I have never met Hon Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi personally though I have attended couple of functions in which he was a guest also. So it would amount to free and cheap talk for me to say I can conjecture what kind of governor he will become. If the messages credited to him on a few billboards in Enugu are anything o go by, one would begin to assume that he is a fine humble man. The same billboard messages will also become a yardstick to know how malleable and docile he can be in the hands of inordinate political godfathers. From the Nigerian perspective of democracy, and probably Enugu in particular, the Enugu State governorship race for 2015 is as good as fought and won. Firstly, the incumbent governor has given his support; secondly he is in the winning party called PDP. Even though I do no doubt the antecedents, integrity and pedigree of Hon Ugwuanyi, it would have been a lot better for him if all the candidates where duly and satisfactorily given a good hearing. I am not a politician so I would not know what all the ingredients in this process of consensus and anointing, a creed PDP has carefully tucked into their constitution for some clandestine purposes, are. I would have said that there are elements of creativity in this consensus and anointing thing but when I hear that there is always a rift amongst the big players after anointing, I become left with no option than to say that anointing is the reason we have problems and not the reason there will be no problem. Experience has shown that most of the infractions in the political groupings have always, directly or indirectly, been triggered by one consensus and anointing or another. Throw the thing open and let the players do it on a level playing ground. It is important to note that PDP has zoned the governorship to the North of the state, but it should have stopped at that. But my argument even has been that if people come in and do a thorough job, this zoning thing should have become an aberration that would have been done away with, in our political lexicon. Zoning becomes an issue, when people who come in to deliver service to the citizenry, either by omission or commission, refuse to use their offices to give a fairly distributed services. So people now say, let us wait, when it is zoned to us we will get our people favored after we would have lined our pockets thoroughly. I have followed all the reasons adduced by major stakeholders on why they resorted to anointing. First from the Nwodos and second from Gov Chime himself. None of the reasons revealed any known ingenuity in the process of democracy by any yardstick. I know I may be odd in this thinking, but history will tell. I weep for this country. And we watch, helplessly, ho the inordinate activities of the political elites strangulate creativity and retard our development and growth as a people. They amass dirty wealth with which they flaunt in the daylight and they become instant superstars. All of us whose lives are being threatened now scramble to make them intimate friends. If they declare occasions where they want to burn our resources they have hijacked from us, we are the very first to gather and toast to our peril. Let us hope that whoever, eventually, emerges in these political shenanigans will be independent minded enough to shirk off undue pressures, which is usually the consequence of anointing, to face the primary reason of coming to power which is to use the resources of the state to develop the generality of the people of that state and not to embellish the already bloated pockets of a few individuals. If Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi becomes that messiah, to god be the glory. I will always give my support from non partisan elevation, at the early stages, but I will not fail to sound flurry if the situation gets awry.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 09:16:41 +0000