PERSPECTIVE
MAKING MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL
Iread an interesting intervention in the Enugu politics by one Louis Okolo, to wit: “APC Makes Final Push to Take Enugu State”, published in the ‘THISDAY Newspaper of Friday the 21st of September 2018. The writer left nothing to be guessed about the quality of his credentials given the contradictions, prevarications and sheer illogicality of his thought flow. At best, it was an embarrassing catalogue of self-indictment, laid bare by an ostensibly profuse struggle to be noticed by a receding godfather. But that is understandable, after all, it is often the passion of a dog to bark at the enemies of his master. To this end, the article would ordinarily not have merited any attention, after all the ultimate ambition in the whole project as expressed in his first sentence is for the APC in the state to be able to make a “significant impact” in the forthcoming general elections in the state. But what wries me is the unhidden evidence that Ayogu Eze, his principal may not have weaned himself of the same hubris that has constantly exposed his knavery and avidity for histrionics and which incidentally served as his Achilles heel in his now forlorn quest to be governor of the state.
The writer takes off by making nonsense of all the efforts, investments and membership of notable political leaders in the APC and who have all the while struggled to keep the light of the party aflame before Ayogu’s recent sojourn to the fold. According to the writer, “even the defection of former governor Sullivan Chime, former Senate President Ken Nnamani and Jim Nwobodo among others, including the membership of other top notchers … could not in anyway produce the required impetus to keep the APC alive and active, let alone constitute a source of concern to the ruling PDP. … all these have changed the very moment Senator Ayogu Eze defected to the APC with an exhibition of sufficient affinity with President Muhammed Buhari…” There he goes again, one may be tempted to say!
The same hubris, the same cynical, howbeit vacuous, condescension with which he treated the leaders of the state in 2014 following the presence of former President Goodluck Jonathan at the burial of his late mother, and which disrobed him of any regard in the political circle in the state comes to mind. Does Ayogu now see himself as the messiah the APC needs in the state over and above these credible leaders of the party who have labored to keep the party afloat all this long while he hankered after an illusory, nay wild goose chase of gaining the coveted governorship seat via a senseless litigation process? Is that how best to thank a people for their benevolence in accepting an evidently famished political orphan? William Shakespeare might have had Ayogu in mind in his immortal poem, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude!”
This assertion is the most unkindly testimony to the efforts of the APC members in the state given that Ayogu, for three long years was absent from the state. In his absence, these men who he now seeks to demean have invested both their material and human resources to keep the party afloat. So Ayogu thinks he is more relevant, or has a better capacity than Sullivan Chime who governed Enugu for a wholesome eight unbroken years? Or the inimitable Ken Nnamani who is arguably one of the salient faces of respect for the party in the country? Or indeed Chief Jim Nwobodo, a former governor of the old Anambra state, former Minister, former Senator and arguably the most charismatic politician to have emerged from this side of the country? These are yet without mention of such mercurial avatar in the person of Gbazuagu Nwkek Gbazuagu, or the indomitable Osita Okechukwu, or the business mogul, Onyemuche Nnamani, to mention but a few, who all have stood by and nurtured the party in the state. The writer alludes to Ayogu being also a “prodigy” of the “maestro”, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani; in other words, his godson. As patronizing as this may be, it must be pointed out that Chimaroke has repudiated this infantile blackmail and the singular reason why he chose to pitch his political tent with the PDP remains the fact of Ayogu’s opportunistic presence in the APC. Can anyone ask Ayogu when last he spoke with his so-called godfather in all the travails he went through since his exit from office in 2007, including his well-known health challenges.
He perhaps never reckoned there would again be a season like this. But the truth must be told, without diminishing anything from the fact of Chimaroke’s contribution to Ayogu’s new-found relevance in the state, the credit of who actually invented Ayogu as a politician should go to the Nwodo political dynasty of Ukehe that gave him the first political break in 1992. This was followed in 1998 when again, through the instrumentality of the same family, Ayogu was made Secretary of the PDP in Enugu State. But true to his streak, he did not blink an eyelid when he abandoned them and joined hands with the emerging power in the state to torment his benefactors.