By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA
LAGOS DECEMBER 15TH (URHOBOTODAY)-The events that led up to Senator Ifeanyi Okowa’s emergence as People’s Democratic Party flag bearer for the Delta 2015 gubernatorial polls throw up lots of lessons to be learnt quite apart from a plethora of political challenges ahead for the state. Hitherto, Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan had played the ethnic card by indicating that he was averse to being succeeded by any Urhobo. This he did while all the time attempting to deceive the entire state into believing he was genuinely committed to power shift to Delta North. Of course he never gave a toss about equity and clearly had absolutely no regard for Delta North. What he was planning all along was simply to install his puppet and errand boy in the person of Tony Obuh as the next Governor of Delta State with himself pulling the strings behind the scene. It was power shift not to Delta North but to Tony Obuh and thus by implication, power shift to himself. When his preferred candidate was thoroughly rejected by party stakeholders after he himself had been completely humiliated by Senator James Manager in the Delta South Senatorial ticket race, he suddenly discovered a non-existent love for Urhobo by attempting to deceive everyone that David Edevbie was now his preferred candidate. Within the spate of a week, our ‘amiable’ Governor had disgraced himself, humiliated Tony Obuh, stabbed Delta North in the back, proceeded upon a make-believe support for David Edevbie, only to end up delivering Senator Okowa as PDP flag bearer. For God’s sake, if you gather us together and tell us David Edevbie is our candidate, then ensure you know exactly what you are talking about instead of making a fool of the man and humiliating the entire Urhobo nation in the sadistic process. I am proudly Urhobo and quintessentially Okpe and if I die and come back to this
world, by the special grace of Almighty God, I want to be an Urhobo man from Okpe, all over and over, and over again!
For those of us who, upon the inspiration of our backgrounds as human rights and pro-democracy activists, having cut our teeth during the June 12 Struggle, had been comfortable with power shift to Delta North within the context of equity and brotherly love, the primaries of the Delta State chapter of the PDP, left a sour taste in the mouth right there at the venue! Indeed, at a point, so committed were some of us to equity that we keyed in to the aspirations of various aspirants from Delta North on the basis of unfortunately ever varying credibility. Most disastrously, far from the touted and pouted free and fair, transparent processes they were supposed to have been, the PDP primaries actually turn out upon critical analysis to have been a most macabre dance to an infernal tune in praise of political infamy. On my part, I remain an Urhobo man who knows that all tribes descend from one common ancestor created by God, wherefore we are all equal and are all equally entitled to rule. Yet the concession of the governorship of Delta to Delta North was based on the understanding that whomsoever ended up emerging from the midst of our brothers and sisters from that district would be thrown up by a transparent process which could be firmly situated within the context of a paradigm shift from the past.
What transpired was not a shift from the past. If nothing worse, it was a dastardly affirmation of the past that has undone us and which we are all most desperate to move ahead from. There was simply no need to humiliate a host of viable and vibrant gubernatorial candidates the way they were treated in the process. From Delta North, Victor Ochei, undoubtedly the most vibrant and performing
Speaker Delta State has ever had was forced out of office when the powers that be were determined never to let him be Governor. His was a classical case of double jeopardy; you will not let a performer become Governor yet you would still force him out of his legislative pedestal – what a sadistic expedient! Clement Ofuani, Ndudi Elumelu, Sylvester Monye, and a host of other Delta North aspirants were given the same short treatment not to talk of the entirety of the aspirants from the Ndokwa-Ukwani axis who were completely treated as second class citizens even within Delta North with the state government egging the state chapter of the party on! As for the aspirants from Delta Central and Delta South, such as Edevbie, Orubebe, Utuama, and Gbagi, they were given the cold shoulder to the extent that it seemed the oil-producing two-thirds of the state had suddenly become a mere appendage to its Anioma one-third.
I remain committed to equity. Nevertheless, I remain thus committed only to the extent that those who come to equity must do so with clean hands. Where a process has been revoltingly unclean, underhanded and utterly unseemly, I elect and remain committed NOT to be part of it. I hereby accordingly disown the gubernatorial primaries of the Delta State chapter of my party, the PDP, and reject its gubernatorial candidate in the person of Senator Ifeanyi Okowa as more of the same and nothing of a difference. While Okowa’s camp is hell-bent on convincing the rest of us that Okowa defeated the Governor and indeed completely disgraced him by defeating his candidate, in the persons of Tony Obuh and later, David Edevbie, the more circumspect amongst Deltans are not at all impressed. At the end of the day, the top contenders for the ticket ended up being the same Tony Obuh, David Edevbie and the eventual winner, Ifeanyi Okowa.
The common denominator for all three men is the fact that they are all diehard members of the Ibori-Uduaghan political family, an avaricious political enterprise whose leader continues to adamantly insist on continuing to rule over us forever even from his prison cell in faraway England.
Anyone who interprets Okowa’s emergence as liberation is a compound fool. In the final analysis, the only winners are Ibori and Uduaghan. The ridiculous PDP gubernatorial primary was actually an intra-family contest in which one of their political sons has emerged. Nothing has changed and nothing new has happened. Neither Uduaghan nor Ibori was in any way defeated.
They have won in so far as the rest of us are foolish enough to fall for their dark Machiavellian subterfuge. Okowa is a product of the same anti-people family that made Edevbie and threw up Obuh and we are not deceived. At the end of the day, Uduaghan is the winner and we are the losers. If Okowa ends up becoming our Governor, we will continue to remain the slaves of a medical doctor with little compassion and an ex-convict who again became and continues to remain a convict in London. We have all been duped but only if we allow the enemies of our state to make a fool of us and get away with it. What we wanted in the PDP was someone new without any connections to the Ibori-Uduaghan political family.
In the Ibori-Uduaghan political family, Okowa is number three after Ibori himself and Uduaghan his cousin, our tormentor. Okowa cannot convince anyone that he is somehow separate from his own family and his emergence can be safely encapsulated within the context of children of the same parents fighting over their father’s property. Thankfully, Delta State is not and can never be either Ibori’s or Uduaghan’s property and none of their sons, be it Obuh, Edevbie or Okowa is entitled to inherit our common patrimony. If indeed we want our dear state to be liberated from the clutches of the Ibori-Uduaghan political dynasty, we must look beyond the likes of Okowa who is not only a product of that family but has now emerged its heir apparent. There is nothing we can accuse Ibori or Uduaghan of that we cannot accuse Okowa of. Okowa has been with these people since the Abacha era, when they were all wining and dining together in their Grassroots Democratic Movement, GDM, days and the only difference amongst them can be likened to the difference amongst different species of poisonous snakes. Just as a lion cannot give birth to a goat, so also a serpent can only give birth to a serpent. Ibori, Uduaghan and Okowa are all three sides of a peculiarly misshapen coin and an Okowa succeeding an Uduaghan would only amount to a son succeeding his political father just as Uduaghan succeeded Ibori.
Only if we prefer, like accursed fools, to remain in bondage, will we fall for this grand political scam that the Ibori-Uduaghan political family has perpetrated against us. Only if we were born slaves and must die as slaves for our children and children’s children to remain forever slaves should we fall for this utter political insult. Who is James Ibori to keep ruling over freemen from his prison cell? Is he not a human being like the rest of us? Why should an exconvict and a current-convict continue to lord it over men who have never committed a crime nor ever been convicted of one? What has Uduaghan ever done for us to warrant his forcing a successor down our throats? Are we not thoroughbred, genuine, authentic Deltans anymore? *Abi Delta done dey carry last since Uduaghan done dey rule*? If Ibori could rule over us for eight years and his cousin, Uduaghan subjected us to hunger, penury, poverty and misgovernance for another eight years, have they not enjoyed our state enough? Have those of us who looked beyond ethnic sentiments, decided to sympathize with Uduaghan and gave him a chance to prove himself all these years, not tried for him enough? Are we, who were created in the most noble and sacred image of the Most High God of the entire universe, Uduaghan’s slaves that he must now rule over us through Okowa for another eight years? When did we suddenly become lazy men in Delta that one underperforming political family must now hold us to ransom without anyone being able to cough for a totality of twenty-four years? Have we become so completely useless that we cannot call a spade a spade, can no longer see the light and will no longer answer our fathers’ names? What a shame, my good people of Delta! If it is change we want, then change we must have, and change is in the opposition, and most certainly not in the twisted Delta State chapter of my party, the PDP!
Now that it is crystal-clear that we are being taken for a ride once again and being led by the nose to the slaughter house once more, how might we cooperate with the grace of God for our long enslaved state to be finally liberated? We must above all remain faithful to our commitment to a second term for our brother, President Goodluck Jonathan. Blood must always remain thicker than water and we would do well in this regard to ignore the ignorance of a few clowns like Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, who, despite their rabblerousing, have very little to offer our President electorally. We shall vote for Jonathan, our flesh and blood, for a second term come 2015 on the PDP platform. Thereafter, we shall dutifully and studiously tell the PDP at state level to go to hell and burn to ashes!
Okowa is not our messiah just as Uduaghan and Ibori were never our messiahs. When it comes to the destiny of our stupendously endowed but colossally mismanaged state, we must now look elsewhere for succor, trusting in the Divine Providence of the God of Liberation to rescue us from the clutches of bad governance. The good people of the South-West proved how this can be done in the last general elections. They voted-in their preferred candidates regardless of party affiliations for their various governorships and later returned to vote-in President Jonathan for the Presidency. In the South-East, which returned a landslide for Jonathan, their love for him did not prevent them from voting-in opposition governors in Anambra and Imo states.
We will not be left out in Delta. *With or without Ibori, Uduaghan or Okowa, we nor dey carry last!* We will vote for Goodluck for Nigeria and vote out the PDP in Delta. There are viable candidates in the opposition and our enduring love for Jonathan does not necessarily mean a love for the PDP. We will remain loyal to PDP national but when it comes to Delta, we shall flush the state PDP down the toilet. We will liberate our state by voting for the opposition come the 2015 gubernatorial polls. We are not intimidated. We are ready for absolutely anything. If they want peace, they will get peace. Whatever else they want, they will get more than they bargained for. Once we have taken care of President Jonathan, we will put them in their proper place and give them a disgrace no one has ever seen in Delta.
We are Deltans and we will not be slaves to an exconvict in jail in London nor will we be slaves to his cousin he imposed to torment us for the past eight years. Needless to say, we will not be slaves to their lackey and triplet sibling, Okowa, whom they have now convolutedly imposed as our party’s flag bearer. We are Deltans and our clarion call henceforth shall be “DELTA FREED AT LAST!” We are Deltans and Delta shall be free!

Barr. JESUTEGA ONOKPASA,

178 Sapele/Warri Road,

Sapele,

Delta State.

07037212475