Edo local government crises, Okpebholo’s stigmatisation and unsolved pillages, BY TONY ERHA

From the year-end of December 2024 to this moment, the eighteen local government areas (LGAs) of Edo State, have been disquieted. The uneasiness in the bottom-rung of the threesome public administration, had snowballed into a crisis of greater proportion. No one seems to know what trouble is next and when it will abate. Most of Edo lawmakers, during a plenary session of the State House of Assembly, had handed two months suspension-from-office to the elected chairmen and vice-chairmen of the LGAs. Reason adduced for the suspension was offered that all the local government councils (LGCs), had disobeyed directives earlier issued to them by the state executive, which was later passed to the legislative body. That they render financial accounts for the over a year and half duration they had been in office.

Incontrovertibly, the legal and ideal steps, which the embattled local government administrations ought to have taken, that they defiantly flouted, was the quarterly declaration to the public and their constituencies, that they are ordinarily responsible to. If it was done, the state government or other non-state actors would have been satisfied with the information in the public domains and wouldn’t have gone the length of ombudsman interventions, to get the right thing done.

Therefore, one would relevantly ask when it had become ultra-vire, like the PDP and others say, for state and non-state actors to call for such accountability? This is at the backdrop that the accountability was denied and several of the councils’ executives had earlier been summoned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commissions (EFCC), on alleged petitions of financial embezzlements by the LGA constituents.

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The councils’ executives had that misfortune of imbibing the notion that they were insured by the Supreme Court, following its last judgment on ‘financial autonomy for the local government councils – which stripped the state governments of the control of local government councils’ fund. After all, when the apex Court pronounces final verdicts, who disobeys them? The chairmen must have contemplated.

Instead of perceiving the faults of the council’s chairmen, the lofty office and person of Senator Monday Okpebholo, the state governor, had been intensely criticised, oftentimes, where the governor is hit below the belt. Also, he is rained with obscenities, which a state number one citizen shouldn’t deserve.

My good friend, Dr. Tony Aziegbemhi, chairman of the state chapter of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the platform which elected all the councils’ officers, leads a battery of media men, about this. In a state, where the press is combative, political doings would follow suite. That is where and how the Edo traditional home-media and its all-comer social media complements, should guide it.

But why accuse Governor Okpebholo as one who removed the chairmen, when the lawmakers of PDP majority are those who frontally suspended their fellow party men and women of the councils? One would have conceded to the media utterances of Aziegbemhi, that because the governor mentioned two huge figures as the money embezzled by the council’s chairmen and so the accusations of fraud were false. A twist to the whole affairs and ion validation of frauds, the councillors of the various councils had risen to the situations to accuse their chairmen and deputies that they committed the huge frauds; hence they impeached the chairmen. Like the Crocodiles who devoured their own eggs, the chairmen and deputies, are members of the same PDP.

Therefore, it’s no gainsaying that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the PDP opposition, had set a hot and dramatic media and politicking template examples that heats up the state. But Dr. Aziegbemhi, who is said to be familiar with the martial art, would know that a handshake with the hard-hitting Emperor Jarrett Tenebe, his fellow chair of the state’s APC, when it goes beyond the elbows, would be ‘fists and kicks of fury’ of the ubiquitous ‘kung fu or judo or karate’.

Disturbed as he was, Osazua Ibhaze, the urbane essayist and journalist, holds a bitter testimony for numerous Edolites and the Nigerian public, who are alarmed that ‘jungle politics’, had overridden ‘jaw-joy’ politics, which his Esan street-lingo call ‘Ofilefi’. Or do I have to remind you of the Benin version of ‘Filaga filogo, political-minded fights, were broken chairs, bottles and other cudgels accentuate muscle flexing? ‘Ofilefi’, (he who hits hardest is the award-winning conqueror), denotes inter-partisan politics, that had gone bananas, where politicians relish the pains, they wreak on their opponents.

Aren’t the Edo populace fed up with ‘cut-noise’ and ‘cut-life politics?’ For all had thought that gone were the heady days of Ex-Governor Godwin Obaseki, when “to rhe na gbina”, “politics of come down and let’s fight”, was the craze? Then, the ‘4+4 Togba’ (a diehard mob for “Obaseki must complete eight years governorship double-tenure”), firmly engaged the APC’s ‘Tokpa’, a counter-combatant group chanting ‘Obaseki must vacate the seat’, in colossal fractures that had shamed the state.

Whereas Mr. Obaseki’s is now a past tense, the ‘4+4 Torgba’ exponents may be in deficits of the usual street worthiness, where the immediate-past governor is now a general without a troop of battle-ready followers, who had fickle-mindedly shifted from him. But, with Dr. Asue Ighodalo, who is fighting to recover ‘his stolen mandate’, at the governorship elections petition tribunal, hope seems to be on the cliff edge, for the foot soldiers, that the judgement would favour them. There is an imprecise hope and there is an APC that is determined to retain its governorship crown. That is why there isa ‘dagger-drawn’ at the Benin City venue of the tribunal.

Aziegbemhi’s sing-songs add more refrains where he accuse Governor Okpebholo as an autocratic, who had wielded his governorship powers to cause and fuel the LGCs’ crises. In a sharply response to the suspension of the chairmen and their deputies, Dr. Aziegbemhi told the Arise News TV Channel, whilst citing the Supreme Court’s ruling and that of the Edo High Court, accused the governor of setting the tone for and masterminding the crisis. In the PM News, with other outlets, the Esan-born Edo PDP-giant, cried out to the public and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that ‘democracy was on fire in Edo’, where it has been ‘thrown into confusion and anarchy’, because Governor Okpebholo had aided the invasion and sack of APC from their secretariat on Airport Road, Benin City, the state capital.

Pointedly, isn’t it funny that a PDP, that was in power, whose kingpin and ex-governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, previously made treasonable public blurts that the 2024 governorship election was ‘a do-or-die’ and ‘that a massive national crisis would emanate from that governorship election, and other ignitable moves and statements by him, is the same now accusing another of causing ‘confusion and anarchy?’

The understanding and application of the law of the law is so dicey. That is why Charles Dickens, once cautioned humanity that the ‘law is an ass ridden by men’. And so, many a pundits admit that there are voids in the Supreme Court’s judgement, which although may have been upright barring the state governments of the control of the LGCs fund, but was somewhat mechanical and open-ended, causing the loopholes, which gave the councils the flexibility to breaches. That a man enjoys immunity from tuberculosis shouldn’t embolden him to leak the saliva of a tuberculous patient.

The Supreme Court’s judgement, itself, had generated a loud hoopla of contending views, mostly from lawyers who claim the usual sanctimony of ‘learned men’. As if all others, including this writer, despite their erudite testimonies, were not ‘learned’ or ‘schooled’. A paralegal (a legal assistant or pocket lawyer), from a village, once confronted this writer, that the Supreme Court gave a ‘below the bar’ judgment, while his home-lawyer-friends opposed him. His final shots were that, even then, neither of the opposing lawyers on the judgement were ‘learned’ enough to determine the pendulum of another interpretation should the matter go back to the apex court.

“The Supreme Court is the final umpire on the matter. The hands which pegged the fresh fish to the kiln are the same that loosen it when dry”. He snapped.

For those still seeking a lifelong resolution to the local councils’ impasse, a solution may have been ignorantly offered by my friend, the paralegal!