By EFOSA OBASOGIE

HAVING emerged as governor in what was ultimately a popular manner, indeed in all its most consequential ramifications, legendary unionist and impactful man of the people, former Edo State governor and current chairman of the ruling All Progressive Congress, APC, Comrade Adams Oshiomole, had nevertheless somehow managed to diminish in ethos whose antithesis his emergence had hitherto so succinctly represented.

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Indeed, in Oshiomole’s bewildering descent into the odious politics he had once rescued the people from, he had allowed himself to sink even into the brazenness of imposing a politician with no leadership credentials as successor and governor over those who had once deified him.

Humans can always be relied upon to forget that nothing is as transient as power and that at the end of the day, it is always the man upstairs who calls the shots. In no state in Nigeria today, is the intra-party opposition more traumatisingly evident than Edo of all places! What Obaseki is being allowed to get away with in Edo, no president of Nigeria ever attempted.

Perhaps, when Obaseki is through crushing his supposed fellow party men, he will set his sights on the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. Right now, he appears ready to bolt to the PDP at any moment yet insists on maintaining a stranglehold over the APC he clearly no longer has any faith in.

Edo is now a state in which politics has so completely failed as to be veritably marooned in the circumstances of an entity liable to be placed under political receivership vide a declaration of a state of emergency.

Let those hobnobbing with Obaseki in the euphoria of the moment wait for another tenure if Edo is, in fact, unlucky enough to have such a man as governor for a second term, and see if they do not all end up in the belly of the tiger.

Yet who might we forensically blame for the scarification of Edo into this all too obvious gaping wound of a pathetic excuse for a functioning state? Certainly Obaseki, of course, who, as governor, sits behind the table at which the buck stops.

Yet, if we are to be fair to all concerned, and especially, to ourselves, how are we to ignore the Oshiomole factor in the entire saga, when he is chiefly responsible for foisting this potentate upon our state?

Remarkably, before the scuttling of the decamping of Osagie Ize-Iyamu back into the APC, the only impactful outing Edo APC had been able to accomplish in a long while, had held in the private residence of General Charles Airhiavbere, his premises proving to be the only place safe enough for the APC, the ruling party at the centre, to hold a meeting in the whole of Edo State!

What’s more, the exiled legislators, members of the first arm of government, who were chased out of their mandates to our collective shame as a supposedly democratic nation, are being accommodated in Abuja, as I have gathered.

This is the same Airhiavbere, who, as far as I know, had hitherto proved to be Oshiomole’s one and only true threat in his entire public career, be it as unionist or state governor!

Why are Nigerian politicians so miserably desperate to determine their successors? Funny enough, and as it has more often than not turned out, the chief executives who managed to impose their successors on the people have woefully fared far worse than those who had the good sense to keep an open mind and allow the process of succession to fairly play itself out.

As a matter of fact, the recurring decimal of anointed political sons turning rabidly and ravenously on their benefactors is probably the most interesting inflection of Nigerian politics, and if anyone thinks this is a phenomenon historically restricted to the present Republic, he clearly knows nothing about pre-Independence politics or the politics of the First and Second Republics.

Maybe comrade-governor is desperately looking for yet another person he considers to be pliable, docile, compliant and conformist to impose on the people of Edo State. In that case, he would only be repeating a very big mistake all over again.

There was a time at which he led the people in the paths of righteousness before he decided to start playing the sort of politics he had once so celebratedly opposed.

In the final analysis, all politics is local and even if certain others are now inclined to discount him as completely irrelevant in the politics of Edo State, I refuse to be moved and will remain confident in my assessment of him as the preeminent political leader in Edo as a whole.

This moment in history beckons on Oshiomhole to reflect on the purpose of leading the people once more. Indeed, this time around, all temptation to self-aggrandisement or enticement into placing reliance on human understanding, he should do well to resist as he endeavours to lead the people as he once did in spirit and in truth.