IN his magnum opus, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the great Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, skillfully created a mystical bird he called the Chichi Dodo’, which he tells us hates  filth and rotten objects with a consuming passion.

Ironically, the Chichi Dodo, in Armah’s very fertile imagination, has a five-star taste for maggots which, naturally, luxuriate and grow in filth and rotten objects!

This analogy, forms the kernel of Ralf Imaghodo’s hocus pocus attempt to situate his pet peeve of “blind ambition,” in contradistinction to the context of the 2016 Edo governorship election and the emergence of a Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, legal challenge which, in his morbid calculations, would not have been contemplated in the first place. Later, he goes on to contradict himself.

Imaghodo’s two-tranched article Edo election: Limit of blind ambition in the Vanguard editions of January 12 and 13, 2017, labouriously opens with a circuitous definition of “blind ambition” as if it is one of the principal offences outlawed by the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) and set on a trail to link it with the Edo political situation.  The scenario is that of a desperate rush to feed his sponsors with a sour alphabet soup that the piece is.

He avers that “ …given the consensus by the general public that the conduct was generally peaceful and relatively free and fair, the loser should have congratulated the winner and look forward to a better outing in the future”.  What hypothesis! One is bound to ask Imaghodo whether he extended the same advice to Adams Oshiomhole, who, in 2007 went to the election tribunal to challenge the election of the PDP candidate, Professor Oserheimen Aigberaodion, Osunbor, an exercise that was almost marred by Oshiomhole’s hordes of Ton Ton Macoutes, who serially savaged PDP supporters and their properties whenever the tribunal sat in 2007/2008.

It is proper  to point out that it will be pristine behaviour for Imaghodo to advise his people to allow the Justice Ahmed Badamasi-led tribunal to perform their  assigned duties rather than distract them through violent posturing and bare-faced threats and trenchant actions.

It is pertinent to note that Imaghodo did not, for safety reasons, shy away from dabbling into issues linked with the current election petition tribunal, in its quest to unravel the contention between the All Progressive Congress, APC, and the PDP, in the conduct of the disputed September 28, 2016 governorship election in Edo State.

The piece under review cast its writer as an epitome and exemplar of the Ayi Kwei Armah’s celebrated Chichi Dodo, who in trying to define “blind ambition , finds it difficult to extricate himself from the labyrinthine assemblage of unrelated contexts that further exposed the primary purpose of his article: demonise the PDP and put an angelic hallow on the head of the APC.  Politics, if Imaghodo does not know is the struggle for the acquisition of power and its accoutrements.  In the main, what some people exhibit is inordinate ambition, in trying to aspire and even run for a position, elective or appointive, that he or she is not mentally, educationally or psychologically equipped to either pursue or occupy.

If ambition is blind, then there is  no ambition at all. Such person is on a Kamikaze trip of self-destruction or harakiri.

When you propound a novel theory, especially in the realm of human behavourial patterns in the search for political power, you do not pigeon-hole your findings to a particular set of people or group, until you are sure that your categorisation will withstand intensive scrutiny and analyses.

Imaghodo “rabbled and roused” about the “limit of blind ambition” as if it is not ambition and self-confidence that are the prime staples and ingredients that drive most contests, struggles and competitions for position, on the one hand.  On the other, you can preach “blind ambition” to Laurent Gbagbo (Ivory Coast), Yahya Jammeh and their ilk, who after losing the reins of power, stay glued to their positions.

What is glaring though, is that there is a deliberate attempt to skew facts and “gain a dip” at the finishing line, especially when the APC and the PDP are still metres aways from the legal finishing point. It is sheer futility to devote almost 2,000 words to a voting exercise that has already taken place, almost four months on and expect to draw inference from it to exonerate your own party’s conduct or misconduct.

Imaghodo has tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to reinvent the wheel in his bid to paint the PDP with a black tar brush in hand, over the 2007 and 2016 governorship elections even when he, inadvertently, postulates that “Since the perpetrators of electoral fraud in the state were by the exit of Grace Group into (sic) AC almost equally represented in the two parties, it was a matter of how well one party was able to out-rig and out-smart the other”! If he, candidly, agreed that the two parties (the then Action Congress and the PDP”…massively rigged (the 2007 election) from Edo South through Edo Central to Edo North”, why did Comrade Adams Aliyu Eric Oshiomhole run to the election petition tribunal for myriad reliefs culminating in his “victory” on Tuesday, November 11, 2008? Another Chichi Dodo benefited from the morass of an election considered to be mutually-rigged by the two major combatants.  Haba!

We will not discuss the grain of the pending petition of the PDP and its candidate against the APC and its candidate over the September 28, 2016 governorship election because it is both contemptuous and impolitic to do so, in the present circumstances.

We feel that the tacit admission that the Action Congress (the precursor of the APC), has an active cell of election riggers who did not do enough to snatch victory on the field but relied on the salvation granted by the 2007 election petition tribunal.  If not, why is Imaghodo frantically fixated on proving, by street science, that the 2007 and 2016 elections had no comparative affinity but differences.  Is he, desperately, trying to set an agenda for the current tribunal, an act that constitutes explicit contempt of its proceedings?

Whomever he is, you will almost get away with the feeling that Dr. Ralf Imaghodo is probably, of a saintly heritage until you decipher, by clinically doing a post mortem of his carefully-concealed diatribes and bare-faced insolence, directed at the rank and file of the Edo PDP.  His “Some nihilistic members of PDP leadership….”, “The benighted fellows and the boastful cronic (sic) no nothings (sic) …” and  a band of political marauders”, “…the daring rigging machines of Mr. Fix It and his likes” etc, are tacit examples of Imaghodo and his sponsors psychological make-up.  Any doubt about the trajectory of the piece will be allayed if you read between the lines of “The Tribunal cannot also be swayed by the organised solidarity rallies of paid gangs and groups of jobless youths, who are being daily mobilised to the Tribunal to disturb the peace of the area chanting slogans!” The foregoing statements presages the sole intention of the writer to poleaxe the PDP and its candidate and beautify the APC and its candidate.

The Tribunals (sic) are already aware that unpopular and desperate political office seekers stop at nothing to create non-existent popularity.  The Tribunal cannot service the blind ambition of desperadoes.  It is solely interested in hard evidence”.

Apart from cloning, the responsibilities of the INEC and making statements and assertions that are cloaked in pseudo-official language and tone, Imaghodo goes ahead to label the highly-credible and respected election monitoring/observer groups as “…sponsored by the PDP to discredit the elections”. All of them?

It is amusing to find that Imaghodo was not aware that the accredited election observers and monitors addressed a press conference, under the aegis of Public Interest Association on Monday, October 3, 2016 in Benin City.  The kernel of the conference was encapsulated in the speech delivered by the National Coordinator of PIA, Mrs. Esther Bassey, that “We demand for an immediate cancellation of the September 28, 2016 governorship election in Edo State because such charade exercise has already put the peace and unity of the state in jeopardy as the results released by a partisan and compromised INEC does not in any way reflect the wishes of the people of the state.” Need Imaghodo any further proof that the observer/monitoring groups were fair and impartial in the discharge of their duties?

If Imaghodo and his sponsors can go to this length and impersonate a Tribunal set-up to adjudicate on a specific topic in which their party, APC, is a contending one, it portrays an attempt to dabble into an area that is contemptible. Edolites, nay Nigerians, are aware that the resolution of the electoral impasse will be critically and clinically addressed in the interest of everyone and not the narrow prism and thesis of “limit of blind ambition” being propounded by “Dr. Ralf Imaghodo”.

Mr.  Brian Jatto, a political analyst,wrote from Lagos.