Okharedia Ihimekpen a political analyst, wrote from Benin City, Edo State.
I have always said if Oshiomhole’s mentor (Lucky Igbinedion) represents the worst regime the state has ever had, Oshiomhole could as well be described as the worst omen ever of a looming disaster that is waiting to happen in Edo State, except there is a divine intervention.

Validation: Today, Oshiomhole’s government is the only government in the country where accountability remains a taboo. For instance, government contracts are never advertised before they are awarded; and, when they are awarded, the cost is never made public; and the strategy is quite familiar: To create room for regular upward reviews.

Sampler: What has happened to the four-kilometre stretch Airport Road allegedly awarded to the Igbinedions? Is it true that the contract cost has been reviewed upward five times to its current N8 billion? Is the same scenario not playing out on the Siluko and Sakponba roads?

In Edo State, the critical education, agriculture, health and industrial sectors are in comatose. The famous Edo Cement Factory, Bendel Brewery, Edo Integrated Farm Settlements have gone under; and, even the ageless Edo Line, which managed to survive the Igbinedion era, was the other day closed down as a result of financial recklessness and abuse of the company’s funds by officials of government.

There is a burgeoning grand deception in Edo; and, as one Osa Director, a journalist and member of the ACN in Edo State, said in a recent interview in the Source magazine: “It is our responsibility as intelligentsias not to allow functional illiterates and self-opinionated demigods to deceive the mass of our people with some propaganda and populist sophistry”.

A friend of mine once asked me why Governor Oshiomhole did not come earlier than now. I had told him that looking at the societal anguish and anger of the post-Lucky Igbinedion era, a functional illiterate and self-opinionated demigod would have been a contradiction in historical terms. Former Governor, Professor Oserheimen Osunbor and his former Deputy Governor, Lucky Imasuen, with their unsmiling visage, their lean and rather anxious figures, captured the mood of their time resulting in an interlude.

The ruling class, together with its ideological apparatuses, especially a judiciary utterly contemptible in its cringing buffoonery, had disgraced the Edo electorate. Only a drastic self-purge could avert the imminent disaster. Osunbor and Imasuen looked eminently ready to fulfill that historical mission.

The election tribunal betrayed its mission and, in so doing, compounded the image problem of our ruling class. This is a fact too well known to delay us here. And, in the absence of a genuine revolutionary circumstance, this betrayal paved the way for a different kind of historical personage: a comrade with sheer propaganda and populist sophistry, a trained rabble-rouser steeped in hypocrisy; hence his appointment with history.

The irony of his situation is compelling: an inflicted egoist and deliberate man, he represents the harried and desperate gamble of a ruling class that has exhausted all its permutations…. But his strength may also be his profound weakness. He may be led to misconstruing his historical mission as that of strengthening the Igbinedion misdemeanour and bad governance: non-functional governance here and brutish demigod there.

However, the painful result of this unsettling mosaic in the governance of our state is that government then becomes a perpetual hostage in the hands of the manipulators of our differences. But then, this scenario can only be resolved in favour of the Edo electorate on July 14, 2012