Peter Obi's Fractured Legacy in Anambra State
By
Okey Madubuife ([email protected])
If I were Peter Obi, former governor of Anambra State,
I would be worried about the looming verdict of history.
This is because,
barely eight months after leaving office, Obi’s well-oiled propaganda machinery
that gave Anambra people a misplaced sense of gratitude to him for mere
tokenisms and things to which they should have a sense of entitlement, has
finally come under a serious stress-test. Yes, with Obi’s recent political
own-goal which he consummated with the ill-advised defection to PDP, serious
questions are being asked about the Obi years in office as the governor of one
of Nigeria’s greatest states and his total failure to manage the people’s
inheritance handed to him by the Ezeigbo Gburugburu, Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu. It is almost heartrending to see that Obi is fast losing his golden-boy
halo under the intense gaze of history. Yes, Obi’s vaunted achievements in
eight whole years have been consigned to narrow margins the emerging narrative
of Anambra State by Willie Obiano’s eight months of solid performance. But this
is a subject for another day…
Someone rightly observed the other day that Peter Obi
came into office asking questions and left a legacy of more questions. He was
of course alluding to Obi’s earliest positioning strategy in governance which
was anchored on the rhetorical question, “are we cursed or the cause?” As it
turned out, Obi unwittingly accepted his own failure to free Anambra from the
ills that shaped his own rhetorical question when at the end of his tenure in
office; he released a pictorial book that chronicled his stewardship with the
same curious title “Is Anambra State Cursed or the Cause?” That Obi was still
asking this self-indicting question after two terms in office tells us that his
achievements were more myth than reality. That Obi could not see the
incongruity of this title for a book of such value is indicative of the lack of
rigor that marked his years in office and the people’s unquestioning approval
of him. It was a simple admission that after eight years of administrative
window-dressing, he could not provide an answer to his own question.
No wonder then, that Obi left Anambra State polarized
and fractured. No wonder why the seeds he sowed with his ill-digested religious
politics have forced a wedge between Catholics and Anglicans in the state with
the simmering dispute over the ownership of Oyolu-Eze Primary School block in
Nkwelle Ezunaka, hissing like a time-bomb at the corner. And perhaps, no wonder
too, why the Frankenstein monster he created in APGA on a mere whim has sired
two irreconcilable factions and spawned endless litigations. It is hard to
believe that many of his unquestioning social media mobsters have yet figured
out that Obi’s creation of the Maxi Okwu faction of APGA to breakdown Chief
Victor Umeh’s resilience is one of the major reasons the party failed to grow beyond
the boundaries of Anambra State. Facebook vampires like Mazi Odera, Daniel
Elomba and Tai Emeka Obasi are too drunk on the cheap liquor of their
paymasters to ask any hardheaded questions. Instead, Obi who realized the
enormous powers of the media after the two-hundred-and-fifty-million-naira
scandal; had turned these loose cannons against Victor Umeh and foisted the
image of a monster on him. As it were, Umeh is blamed for virtually everything
from the threat of soil erosion in Anambra State to the phenomenon of desert
encroachment in the North of Nigeria while Obi continued to shimmer like the
golden boy of Igbo politics…until recently. Haba!
Obi’s legacy of bitterness is indeed troubling. It is
well known that his regime was a largely divisive one. In his time, he
effectively ingratiated himself into the affection of the church and made
strenuous efforts to create a deep disaffection for many illustrious sons and
daughters of the state. His divisive influence made it difficult for the
state’s many heavyweights to come together on the altar of brotherhood. He
virtually ran his rivals out of town and loomed over the landscape like a
colossus with feet of clay. Obi’s trumpeted humility is usually exaggerated and
phony and he deliberately fed popular imagination with his stage-managed
humility by shuffling around ticket counters in the airports to get a
reservation while logging his own baggage to create a perfect make-belief. In
the process, he misled many people who mistook that for modesty but in actuality,
Obi was dragging his high office down to a point of ridicule. There is nothing
wrong in a leader having his aides do menial tasks for him. It is the standard
practice all over the world but Obi made a song and dance of doing things for
himself and misled the uninformed about the way leaders should carry
themselves.
Now, if Obi’s humility was false and announced itself,
so is his legacy. To start with, it is just beginning to dawn on Anambrarians
that after eight long years in office, Obi did not build any serious legacy
project in the entire state. He didn’t do anything monumental. True; he built
roads and rehabilitated schools but these are run-off-the-mill projects that
any `wimp who finds himself in power with a load of cash could have done. Obi’s
administration did not leave Anambrarians with landmarks in the manner that
Godswill Akpabio did or even Sullivan Chime, across the border with less
resources than Anambra. He left no actual touchstones to remind us that he was
here for eight years, no big ideas and no enduring philosophy of governance.
Managing donor funds and meeting MDG goals are mere tokenisms. Any average
leader with minimum resources could have done that with greater result than
Obi. What we must avoid is the usual tendency to evaluate Obi’s legacy within
the context of the underperformance of his predecessors. That is wrong. Obi
should be compared with his fellow governors across the borders and not with
Chinwoke Mbadinuju.
The Peter Obi legacy in Anambra State does not lend
itself to ease of interpretation and appraisal because it is half reality, half
myth. Obi’s eight years of shadowboxing is extremely woolly and devoid of any
seriously enduring stem that will survive the scrutiny of history. People who
applaud him actually gloss over the raw deal he whimsically handed the people
of Awka and Nnewi who are still smarting from his shocking insensitivity. Obi’s
ego is huge but his deceptive mien provides a perfect disguise for it. Nowhere
else has the capital of a state suffered such scorched earth neglect as Awka
suffered in the hands of Peter Obi. It was so cruel that Obi could not repair a
pothole on the road leading to the Governor’s Lodge in all of eight years while
he blatantly lied that the people were resisting his attempt to develop the
town. In much the same way, he left the Etiabas of Nnewi badly bruised and
battered because their matriarch, Dame Virgy Etiaba, dared to accept the
challenge to hold the state together while he fought to retrieve his mandate
from the same forces he is presently cavorting with. And now, with his betrayal
of Ikemba Nnewi, the Ezeigbo Gburugburu, Chief Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu,
Peter Obi’s many treacheries against the enterprising people of Nnewi
have come to full circle.
Till date, it is still a puzzle how Obi outsmarted
everyone, refusing to hold local government elections for eight long years,
pocketed all allocations that accrued there from and still left office with an
applause. Always quick to shove his innocence down the throat of others in the
belief that they would not understand, Obi’s hurriedly organized local
government elections just weeks before the end of his tenure was an undisguised
move to lay a landmine for his successor. So were his hiring of 4000 civil
servants without adequate provision, the hurried award of spurious contracts
and perhaps the most obscene of them all; the handing out of financial
donations to different groups and organizations in the final days of his
administration.
In the twilight of his administration, Obi fancied
himself an Arab oil Sheik, smiling into the camera as he handed out cheques to
just about anybody, insulting our sensibilities with such a thoughtless gambit
that has no place in purposeful leadership. How purposeful is the approach of
handing out money to people to solve the problems that Obi himself was expected
to solve but failed to do so in eight long years? What measures did he put in
place to ensure that the funds would be put to intended use? And yet his social
media gangsters insist that Obi is Anambra’s greatest leader. And indeed he is.
Or isn’t he?
What has never ceased to amaze me is Obi’s desperation
to mitigate the verdict of history. He has positioned attack dogs to pounce on
anyone who attempts a balanced evaluation of his place in history and retained
a well-oiled propaganda unit to foist himself on our collective memory. Why is
he struggling so hard to police our memory if indeed he left us with anything
of value? Pray, why is Obi reluctant to leave the stage after serving two terms
in office? Why is he busy setting booby-traps for his successor? What manner of
man finds morbid satisfaction in pulling down the house he has built with his
own hands?
Madubuife writes from the grotto of Idoto
in Ojoto
Peter Obi's Fractured Legacy in Anambra State
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Thursday, October 30, 2014
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