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 Daily
Independent Online.
* Friday, July 02, 2004.
Anambra: The fire next time
By Obiefuna Nwachukwu
Like an all-season tempest, the lingering
political crisis in Anambra State cannot just seem to go away. At the
threshold of the anniversary of the original act of infamy that ignited
the fire, the felons who masterminded the brigandage and their
accomplices in concert with new-found bedfellows are regrouping, and
re-thinking their strategies for possibly another major onslaught,
another last-ditch effort to over-awe the long-suffering people of the
state into submission in their courageous and historic struggle against
reactionary political forces and tendencies. Few societies, it is true,
have been served well by the political elite (the so-called political
class). Even so, far fewer societies, under the emerging dispensation in
the country have been so mindlessly pillaged and plundered and stolen
blind by its political elite as Anambra State.
The principal culprits in this invidious
theft of the state and the appropriation of its levers and structures to
serve the selfish ends of entrenched, vested interests are no other than
the self-styled godfathers, also variously known as kingmakers, the
powers-that-be in high and low places, the stakeholders, the sacred cows
and sacrosanct donkeys etc. These characters have forcibly seized the
public space and usurped the sovereign will of the people of the state in
total contempt of the imperatives of democratic governance.
The latest round of the series of
onslaught of the godfathers has been orchestrated by a stiff-necked, free
wheeling rabble rouser and politician-of-fortune, Chief Joseph Anene
Okonkwo, one-time chairman of the Peoples Democratic Power (PDP), in
Anambra State, who barely masks the fact that he is a front for the
discredited self-styled kingmakers and powers-that-be in Anambra State.
In a space of two weeks, he has made prime time appearances on the
National Television Network (NTA), in addition to other privately-owned
television stations in Lagos where he indulged himself to the fullest by
raining invectives and vitriol on the Anambra State government and
Governor Chris Nwabueze Ngige in particular. According to this well-known
political contractor and dealer, “the political stake-holders and
godfathers of Anambra politics have passed a fatwa on Governor
Chris Ngige, and the only option open to the later is to throw in the
towel”. Sounds familiar!
Asked whether the fatwa came about
as a result of non-performance on the part of the state Chief Executive,
he grudgingly concedes that Governor Ngige has left Anambra State a
better and much improved place in the past one year, and as a matter of
fact, the Governor is popular among the common folks. But that, according
to him, is where it ends; the governor is, otherwise loathed by the
godfathers and kingmakers for not dancing to their heavy metal music. The
point is that, they that are greedy of applause hardly ever give a cheer
to a rival. To say that Chief Okonkwo cut a pathetic picture in his
television outings will amount to an understatement: the man thoroughly
betrayed a streak of political vacuity and venality that goes to
underscore the fact that a man who stands for nothing will almost
certainly fall for anything. The logic of godfatherism in politics
demands a victim; only by so doing could the bestial appetites and
passions of the godfather be assuaged, even if momentarily.
The political struggle in
Anambra State presently, must be seen in the proper context as a
contention between good and evil, between principle and compromise. It is
a contention between genuine purposes and valid ends of governance as
opposed to the miasma created by non-democrats who, ironically, are
creating and shaping the course of the country’s democracy and who desire
to reduce Anambra State from point of promise and hope to a position of
despair and hopelessness. Those who suggest that time is a great
legalizer, according to the great libertarian Herbert Spencer, ought to
be able to find satisfactory answers to such questions as “how long does
it take for what was originally wrong to become right?”
Meanwhile, a second chapter in the renewed
onslaught was being acted out before an Abuja Federal High Court presided
over by Justice Jonah Ada. The judge on Friday, 18th June 23, 2004,
frustrated a fresh bid to oust Governor Ngige when he dismissed a request
by a serving member of the Anambra State House of Assembly, Mr. Nelson Achukwu
and four others to remove Governor Chris Ngige from office on the grounds
that he had resigned his position as governor of the state on July 10,
2003. Justice Ada contended that the plaintiffs had constituted the
judicial process into a forum, a situation whereby, litigants approach
different courts of co-ordinate jurisdiction seeking basically the same
or similar reliefs from them over the same issues or points.
The political shenanigans of the
godfathers notwithstanding, the ordinary people of Anambra State have
embarked on a long walk to freedom and liberation. The events of July 10,
2003 marked a new awakening for a people for whom the inauguration of the
new democratic dispensation in 1999, no sooner turned into a nightmare of
profound proportions. The atrophy witnessed under several years of
military dictatorship pales in significance compared to the ruin and
devastation enacted under a supposed democratic milieu between 1999 and
2003. Such was the case that by May 2003, Anambra State had betrayed all
the symptoms of a failed state entity within the Nigerian federation.
Looking back now, Dr. Chinwoke Mbadinuju’s tenure as governor of Anambra
State could well be adjudged as the years of the locust due mainly to the
unremitting pressures and distractions of political jobbers like Chief
Okonkwo.
It was this same odyssey that the villains
of July 10, 2004 sought to further reinvent in perpetuity with the
abduction of Governor Chris Ngige. Such a heinous, callous act was
capable of breaking the will of some less mentally endowed beings, but
not Governor Ngige, who promptly turned adversity into strength and, ever
since, there has been no let up in his devotion to the aspirations of the
mass majority of the people, coupled with a burning determination to reinvent
and re-position the state on the path of sustainable socio-economic
development and political transformation.
• Nwachukwu, a public affairs analyst, lives in Enugu
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