By Anthony Iwuoma
One of the most hilarious occurrences leading to the disputed February 25 presidential election was the assemblage of ‘bishops’ in Abuja to show their support for the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Among the emergency bishops were plumbers and sundry artisans, who were compelled by hunger to don ill-fitting regalia to deceive the people.
Truth be told, it was very possible for Bola Tinubu, the then flag bearer of the party, to win that election. He did not need all that drama if he had insisted that reason prevailed. He also does not need the worse scenario created by the fumbling Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which has become a pain in the neck of credible elections in Nigeria.
I say so because take it or leave it, Tinubu has huge credentials trailing him. He had sown so much in the lives of people and the concomitant goodwill is enough to drown oceans of opposing voices. INEC should have conducted a believable election without muddling up issues that make even the man wonder if he truly won the election.
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However, this is not about Tinubu. I brought him into the picture because he had something he could point to as a credible and verifiable antecedent. He has an army of loyal lieutenants, and deservedly so, unlike what is playing out in Imo State.
The outgoing governor of the state, Sen. Hope Uzodinma, who is bereft of worthy achievements in office like Tinubu, aped the Jagaban and, perhaps, is deluded that something would come out the scam.
He assembled a motley crowd of hungry purported ‘Okigwe indigenes’ in Owerri at the weekend to canvass support for his reelection, an ambition he is constitutionally entitled to. Even the people that gathered to support him also have the right to but for the prank involved.
Nevertheless, hunger is a wicked master. It has a way of disrobing a man of every semblance of dignity. Some of the Israelites Moses pulled out of Egyptian captivity railed at him, preferring to mortgage their freedom to as a little thing as a cucumber. The good thing was that regardless of the ragtag protesters, Moses successfully led the people to freedom because those mindless opponents could not stop the move of God.
Governor Uzodinma has deployed several feeble arsenals to deceive the people once again for another four years. He has not accounted for the four years the Supreme Court graciously gave to him except the unprecedented waste of lives and resources that has made the state a wasteland and gateway of evil into the entire South-east.
Imo has been deserted because of insecurity. The land is Desecrated daily by the wasted blood of the innocent, baying for vengeance. There is so much hunger because people can no longer go to their farms, as they may never return with their heads. Kidnappers and gun-toting marauders are on the rampage and it is hard to differentiate between genuine security operatives from Uzodinma’s Ebubeagu and Asari Dokubo armies.
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I don’t know of anyone in his right elements that would vote for Uzodinma to prolong the people’s suffering.
The ‘bishops’ he gathered are hunger-battered, unconscionable folk, who don’t mind eating their children’s tomorrow today after incinerating theirs.
I refrain from being hard on them though because I suspect that the majority of them want to collect out of the state’s plundered resources but are still determined to vote for the freedom, that the Labour Party candidate, Sen. Athan Nneji Achonu, is bringing.
Uzodinma’s fixation on Achonu as if he is the only contestant against him is because he knows that Achonu is the only fit and proper contender with what it takes to recover Imo for the people. He knows that the ‘Take Back Imo’ project is unstoppable and zooming closer to Douglas House each passing day. That is why he chose Achonu’s Okigwe Zone for this macabre dance.
Unfortunately for him and his gullible crusaders, Imo people are sold on the candidature of Achonu. The reason is not far-fetched.
Achonu brings hope to the hopelessness Hope Uzodinma foisted on the people through inept and rudderless governance. Achonu is ‘talk and do’ and as his mantra is, ‘go and verify’. He does not need to arrange starving impostors to convince the people that he is the right man for the job because they know that he does not make pretentious speeches or promises he would not keep.
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This is unlike Uzodinma, who wants to pull the wool over the eyes of the people on e again through bloated self-rating that is about to be punctured like a floating balloon.
Imagine a governor that would not mind even sleeping in the corridors of Aso Rock in order to ingratiate himself to Tinubu whose presidency he never supported or even almost sabotaged; a seeming generalissimo of APC but yet could not muster an extra ministerial slot in Tinubu’s list for the South -east whereas other zones got as many as ten or nine slots. Thank God for the constitutional mandatory that guaranteed the zone five slots, the South-east would have been left high and dry. Does this not speak volumes of even how Uzodinma is rated among the APC power brokers?
Ndi Imo wake up! Rise with one voice and take back your state regardless of Uzodinma’s rented or hungry crowd. It is all part of a fraudulent scheme to further emasculate the people. He knows too that his opponents may not take the risk of gathering people openly like he has done because of the hoodlums on the loose looking for blood to spill.
Uzodinma and the APC’s coming on the stage in Imo have brought nothing but pain and deprivation.
One definite takeaway is that a new Imo is ‘Athanable’. Nevertheless, the ball is in the court of the Imolites themselves. They have a choice to shoot into the net and let Achonu lead them out of darkness to light or over the bar and accentuate the strangulation of the land and the people for another four years.
…Iwuoma is a Kano-based public commentator and newspaper columnist