PRESENTLY, it isn’t well with Mr. Godwin Nogheghase Obaseki, the outgoing governor of the state. It is same with his die-hard followers, the ‘Torgbas’ (a.k.a. 4 + 4 = Ogbane!) mob. Somewhat, it comes to a bad news for they who held onto the yam tuber and the knife. They have fallen out of reconing, because they lost the meal ticket to Edo government house, and are now stranded. The perks, pomposity and carefreeness they once wielded are no more.
For the coveted governorship, which they had handled with self-centeredness and .vaunting pride, had been stripped off them and pushed to another, Senator Monday Okpebholo (a k a. Akpakomiza), the governor-elect, the very man, Obaseki and his Vuvuzela supporters dubbed a dumb and a village man. They also called him ‘Iron Bender’, a mockery which writer’s would call an anti-thesis, in that an iron bender is all needed to bend or spoil ‘Emanton’ the stubborn ‘Iron piece’, which yields to nothing else. Senator Okpebholo of the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), party, is the new Sheriff in Town, who came to be Obaseki’s nemesis
Henceforth, Mr Obaseki and his brigades will no longer sing ‘Joromi’, a winning song of the superhuman, who wrestled down the ‘Ighele Erinmwin’, the spirit-beings, to the dusts and disdain.
There was (is) intensed weeping, wailing and gnashing of the teeth from the governor’s camp, because of the tragic loss of their ‘farmland and honeycomb’. When one’s farmland is taken over by others and there is scanty or no means to bargain with “sellers of the elephant’s meat, there is a certainty of a prolonged hunger and unassuaged thirst.
For, the metamorphosis of Mr. Obaseki and his followers, is a tragic reminder of what the Edo residents once told ex-governor Lucky Igbinedion, which until recently was similarly spat on the dust to for the outgoing to decipher. “Eight years in governorship power is not forever”.
And the revered monarch, Ewuare (Ogidigan) II, the Oba of Benin, in his sagacity, made it simpler in his now-widespread admonition of the governor and his now estranged deputy governor, Rt. Hon Philip Shaibu, that life, after all, exists after being a governor and a deputy.
And it goes in the similitude with one of my earlier articles, ‘Governor Obaseki: Power is a Mistress’. The piece, apart from quoting some psychoanalysts, had equated the reasonability of Pa Eduwu Osawe (a.k.a BBC), a late ballad of my village, who once told a razor-edge satire, that power is an intoxicant likened to a flirtatious mistress, who hooks on, but only in a little while, before shifting to another man.
Governor Obaseki had had uncanny brainwaves and a tendency to rolling up his sleeves to originate deadly fights with real and imagined foes. This was his government’s benchmark policy of a blundering era of burnt bridges and wastage of government’s man-hours and taxpayers monies.
One week, one trouble! Edo and the world were scandalized about the many fights of the governor, with his illegal inauguration and supplant of a ten-man State House of Assembly, instead of twenty four. And he baited no eyelid as they the majority 14 were permanently excluded in a law-making process of the state. Unfazed, he shifted to another prolonged spat with Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, his predecessor and one who brought him to power.
He soon fell out with the revered Oba of Benin, over the ownership of repatriated Benin artifacts, even though the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture, the vested authority, had earlier sealed his fate, when it finally gazetted and willed it to the Oba and the Benin, the aboriginal and authentic owner.
The end-implication of the Obaseki’s intermittent spats, was the disruption of the Ombudsman institutions and individuals, so long it permitted stranglehold of the state, where window-dressing projects, policy summersaults, brigandage, vendetta, lawlessness, community’s land grabs, unbridled use of tax payers fund and all what-not, became a makeshift or expedient policy. And Edo was conquered.
Having had a premonition, of an evil conduct of the 2024 election, long before the governor told the public it was going to be a “do or die’, that bothered on treason, I wrote another piece, regarding the election as a ‘Filaga-Filogo”, a prolonged street fights where guns, battle axe and deadly other cudgels are in free use (with an apology to Igodomigodo Patrick Obayagbon’s coinage).
Shortly, the world was later shocked stiffed at the governor’s blurted threats that that a nationwide pogrom of great magnitude would spread from Edo, should the 21st September, 2024 election be rigged. It illustrates the governor’s double-speak and split individualism, where he has now gone to the court, instead of going violent, even now that he claimed the election was rigged
Before this treasonable pronouncement, by which the governor could not be prosecuted, because of the governorship immunity that covered him, a police inspector, Onu Akoh, was shot to death in broad daylight by unknown gunmen, allegedly by the governor’s supporters, with some men of the state-owned Security Network, the vigilantes.
The latest boasting spree of the embattled governor, is calling off as a bluff, the arrests and detention of his accountant general and four other treasury officers of his government, by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), over alleged financial fraud, which entwines the governor, as the principal accomplish.
A hunters boasts at home is not always repeated before the elephant, in the jungle. It is no longer news that the governor usually feigns a courageous face, which is only the ‘guilt bravado, according to John Conrad, the notable British essayist.
I, with KEVA, the NGO that I established, was the first ever to drag a sitting governor to a then newly-founded EFCC. It was in account that Ex-Governor Igbinedion’s vicarious handling of competition and medical treat of about 3,000 victims of the year 2001 burnt victims of kerosene/petrol explosion. Chief Igbinedion, who the Obaseki has surpassed as the worst governor in Edo memory. Igbinedion and his government had laughed if off that the dreaded anti-graft agency wouldn’t show up. But, when it breezed into Edo for the investigation, Edo government house and offices were shut down
Still, this time around, our NGO and some of our civil society coalition, had also dragged the governor, some government officers to the EFCC. Some of his business associates, especially the ‘spiderman’, who is bent on succeeding him, would also sweat it out. He will never be a governor, when he as an accomplish in the ruination of the state, where he had pledged to continue with his master’s tainted legacy.
Tufiakwa, as the Ibo people would intone. It will never be!
Tony Erha, a journalist and rights activist, reaches you from Abuja
