quietude was not
in _pari-materia_ with his existential, essential activism and public
space disposition. The expressive Iyamho-born politician, who deployed
the singularity of his oratorical prowess in driving the electioneering
of Obaseki in 2016, bided his time unlike Obaseki whose reactions had
always been impulsively aggravating.
Left to Obaseki, he would circumvent leaders and members of the APC
political family in the scheme of things. That was the philosophy that
undergirded his quotidian disposition and perception of APC’s leaders
in the state as being interested only in having government funds shared
to them.
The quixotic demonisation of the APC leaders was Obaseki’s most
ludicrous faux pas. How could the governor, who is the leader of the
party in the state, fail so abysmally to understand the imperative of
managing successes and expectations of members of his political family
to consolidate on the structure? Before his current predilection,
Obaseki’s original plot was to retire a good number of the old
political warhorses and build his own structure of budding politicians.
And, that was his howler: having inherited them, it behoves him to
harvest their electoral assets and their nuisance values, going forward.
Nothing could have been simpler than that. Oshiomhole had already cut
out Obaseki’s job for him by harnessing the potentialities of the
politics and praxis of gladiators whom he galvanized behind his
governorship candidature in 2016. But the governor has complicated an
otherwise simple relationship because of self-interest. In fact,
Obaseki had created the impression that he was not interested in
politics but he is now so enamoured of governorship power, a disposition
that is tantamount to the Chichidodo bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The
Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born”. The Chichidodo bird hates feces,
but loves the maggots therein.
Obaseki has been deploying the governorship power in its vast flourish
to unsettle the APC family and raise the political temperature in the
state. After his gambit to supplant the political structure in the APC
collapsed, he is pathetically progressing in egregious blunders. To be
sure, Obaseki had his own plans and calculations cleverly scripted and
laid-out for implementation. But what he did not factor into his plan
was the emergence of Oshiomhole as national chair of the APC. Had that
not happened, Obaseki’s plan was to rout Oshiomhole and his political
structure.
Before the 2019 general election, Obaseki had, at the level of
governance, desecrated the philosophy of continuity on which Oshiomhole
premised and rationalised his choice as a successor. He had curiously
upended projects and programmes that he inherited from the Oshiomhole
administration in which he played a strategic part as Chair of the
Economic and Strategy Team. Two critical legacy projects: the five-star
Central Hospital in Benin and the Edo Storm Water project- were
unconscionably abandoned.
Blacklisting these two projects, among others, gifted opposition parties
in the state grounds to continue to vilify Oshiomhole and disparage his
administration. It was Obaseki’s plot to turn the people against
Oshiomhole so that he could create a new popularity momentum around
himself. Whereas, what he needed to do was to facilitate the completion
of the outstanding 25 percent component of the hospital project; he
never did so. Secondly, whereas, what he needed to do to maximize the
functionality of the Storm Water Project was to de-silt the drainages so
that flood water can flow through them seamlessly, he never did.
Whereas, that is the essence of continuity in government, Obaseki
scorned the philosophy in furtherance of his blinkered agenda.
Oshiomhole addressed these and other ancillary issues in his media
interviews. First he said there was nothing personal about his
disagreement with Obaseki as they remain friends – Comrade and Goddy –
as the duo address each other. But the issues remain Obaseki’s
constitutional infractions, lack of fidelity to the philosophy of
continuity of Oshiomhole administration’s legacy projects and failure
to constitute boards in order to empower party members and leaders
across the 192 wards in the state – about a year to the end of the
administration to validate the APC and the governor’s re-election.
These claims are very weighty and define the contention in the party?
The weight and precision of the claims were such that Obaseki could not
logically and reasonably discount them through the instrumentality of
“a further and better affidavit”. By heaping the coal of fire on
Obaseki’s head, Oshiomhole had perceptibly redefined the shape,
texture, context and content of the complex politicking and political
narratives around the executive-induced APC crisis in Edo.
Obaseki’s decision to ignore Oshiomhole’s claims had largely
reinforced the truth in them; otherwise, the governor could have
addressed the claims so that the Edo people would be able to make their
inferences. But obviously overwhelmed by the magnitude of
Oshiomhole’s claims, Obaseki would appear to have lost the little
gravitas he hitherto had and has now continued to accentuate his
clumsiness through a rash of discourteous acts towards Oshiomhole at
public functions.
Some pictures have been trending on the social media showing how during
exchanges of pleasantries, Obaseki would sit somewhat comfortably in his
chair to respond to Oshiomhole’s greetings. In another of such
pictures, where he acted the same way, his condescension was made more
glaring by his Deputy, Philip Shaibu, who stood up right beside him, to
pump hands with Oshiomhole. Such disrespect only serves to confirm that
all is not well between Comrade and Goddy. This is the essential weight
of the matter.
· OJEIFO CONTRIBUTED THIS PIECE VIA OJWONDERNGR@YAHOO.COM