My dear Owanlen,
I hope that you are getting your well-deserved rest and that this meets you well. I just want to bring you up to speed with political developments in Edo State. In less than 24 hours, the electorate will troop out to vote to elect the next governor of the state. I know that this will be of great interest to you because, while you were here with us, you played a lead role in the governorship recruitment process in our dear state. Your imprimatur was evident in the 1983 governorship election victory of General Samuel Ogbemudia on the platform of the National Party of Nigeria. You would replicate the same mojo in the 1991/1992 governorship election victory of Chief John Odigie-Oyegun on the platform of the Social Democratic Party; as well as the election of Chief Lucky Nosakhare Igbinedion in 1999 and 2003 on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). I remember, Sir, the sacrifice you made in 2007 by stepping down your endorsement of Senator Odion Ugbesia for the governorship ticket of the PDP for Senator Oserhiemen Osunbor who enjoyed the backing of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who was Nigeria’s president at that intersection. Osunbor won the election, but he could not defend his mandate in court. He naïvely allowed the opposition to take over Edo.
I remember the fruitless effort you made to cure the mischief caused by Osunbor through your long-drawn political battle to reclaim Edo Government House for the PDP. In 2012, you supported General Charles Ariahvwere, a Benin man, for the Edo PDP ticket. He could not dislodge Oshiomhole. In 2016, you backed Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, another Benin man for the PDP ticket. He was believed to have won the election against Oshiomole’s candidate- Mr Godwin Obaseki- but Obaseki ran away with the prize contrary to reasonable expectations. How he did that against a much more popular political force in Edo South is left for the consciences of those who upended what was going to be PDP victory in 2016 to live with. Obaseki has dealt with them very well.
Your proclivity towards Edo South stemmed from a reasonable political calculation to pick the PDP candidate from the zone with the highest voting population. I remember you gave me the analysis that was very convincing. You told me that our zone did not have the number. Edo Central is actually about 18 per cent of the voting population of the state. Staking that political reality in a haystack would be consequentially disastrous at the poll against an incumbent Oshiomhole in 2012 and an Obaseki-backed government machinery in 2016. I agreed with your analyses on the two occasions during which you commissioned me to run an independent media campaign in aid of the candidates’ election. Sir, let me take this opportunity to thank you for the vantage positions you accorded me both at the federal and state levels in the affairs of the PDP (the role I played in two presidential campaigns) as a media professional without compelling me to pick PDP’s membership card.
Leader, Sir, since you left us on October 28, 2018, the PDP that you laboured to build and hold together in Edo has become a conclave of confusion created by centrifugal forces—outsiders who were granted political asylum and electoral leverage when their political future was on the tenterhooks, hanging in the balance and apparently heading for the sepulchre. These characters were hounded in their original party-the APC- and, also because the PDP wanted to use the opportunity of having an incumbent governor on its ticket, to negotiate its return to the Government House on Osadebey Avenue, embraced the Obaseki option, not knowing or realizing that it was receiving into its fold a trojan horse.
Today, I make this report, without any form of embellishment, that the PDP has been denatured and rendered prostrate by one man who is controlled by hubris. His re-election victory in 2020 against all forces in the state must have further fueled his ego. He would not concede grounds. Negotiation is adversative to his philosophy. For him, absolute dominance together with rigid control of the administrative and political wings of governance is the ultimate imperative factor. Sir, Obaseki dismantled the structure you handed over to your reliable political son, Chief Dan Osi Orbih. As I write this, many political leaders have left the PDP for the All Progressives Congress (APC). Obaseki has fought the custodians of the structure that he did not know how it was built and nurtured especially at a time he was enjoying his governorship that was foisted on Edo State by Adams Oshiomhole. It is a painful situation. I know you can imagine how painful this could be and how pained Orbih and others would be.
It may interest you to know that this fellow-Godwin Obaseki- did not limit his excessive impudence within the ambience, atmospherics and nuances of the PDP family. He went on some outlandish fights against significant non-partisan persons outside the Party. For instance, he is locked in a cold war with the Oba of Benin over sundry traditional matters, which time will not permit me to go into in details. He has been deploying state funds in aid of his agenda. I hear from the grapevines that he facilitated the suspension of Orbih from the PDP by the National Working Committee. Each member of the committee was allegedly procured to deal that blow on the political heavyweight from Ogbonna. But trust Orbih to fight back. He is in court to challenge the NWC’s shenanigans and shambolic suspension process. I know that one way or another, if the PDP loses the reins of power, Orbih will ultimately be a significant last man standing to galvanise other members-men and women of goodwill, to pick the pieces of the party and rebuild it from Obaseki’s ruination.
Sir, it is clear now that with your departure in 2018, the PDP had since lost an avuncular leader with Solomonic wisdom. If you were still here and Obaseki had the privilege, as he did, of being rescued by the PDP, I am very sure you would have reined him in. Through the force of your leadership, you would have guided and put him where he belonged. For instance, the calamity he plunged the party and its governorship standard bearer, Asue Ighodalo, into recently would not have happened. By not allowing the national leaders of the party who had converged on Benin for the mega rally of the PDP candidate to pay the traditional homage on the Oba of Benin because of his personal animosity was the height of Obaseki’s insolence and disdain for the revered Oba and the Palace. He would rather lead Atiku Abubakar and other members of the campaign trail to the “palace” of the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Osawaru Igbinedion, knowing full well the historical tension between Palace and Igbinedion. Leader, Sir, you would not have allowed this divisive, insulting and treacherous episode to happen.
Obaseki’s irritabilities have destroyed bonds of friendship, the foundations of political affinity and the zeitgeist of the PDP after your era. It is unfortunate that his actions have increasingly led to the alienation of the party’s candidate, Asue Ighodalo, a brilliant mind, one that you would have been proud and supportive of to be your governor, were you to be here and involved in the governorship recruitment process. Ighodalo has not been able to shake off the Obaseki mischief going into the election on Saturday. Scores of PDP leaders who decamped to the APC did so because of Obaseki. They did not have issues with Ighodalo. Their perception that a victory for Ighodalo is an endorsement of Obaseki’s third term by proxy finds anchorage in the way and manner Obaseki bludgeoned and badgered the PDP, using the machinery of government, to foist Ighodalo on the party as the guber candidate. Obaseki lacks the conversational capacity of an astute political leadership, the kind of savvy with which you preponderated political interactions and reinforced your tag of “Leader”.
In retrospect, I laugh at the hypocrisy of Obaseki and those that brought him to power in 2016, especially Oshiomhole. They complained of godfatherism in Edo politics. They fashioned out some convenient mantras about dismantling godfatherism in Edo, burying the godfather and all the baloney; whereas, in fact, they knew then and even know that godfatherism is a universal concept and cosmopolitan reality. Sir, the painful reality in Edo today is that they have taken their version of godfatherism beyond the limits of reasonableness. You needed to see how Oshiomhole, as the leader of the APC, in his “gra-gra” interposition between his preferred candidate and the rest of the party members, was disrobed and could not push through the anointed governorship candidate-Dennis Idahosa. Obaseki’s pyrrhic victory in the PDP has boomeranged with terrible consequences and potentially calamitous governorship poll outcomes. Except a miracle of the century happens, PDP is not favoured to win the election. The fact, Sir, is that between the two Esan candidates in Saturday’s election-Ighodalo of the PDP and Senator Monday Okpebholo- yes, the same Monday, your boy, of the APC, Ighodalo cuts it. He typifies a good message but Obaseki is a bad messenger. He appears unable to seamlessly deliver Ighodalo and he would not allow Ighidalo to deliver himself. In any case, the Obaseki-led PDP could prove bookmakers’ wrong by pulling some electoral stunts, until then, Sir, Ighodalo’s brand is being tempestuously assailed on account of Obaseki’s governance excesses.
Leader, Sir, apart from Ighodalo and Okpebholo, there is a third candidate on the platform of the Labour Party (LP), Barrister Olumide Akpata. I am not sure you knew him when you were here with us. He was still tending to his legal practice at Templars Law Firm. He came to national limelight in 2020, two years after you left us, when he won the presidency of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), effectively disrupting a tradition of SANs’ appropriation of the exalted office. He has yet to become a SAN. He would go ahead to defeat his opponents who were all Senior Advocates of Nigeria. He held office for two years and performed very well in the saddle and as Oshiomhole did in 2007 when he entered Edo guber race straight from his presidency of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Akpata, representing a breath of fresh air, having not been previously involved in local Edo politics, has entered the Edo governorship race with a promise to cause a positive disruption. The fact that he defeated all aspirants, including your boy-Kenneth Imansuangbon-aka-the rice man, speaks volumes of Akpata’s tenacity and capacity to cause some disruptions in the September 21 governorship poll. Interestingly, he is from Edo South-with the highest voting population and where LP is rooted with a serving senator and two House of Reps members in Egor/Ikpoba Okha and Oredo Federal Constituencies.
I remember you told me something instructive about Edo South people: it was one of the many things you told me in confidence that I should not share with anybody and I would not do so even at the point of bayonet. Sir, my concern is that our Edo Central zone should not rejoice yet especially with Obaseki mischief that is hunting the innocent Ighodalo and the intra-party dialectics in the APC on the heels of Okpebholo’s emergence as the candidate, which was made possible by the President of the Senate and leader of the APC in South-south zone, Godswill Akpabio. I will tell you the political calculations behind Akpabio’s interest in Edo politics in my next missive to you. But you need to know this: I hear from a grapevine that there are no fewer than six power centres in the APC now which are just tolerating one another, trying to see how to first finish off Obaseki, get into power and then begin the real battle to settle old scores in the party and in government. Sir, if you see the number of disparate elements that have gravitated to the APC- buccaneers, backstabbers, fiends, they fit into all adverse descriptions- one would be afraid for Okpebholo in the event he becomes the governor. He must needs devote the greater part of his first term to manage and rein in the tribe of the vultures that is gathering. There is indeed an ominous cloud over Edo even before the dawn of a new era.
Back to my drift about Akpata and Edo South political/electoral terrain: Akpata is enjoying the Pter Obi’s “Obidient Movement’s sentimental support” (strengthened by the teaming youth population who are craving new directions and different identities with whom they could associate and surrender to in collective struggles for a future they could hold in their hands and manage by themselves). Akpata provides that possibility. As it is today, there are no deleterious godfathers in the LP who would distract and detract him from governance in the event he wins by default as a result of the PDP and the APC trying to cancel out each other at the poll. The youths are, let me coin it this way, his “godfathers” with whom he sets out to redefine the future of Edo State. Akpata has also strategically picked his running mate from Edo North (the next port of voters’ haul after Edo South) in the person of Prince Asamah Kadiri (SAN) from Auchi. Both APC and PDP picked their running mates from Akpata’s Edo South. Depending on his messaging during the electioneering, it is possible that the Edo South people would prefer to settle for governor rather than deputy governor. It would not matter to them if the incumbent is a Benin man. After all, it is a different party that took the chance….
Leader, Sir, since it will be preposterous to abnegate the force of an Olumide Akpata’s political/electoral brand, the election, from my reading, will be down to the wire in a testy three-horse race. I will apprise you of the outcome, Sir.
As I round off, it would interest you to know how Edo politicians have turned themselves into salesmen of products they hardly know. I read one of them, whom I know hated you with a passion, say beautiful things about you when he was trying to sell the candidature of Monday Okpebholo. If people, like the one referenced here, have failed the imperativeness of a caveat venditor, the onus should be on the electorate to evoke the consideration of a caveat emptor. I trust Edo electorate, beyond the song and dance, the half-truths, misinformation and outright lies during electioneering when some candidates shied away from debates and could not prove the stuff they were made of, in terms of mental alertness, intellectual depth, academic rigour and public and private sector exposure/knowledge, to vote wisely by taking a conscience vote, not one induced by and/or tainted by the money from the highest bidder.
So long a letter, Owanlen! Let me allow you to enjoy your deserved rest.
I remain your “son” even in death.
● Ojeifo is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of THE CONCLAVE
