April 3, 2012 -
Governor Peter Obi
By Charles Nnadi
First, Chuma Nzeribe, his candidate for the rerun of the Anambra South Senatorial district election was trounced yet again by Andy Ubah. Second, Dora Akunyili, his defeated candidate in the 2011 Anambra Central Senatorial district, had her election petition permanently thrown out by the courts for lack of merit. Third, Victor Umeh, his APGA chairman, utilized the funeral of Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to underscore Peter Obi’s lightweight politics when he announced that the Ikemba’s leadership of the party would devolve on Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo state.
How has Mr. Peter Obi, the self-professed “Igbo leader” who has been ingratiating himself to the political north, reacted to these irreversible setbacks? In his usual ways, of course! First, following Nzeribe’s thrashing at the ballot, Mr. Obi barricaded himself inside his official residence for a whole week, receiving no visitors and making no public statements. Second, when he emerged from self-imposed seclusion, he hit the ground running by going about dressed in Ankara jumpers advertizing Ojukwu’s passing. Third, he had his mouthpiece, a certain Valentine Obienyem, who uses various aliases to fester the Internet and the Nigerian media with Peter Obi effluvia, issue a “statement” to the effect that “Peter Obi has said he will not run for elective public office or hold any political office after his tenure as governor in 2014.”
There are a number of conclusions to draw from this desperate clutching at every straw by a drowning lie. First, in reacting to Nzeribe’s electoral humiliation and Akunyili’s judicial red card by embarking on internal exile, Peter Obi sought to distance himself from failures that are down to his leadership diffidence and lack of political clout in a state he has unfortunately been governor of for six straight years. Second, in subsequently surfacing at every juncture and every occasion dressed in Ojukwu paraphernalia, this man is crying more than the bereaved for even the very children of the late Ikemba are regularly seen in public not dressed in the propaganda rags Obi commissioned the Onitsha General Cotton Mills to produce. Third, in activating the media diarrhea of Valentine Obienyem, his intention is to deflect the death knell on his political fortunes, while working underground to become the next Vice President of Nigeria.
It will not work. Not even “astral travel” will make it work. When Peter Obi leaves Government House, Awka, he will not assume a new political role, whether regional or national, for there is nothing positive that he has bequeathed to Anambra people, unless it has become fashionable to characterize loquacity as a legacy. Peter Obi promised that, upon election as governor, his UK-bound children would return and school with their mates in Nigeria. It didn’t happen; it couldn’t have happened because the promise was made in jest of the people. Peter Obi promised to resign his appointment any month the State workers were not paid their salaries by the 25th. He has never kept this promise because it was made in utter contempt of the people. He invariably pays salaries in arrears. For instance, Peter Obi paid the January 2012 salaries of Anambra civil servants on February 17, 2012. Peter Obi swore before Bishops of all Christian denominations and before live television and radio audiences that God should punish his children if he ever took for personal ends as much as a single kobo belonging to the State.
People were surprised because Mr. Obi asked God to punish his malfeasance, not on his person, but on his children domiciled thousands of miles away from Awka. People are not surprised at what the passage of time has revealed of the “pious” governor whose official convoy was caught in front of his Next International offices in Apapa, Lagos, carrying N250 million in cash. People made the arithmetic and came quickly to the right answer regarding the true intentions of a former bank chairman who had to stealthily move a quarter of a billion Naira in cash when there are safer, quicker and better ways of cash transfer available to him. People are waiting for Peter Obi’s tenure to end because every trance has its expiry moment. The trancelike hold this man previously had on his people with his sanctimonious preachments disappeared a very long time ago. That is why they patiently await his departure from power to raise judicial questions on what happened to the trillions of local government funds he has been managing since 2006.
Governor Sullivan Chime is Peter Obi’s neighbor immediately to the north. Chime has transformed Enugu – capital and state – into a delight to drive in and through. Chime achieved this feat without “flagging-off” any road project and without commissioning any completed road project. On the contrary Peter Obi’s singsong media blast the eardrums to announce flag-offs and commissioning. But, at the end of the day, the 500 kilometers of roads he claims to have constructed are nowhere to be found. And, whereas the roads constructed by the Chris Ngige administration are still together, solid, entrenched and motorable, Obi’s phantom 500 kilometers of roads have all fallen to pieces, washed away by the rains and replaced by potholes and gullies. What a debacle!
Peter Obi’s neighbor to his immediate south is Governor Rochas Okorocha who, in less than a year, introduced free tuition at all tiers of education in Imo State and followed it up by instituting salary levels higher than the federally approved minimum wage. Rochas Okorocha demonstrated the fraud that is the “Security Vote” and ploughed the money back into giving a meaning to the lives of his people. Obi is yet to pay the minimum wage. There is not one governor in the South East geopolitical zone that is not pulling his weight much better than the media manipulator in Awka.
But, if Obi’s intractable problems are down to non-performance alone, the people of Anambra State will understand that all that glitters is not gold. Obi – this should be a byword for disastrous governance – is compounded by a traitorous streak of meanness. Two whole years after she left office, Peter Obi has not paid the terminal entitlements of Dame Virgy Etiaba, his former deputy now approaching 70 years, a woman he made repeated mockery of simply because providence shipped them both in the same gubernatorial boat. Mr. Emeka Sibeudu, Obi’s current deputy, rebuilt his office with money from his sibling. Visitors to his office will attest to the fact that, at the very least, a third of the chairs in his office are made of plastic! To contain his deputy, Obi held a meeting with the Sibeudu family, promising them that their son will succeed him! They do not believe him.
Still, when Obi’s meanness extended to Anambra Youth Corps members fleeing from the north for their lives, people understood that this affliction is incurable, coming as it does from the gods. Other State governors organized the repatriation of their NYSC children from the north but the famous Obi could not even provide transport money for them to travel from Awka to their various hometowns. That is the sort of fellow we are contending with.
Apart from the image and memory of Ojukwu, Peter Obi also contrived to commandeer the good name of the great Zik of Africa by suddenly being awarded the Zik Prize for Leadership! Expectedly, Chukwuma Azikiwe, Zik’s first son, dissociated the illustrious family from the nonsense prize, stating that Peter Obi did not deserve it. He had done nothing, for instance, to complete the great Zik’s mausoleum. In minutes one of the megaphones of the media manipulator surfaced in the person of an Uche Ezechukwu who claimed that Peter Obi could not work on the mausoleum because Chukwuma Azikiwe locked up Zik’s Onitsha home and threw away the key! Would Ezechukwu add that the people of Umuleri also locked their General Hospital and threw away the key? Or is it not known that, since four years ago when he finished work on the shell of the building, Peter Obi has not bothered to put a chair in it, let alone a hospital aid?
After all the shenanigans in Awka, the people will have their say. Not only their say but also their way in the clamor for justice. How can they have a governor who routinely shares rams and cows to northern legislators during Moslem festivals but cannot pay in good time salaries for the celebration of Christmas and other Christian festivals? The reader must mark the following words: Anambra civil servants will not be paid their March 2012 salaries until well after Easter.
The countdown has begun for Peter Obi. He was the only governor in a vast Nigeria that could not deliver a single senatorial seat to his political party. When a few bold people mentioned that the electoral catastrophe had set a dismal record, Obi responded by quoting the Bible: “A prophet is respected everywhere but in his own village.” What a shame. Undaunted, Obi has continued with the same prophet-hometown garbage, claiming to the people of Anambra that, while they have no respect for him, President Jonathan has appointed him his lead economic adviser. Adviser indeed! Peter Obi is just one of 21 others, including Governors, Ministers, bureaucrats and captains of industry in the Economic Management Team, who meet occasionally in Abuja, ostensibly to improve the national economy. The point, really, is that Ndi Igbo do not give a hoot even if Peter Obi becomes the economic adviser to UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon. What they insist on is that this man will leave Awka at the appropriate time, but not to assume another political office.
Peter Obi has left no legacy for the Igbos. He even withheld the salaries of all categories of workers at the National Light, his state-owned weekly newspaper, for three months because, in one edition, his wife’s pictures appeared many more times than his own. Besides, he has refused to implement a pensions’ policy for the newspaper despite a longstanding whitepaper on the subject.
When Father Toby Osigwe of the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, Awka, castigated Obi during a sermon for his insensitivity on the pensions issue, Obi had the Anambra Broadcasting Services call the priest a “deceitful and mischievous liar” for three consecutive days!
What is there to say about this man that remotely connects to the positive? Ojukwu, on whose coattails he perambulates, is an apostle of the handshake across the River Niger. But Obi derided the Yoruba with political cartoons simply because Dr. Chris Ngige was campaigning for a Senate seat on the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). The same Chris Ngige refused to pay Chris Ubah unquantifiable sums in the name of “Irrevocable Payment” for work not completed on the new Anambra Government house. Obi has surreptitiously settled all the bills. Yet, he had his media dogs sending text messages during the recent election campaigns in which abuses were rained on the “Ubah family” with the hope that this would make his Chuma Nzeribe victorious in the election. He failed.
Such failure will continue to attend the schemes of whoever holds Ndi Igbo in disdain. The year 2014 will mark the good riddance of effluent rubbish in Anambra and Igbo land as a whole. Then the judiciary will take over; for, after James, there will be many more Iboris.
Mr. Nnadi, an indigene of Anambra, lives in Lagos.
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