On Thursday, June 14, 2012, the Independent Television, ITV, Benin aired two interactive political discussion segments on its flagship breakfast programme, “This Morning on ITV”. The two sections had the same focus of the definition of true governance and people-oriented development of Edo State.

The first session was anchored by the cool and calculated Sonny Duke Okosun and the discussion panel was made up of Mr. Tony Alile, a key member of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Publicity Team; Omo Irabor, a Warri-based legal practitioner and civic rights activist, and Mr. Kassim Afegbua, the Director of Media Affairs of Oshiomhole Campaign Organisation.

The second session featured Matthew Urhoghide, the Publicity Secretary of the state’s PDP chapter and Mr. Kassim Afegbua of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN. This segment was also compered by Duke-Okosun of the Independent Television. Apart from the number and disparity in the composition of the two panels, the bile, acrimony, allegations and bare-faced insults that riled the air waves portend the vehemence with which the incumbent ACN wants to vilify and demonise the opposition –especially the PDP.

The two mid-morning interactive sessions were turned into platforms of stark abuse of Chief Anthony Anenih and other PDP members by the loquacious Afegbua who has a dislike for decorum and respect for elders, not to mention his peers. While bandying and parodying the time-worn “monumental achievements” and “giant strides” sing-song, he consciously tried to skew verifiable facts and figures that are already in the public domain, to “authenticate” his spurious claims that Edo State was in “safe hands”. One of the major faux pas he committed was his unsuccessful attempt to distance his ACN (as presently constituted) from the Years of the Locusts that attended the state from 1999 to 2007. For record purposes, Kassim Afegbua, the self-acclaimed former “National Chairman” of the National Democratic Party, NDP, self-styled media spokesman for General Ibrahim Babangida, was a six-month Chief Press Secretary to Governor Oshiomhole in the nascent days of his governorship after the death, in a motor accident, of Chris Nwachukwu, the pioneer CPS.

It is general knowledge that Oshiomhole found Afegbua hyperactive, meddlesome and uncontrollable. He (Oshiomhole) wanted to declare Afegbua as “excess baggage” before he left office in very dramatic, cloudy and negative circumstances. It surprised Edo watchers how the duo, who are on the same wavelength of rabble-rousing, grandstanding, grandiloquence, wild and spurious allegations were able to click for a six-month period.

It is vital to note that during the fuel subsidy debate, the selfsame Kassim took Oshiomhole to the cleaners in his “Stomach Democracy” column in Saturday Vanguard by employing weighty and denigrating adjectives and expletives to denounce the anti-people stance that a branded “Peoples General” like Oshiomhole took and propagated shamelessly. In the said article, Afegbu clinically deconstructed the Oshiomhole persona as a fake and over-hyped creation due to his wholesale and selfish support for the removal of fuel subsidy – a policy majority of Nigerians railed against.

We will go back to the grain of the two interactive sessions that featured Afegbua and three other gentlemen and showcased his predilection for the obverse, ridiculous, insolent and skewing of information. Among other mind- binding assertions he made in the course of the live telecasts under considerations, Kassim accused the Edo PDP of non-performance for a decade and touted the “giant strides” of Governor Oshiomhole.

The nexus between Edo PDP and Edo ACN

It is no gainsaying the fact that over 98 per cent of the membership profile of the ACN in Edo State were former members of the PDP at one time or the other. It is also common knowledge that the leadership strata and top hierarchy of Edo ACN were also the principal initiators and executors of the ruddlerless eight-year incubus that instituted development inertia, graft, pillage and asset-stripping in the governance of Edo State between 1999 and 2007.

Dr OKHAKUMHE IJEBOR a political analyst, wrote from Abuja.