Edo 2020: What else does Obaseki want?

By Tony Erha

Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State could be perceived as a man who acts before he thinks.  He can also be likened to one who tries in vain to gather the rainwater after a heavy downpour when all that is left are scanty droplets on the housetop.

Apparently, the governor’s manoeuvres  to get a second term in office in the scheduled September 19, 2020 governorship election on the platform of the APC have hit the rock. The gateway had been firmly and finally locked against him.

Verily, a screening panel, set up by the National Working Committee (NWC) of the APC, the political party on which platform Mr. Obaseki was initially elected  returned a damning finding, that culminated in the confirmation of his disqualification from participating in the party’s primary election.

Two others were also disqualified whilst three others scaled through the screening process. Reasons adduced for Obaseki’s disqualification  by the panel, made up of some erudite APC bigwigs, were premised on the  irregularities discovered in the certificates and other entry papers Obaseki had submitted. His anti-APC activities were writ large.

Despite his disqualification from the primaries, as well as the scandalous allegations that he forged his certificates, with the alleged highhandedness he conducted the affairs of the party and the state, Mr. Obaseki and his followers are Quixotically dramatic that the governor is infallible, even as they cry blue murder that Oshiomhole and the NWC are the  plotters of the governor’s downfall.

And aided by the bravado-guilt a political support base could choose to lead its principal to the perilous pathway Obaseki had been led, leaving all in a complete puzzle as to whether his instigators are genuine “Political Friends or Fiends” of the governor.

Interestingly, an army of his supporters, known as the “Torgba” coined from “4 + 4”, a euphemism for “Obaseki must complete two tenures of four years each”, liked doing the street and social media fights with the “Torkpa”, a Benin language coinage for “Obaseki Must Go” with only one term. Genuine  critics of the governor are usually maligned by the Torgba, who call them haters of Obaseki.

The factional crisis in Edo APC started with incessant complaints of neglect and maltreatment by its members, as levelled against the governor. It soon reached an apogee when Mr. Obaseki failed to address it all, but clandestinely schemed out fourteen major members of elected assemblymen of the state, to swear-in ten other minority members, who he browbeat into supporting his gambit to control the leadership of the State Assembly.

The consequential crisis snowballed into two irreconcilable factions, where APC party members engaged in street brawls, brigandage, bomb detonations, arsons, mudslinging and multiple lawsuits.

Obaseki frontally attacked Oshiomhole, the same man who brought him to power, as a mastermind of the Edo People’s Movement (EPM), an opposite faction to his Obaseki/Shaibu Movement (OSM), the one he had led. He also raised the public hues and cry of Oshiomhole being an overbearing godfather, interfering in  his governance of the State. Obaseki deployed innuendos in his frontal war against Oshiomhole and other APC leaders he had reason to believe were with Oshiomhole.

He employed propaganda to deviously characterise and profile them as piling pressures on him to share Edo monies, under his care, to them.

While Oshiomhole continually denied the allegations, the governor and his men tended to be more aggressive, obviously using the same scarce resources of the state to promote the crisis against the EPM faction.

Obaseki usually directed volatile public utterances  at his fellow party men, who worked assiduously for his election, instead of evolving an all inclusive orderliness, since he should assume Edo APC leadership and that of the state’s first citizenship.

From the very inception, many perceptive groups and persons could see the ominous signs that the needless face-off, steadily induced by the governor, would be a Boomerang, with him as the imbroglios’ first victim.

With Obaseki’s disqualification from the race and his resignation from APC, the same bad advisers and fair weather associates, who goaded him to give Oshiomhole and others the dirty fights, which most pundits see as grave mistakes, Obaseki is again being misled to vie in any other opposition party, against APC. They would cajole him as being the most loved and popular candidate that would amass majority votes in the Edo saidv forthcoming election, whereas a majority of the same voters in Obaseki’s own backyard in Benin City, were the same jubilated about his APC’s rejection instead of being agitative.

Mr. Obaseki, if he is a truly discerning person, like the monstrous Elephant that hears his bodily smell, he should know outright that his problematic certificates and brashness are an Albatross to be easily ignored by any political party and its players who may cunningly decide to field him, whereas what they are after is the money of Edo State.

And as it now seems, none of the parties would genuinely field a political liability as a governorship candidate, excepting the party is only in the race not to win or to get an elected governor, who would easily be removed over certificate forgery, where another party watching from the sideline could wrestle the governorship position through litigation.

Of course, the case of Bayelsa State and others are fresh in the minds.

Tony Erha,  a journalist and activist, writes from Benin City, Edo State.