By Sonala Olumhense
As an Esan man, let me begin with a disclaimer: Contrary to the lies of Senator (and former Governor) Adams Oshiomhole, the name, Okpebholo, does not mean “The Rescuer.” It means “great community” or “wonderful people.”
Oshiomhole’s customary flippancy comes from trying too hard to be everything he is not, particularly smart or empathetic. He may have once been married to an Esan woman, but he demonstrates no grasp of the Esan language let alone its etymology.
I confess to being among the many stunned by Governor Monday Okpebholo’s budget presentation last week as he struggled to pronounce the most important number in his speech. And I say that as one who has sat with quite a few governors, including another Esan governor, the late Professor Ambrose Alli, about whom I have proudly testified.
Of course, Prof. Alli was incomparable. Nobody is asking Okpebholo to transform into a professor simply because of their common Esan heritage. But Esan teenagers, including the PDP governorship candidate, Asue Ighodalo, whom I knew when he was a teenager in secondary school in Ibadan, routinely know how to read.
The chairman of Okpebholo’s APC in Edo State, Jarret Tenebe, appears not to know this: that there is a difference between being a professor and being illiterate. Much less does he seem to know the difference between the man in the street and a convicted thief.
As a result, Tenebe stepped out of the dark dungeons where APC leaders stumble around (and I speak as the first to identify the collapse of the party as far back as February 2017), to accuse Mr. Ighodalo of “having stolen billions of naira before.” On video!
Ighodalo does not waste time. It took him just hours to bring the heavy lawsuit that would most probably end Tenebe’s political pretensions.
Two months ago, he had also swiftly sued Oshiomhole for N20bn for associating him with an alleged pyramid scheme in which numerous Nigerians were defrauded.
What was at stake on the floor of the Assembly on Tuesday was not ethics or even education: it was literacy.
Okpebholo had, somehow, won a senatorial seat. He was appearing in the House as state governor, although that election is in dispute. He was taking the microphone to show the people of Edo that he could read. He could not.
Surely he must have had at least one night—or the breakfast hour in Government House—to practice the reading of his own budget address?
Despite several trials and restarts—including “it is confusing me,” he could convince nobody that he is literate. His embarrassing performance immediately went viral.
To be sure, Okpebholo does not know how old he is. Two months before the governorship election, news broke that he had falsified his birth records, presenting three different dates—in 1970, 1972 and 1977—to the electoral commission.
One week before the election, he was summoned by an Abuja court to explain his having been born several times.
He also somehow also wrote his School Certificate examinations in his late 30s, instead of his teens as is normally the case, turning in abysmal scores.
It is noteworthy that his best subject was Mathematics, where he scored a C5 although, 16 years later, he is still unable to express a number in the billions.
He did not appear to have even been a registered voter, either. On July 10, SaharaReporters reported that there was no evidence to that effect at the electoral commission.
Beyond all this, candidate Okpebholo kept away from the media. In public, he often did not know what he was talking about, either, requiring the ubiquitousness of Oshiomhole at his side not to fall apart. Despite Oshiomhole, on one occasion he promised to supply Edo with “insecurity.”
Oshiomhole had no objection to that either, and the project to enthrone Okpebholo went ahead. By the end of September, Abdullahi Ganduje, the APC National Chairman and himself the subject of famous allegations of corruption, was on hand in Abuja to present the governor-elect to President Bola Tinubu. How symbolic, but as I had said 15 months earlier, the elements were scrubbing out the concept of character.
Among the Edos, Okpebholo ought to have retained only the right to walk past the Edo Government House gates, not drive in through them as governor, but President Tinubu had promised APC that it would have Edo State, and Oshiomhole delivered.
I have written about Oshiomhole for years, often favourably, including one awful afternoon on a Benin City street that as governor, he was caught yelling at a widow to “go and die.” Given the political tunnel through which he had emerged, I argued as he left the Edo governorship that for Nigeria, he might be the road to tomorrow.
That was in July 2017, when I reflected on his determination to end the era of godfatherism in Edo politics. My final question was: “Can he rise above narrow interests and fight for his country, bringing his brand of scorched-earth justice on every false tree and every withering branch?”
Sadly, Oshiomhole has become worse for Edo and Nigeria than Mr. Tony Anenih ever was. Writing when the man died in 2018, I declared that he had not been a patriot.
“Anenih…was a cold-blooded PDP-partisan who saw Nigeria through the eyes of his party; he never saw PDP through the eyes of Nigeria.”
I described the PDP brand as one of “political brigandage, ethical arson and administrative incompetence,” and in which “murder, looting and injustice ran the day.”
Of its 16 years, I said Anenih was “the Chris Uba—or the Jagaban, if you like—of Edo State politics.”
That was the monster that Oshiomhole fought. Sadly, it is what the former governor has metamorphosed into, and worse: anything for APC, no matter what.
No, the Okpebholo story is not about Okpebholo. It is about Oshiomhole, who knew the APC governorship candidate far more than anyone else. It is a story of immense hatred and hypocrisy for the people and public affairs. He owes Anenih a lot of apologies.
Because of Oshiomhole, Edo now has a puppet, not a governor. It has a chief executive with three birthdays who is ill-prepared for nothing beyond running errands in Abuja. He has given Edo an operative that, when he appears on television, parents would be muting the audio.
That is what happens when the governor’s most memorable early words, in his own introduction, are: “[My speech] is confusing me.”
We are on our way to a one-party state in which greed and ruthlessness are recommended, and the less known about you, the more qualified you are. The more obtuse your preparation and more convoluted your record, the more of an APC hero you are.
Governor Okpebholo concluded his budget presentation still unable to pronounce its value.
Nationwide, for 60 years, Nigeria has had bad governors, but none of them began by warning the world that, on top of massive doubts about who they really are or how they got here, they are semi-literate. In today’s world, if you can’t read, you can’t lead.
Congratulations, APC! Congratulations, Oshiomhole!!
Credit: First published in Sunday Punch of 15/12/24
