OKOWA’S VICTORY: URHOBOS AND POLITICAL TRANSMORGRIFICATION
“Politics are almost as exciting as war,
And quite as dangerous. In war you
Can only be killed once, but in
Politics many times.”
– SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
CHIEF BOBSON GBINIJE
It is a mathematical certainty that the tidal surge of apodictic euphony that greets success and the lugubrious gloom that characterizes failure are always brought to an oxymoronic focus when they are at play in politics. Hence, failure is an orphan but success has a thousand and one friends.
The empirical testability of this philosophical dictum was profoundly played out when the Urhobos (Great Ogboru-LP and Emerho O’tega-APC) lost woefully to Senator Ifeanyi Okowa-PDP in the Delta State gubernatorial election. Chief Great Ogboru scored 130,028 votes while Senator Ifeanyi Okowa scored 724,680 votes.
It is platitudinously axiomatic that there are multidimensional strategies and tactics for winning elections in Nigeria. They include but not limited to tribal sentiments, numerical superiority, thuggery, rigging, ballot box snatching, manipulation of results, assassinations, extra judicial killings, kidnappings, institutionalization of intimidation, blackmail, propaganda, media hype and social rascality. Hence, Wendell Philips in his 1864 address to congress posited that “politicians are like the bones of a horse’s foreshoulder – not a straight one in it.”
But the Urhobos of Delta State have all these political weaponry at their beck and call. But they failed must sordidly in the 2015 gubernatorial election in Delta State, because of crass disunity. Three months to the 2015 general elections the arrow head of Urhobo political socio-cultural fulcrum, the Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) was in total schmaltzy of political and leadership contretemps (Joe Omene’s group Vs Onoge’s group). The ‘bandwagon effect’ of this state of gross political salmagundi led to the failure of Urhobo candidates during the PDP’s convention in Asaba, Delta State.
That was what sounded the political death-knell of the Urhobo gubernatorial ambition. This commenced the fire brigade action of gravitating and junketing from the Labour Party (LP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) etc. When push came to shove there was the compound and sagacious need for the Urhobos to unite under one party and to feature one credible Urhobo gubernatorial candidate.
Chief Great Ogboru of the LP took the politically algebraic position that if he wins under the LP he will start hobnobbing and will work with the APC (Buhari’s presidency). But Emerho O’tega of the central party APC had perspicuous cerebral fluidity that with the APC at the center he and his APC deserve to carry the gubernatorial banner for the Urhobos in Delta State. They both refused to step down for the other so that the Urhobos could have one gubernatorial candidate standing against the formidable wiles and Machiavellian craftiness of the PDP.
The Urhobo Elders, Leaders of Thought and Concern Urhobos etc. adviced on the need for there to be unity in the pursuit and defence of Urhobo interest in the gubernatorial political struggle. But Chief Great Ogboru and Emerho O’tega thought otherwise. The consequences of their political rascality, heedlessness and mulish obduracy led to the landslide victory for the Governor-Elect Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, apart from the serious campaigns to all nooks and crannies of Delta State. The PDP used every advantage and clandestinely furtive descartian manipulation to win the gubernatorial and other elections in Delta State.
The disunity of the Urhobo people and the stubbornness of their two gubernatorial candidates reminds us of the metaphor of ‘the two self-opinionated antelopes’. The story runs thus: two stubborn antelopes full of the metastatic malady of egocentrism, edacity and Luciferous arrogance met on a single lane bridge. They both refused to go back so that one could cross before the other. Driven by pride and the clamorous plaudit of their hypocritical supporters they both fell into the river and got drowned.
We hope these excess luggages of disunity, treachery, lily-livered monetization of political conscience, skullduggery, prestidigitation, abracadabra and ventriloquisms by Urhobo politicians, voters and totality of the Urhobo nation will undergo radical political surgoenization and morphological transmogrification after the 2015 elections and before, during and after the 2019 elections. We say congratulations to Senator Ifeanyi Okowa the governor-elect, PDP and Deltans in general. In genuine rotation of power lies the pulchritude and majesty of democracy. Delta State must set forth at dawn.
CHIEF BOBSON GBINIJE
MANDATE AGAINST POVERTY (MAP)
WARRI.
08023250378
