STORY-telling is an age-long tradition in Africa that has refused to died even in the face of invasive Western culture. Didacticism is the surviving strength of this age-long tradition. However, African politicians are good story-tellers:they always tell good stories to convince the electorate during the fevered electioneering campaign period.

Engaged in this art the politicians always overlook, ignore, idealize, romanticize the prickly lethal undulations, bends, flaws and SILENCES in their propagandist claims, unmindful that the discerning electorate have got the capability to isolate the silences from the real achievements. Is this not the time of political digitization when only political shelters with strong foundations are searched and occupied – when known ties of consanguinity are buried in veneration of performance politics of verifiable story-telling?

Characteristically, with the fast-approaching 2015 Delta South senatorial elections, many exceptionally talented story-tellers have emerged on the arena, each armed with a bag of inexhaustible stories invented with all the rhetorical flourishes to hypnotize their listeners. Senator J.E manager and others from different political parties are the current story-tellers entangled like fighting iguanas in Tuomo town, leaving to the electorate the authoritative task of assessing the stories and awarding deservingly corresponding marks. Therefore, some sugar-coated aspirants could respectively claim to have created the Heaven and the Earth in their iguana-like struggle but the voters, this time, would conquer any rhetorical charm and identify with the right candidate, as Deltans are familiar with the political biodata of the aspirants no matter the infusion of propagandist ornamentation.

In this season of story-tellling, story-listening and story-evaluation, clear and vast is the consciousness that Manager, the present PDP flagbearer for Delta South Senatorial District, was the chairman of Bomadi Council (1991), state PDP chairman (1997), two-time Commissioner of two different governments and a two-time senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Bomadi bridge, Gbaregolor-Esanma bridge, Torugbene road, Ogriagbene road, Ogbeinama canalization and other numerous development projects are giant indicators of his politics of performance and achievement. His human capital development features in form of his facilitation of award of contracts to people in his senatorial district and beyond, his passion for legislative facilitation of contract-creation for people is one visible component of his performance politics which has clearly situated him above many of his peers.

Beyond all these achievements which he terms his transformation dug-out, he has been the political beacon, navigator and surveyor for most Ijaw politicians of his generation right from the days of Chief Felix Ibru to Chief James Ibori. The phenomenally unassuming noiseless but clearly focused Manager is politically the Mecca for many politicians because of his political philosophy to accommodate all – a philosophy that always pardons his detractors, traducers and opponents no matter the enormity of the political transgression. This philosophy has more often than not been exploited by some psychopathic opponents. But, he is not bothered by these deliberate serial violations.

With the captivating stories of achievement credited to the aspirants in their passion for victory, it is their respective attunement in their various oratories that one of them be mandated to represent the Delta South Senatorial District in the Senate in 2015. Iguana-like, no aspirant is sacrificially ready to concede the senatorial space for the other in acknowledgement of superiority in achievements and competence. Yet comparatively, one is a better choice than others. This is where the electorate would claim a god-like position over the fate of the ENTANGLED political iguanas – the story-tellers because Deltans know the achievement and competence quotient of all the contenders.

Among the aspirants, Deltans know whose achievements are mere media creations. The electorate with the power of discernment should delve deeper to authenticate the stories of achievement by aspirants so that the right choice could emerge.

This is the time to cast votes intelligently so that the politics of vindictiveness, isolation, discrimination, selfishness, under-development would be a thing of the past. The Delta South Senatorial District is not the political space for vindictive, insensitive and congenitally lie-coated story-teller who has not been able to transform his people visibly in all these years of political involvement. Only an aspirant whose stories of development are verifiable at the grass roots level would be crowned the accredited representative of Delta South senatorial District in the Senate. Awakened to the universal reality that only talented story-tellers with stories rooted in truth command wide listenership, let the search for a true story-teller begin now among Deltans. Only true story-tellers can transform Delta South Senatorial District. The stories of Manager have the transformation potential required to lead the Ijaws,Isokos and the Itsekiris to the land flowing with transformation honey.

Senator J.E. Manager is the true story-teller whose true stories cleared the path to the PDP ticket for the Delta South Senatorial District on 7 December 2014.

Mr. Ekanpou Enewaridideke, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Akparemogbene, Delta State.