RIGHT OF REPLY

By Nwachukwu Obidiwe

‘WHEN adults reduce themselves to rice, children feast on them,” is the wisdom with which Comfort Obi set out her recent piece on developments in Anambra State,    titled: “Anambra: Time to tell these traditional rulers the truth.”

I, therefore, wish to borrow a leaf  as I unravel her reckless distortion of facts and cavalier dismissal of the eminent tribute that history pays to Senator Chris Ngige.

When an otherwise senior journalist self-reduces    to    fiction writing, compelled either by fading thoroughness, redundancy or mischief, the mighty pen is lost in an axial junk competition with a ganglion of social media slashers. A junk sold as factual and truthful should earn the reproach of  the  discerning as an errant revisionism.

Often in our clime, politics  wages war on morals but subjective partisanship does even worse. It deposits prejudicial silt on memory and mercilessly wrecks cognitive intuition.

Comfort Obi has since left the  active reportorial turf while comfortably sojourning with politicians. Only a consequent memory loss or mischief can explain the declarative lies she told about  Ngige in her essay.

It is out of place to repeat the inaccurate reductionism the piece bandied but suffice there is absolutely nothing like Dr. Chris Ngige as Governor was “taken to a room, some say toilet, and forced to read his resignation letter as governor,” as Comfort stated. It is a silly lie, a beer parlor tale that stands no chance before common sense.

But the truth is that the issue has left the realm of guesses, hearsay and speculation as the true story has severally been published.    Governor Chris Ngige arrived the Anambra Government House by 9.30 in the morning of July 10, 2003, and about an hour and half later, the late AIG Ralph Ige invaded and put the Government House on siege   with two lorry-load of fully-armed policemen.

Assisted by two other officers, he forced himself into the Governor’s office, shoving aside and disarming his security details. Not quite 30 minutes later, the Clerk of the Anambra State House of Assembly, Alloysius Ikwuka, walked in with the so-called resignation letter.

“So they brought the letter – my resignation letter as governor and another letter, that I have accepted the House of Assembly resolution accepting my letter of resignation- two letters.

Because when you sign the resignation, the house will  do a resolution of acceptance and then bring it back to you to sign– acknowledge. So, I refused both and I told him that this resignation letter was not from me.

There was argument and altercation. Then, the clerk left and Ige said I must sign and I said: Never! I won’t sign. He said in my own interest I have to sign it and I replied: which interest? I said the highest interest you have is that you have pistol.

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Bring it out naah, let’s see. I was waiting. If he had brought out his pistol, I would struggle for the pistol with him and I will take it from him.” This undisputed account from the former Governor is in the public space.

I therefore wonder where this other pedestrian account was fetched. The same goes for the assertion that as Governor, he was taken to Okija shrine- a grievous falsehood that ought to be corrected.

Then the mother of all lies! That Senator Ngige has not won election since leaving office as Governor in 2006.  This is an assertion that defies both empiricist reasoning and rationalism even among those not conversant with developments in Anambra.

Ngige became a senator in the seventh National Assembly by appointment according to Comfort. Such a cock-handed avowal by a supposedly well-heeled journalist is detestable.

How could anyone forget that the late amazon, Prof. Dora Akunyili, who incidentally was Comfort’s friend, was trounced by Ngige in a bitter and hotly contested Anambra Central senatorial election in 2011?

Here then is enough reason to talk about that election and the array of forces which Ngige defeated. There was Peter Obi, the incumbent Governor and there was Victor Umeh, the National Chairman of APG – all from Anambra Central and there was also the PDP-led Federal Government whose support for Dora was outstanding.

And how do you even diminish Dora herself, a national and international figure who at a point during the contest boasted that even some top members of Ngige’s ACN were in her support?

There was also Uche Ekwunife,    the APGA House of Representatives candidate for  Njikoka/Anaocha /Dunukofia Federal Constituency. The bottom-line is that it was the people of Anambra who stoutly resisted rigging as every attempt to re-enact the 2010 governorship heist and fiasco failed.

Three times a bye-election and three times, Ngige won! Round and about turns from the tribunal to the Appeal Court and all, Ngige won. Recall also it was an abomination to hear of ACN in the South East at the time in reference, yet Ngige used this platform for a resounding victory, coasting home as the only opposition Senator from the entire old Eastern Region.

Not garnering enough votes over the years is another allegation that portrays ignorance of the vitals and dynamics of elections in Anambra. The 2010 governorship election referred to above saw Ngige    officially allocated 83,276 votes to APGA’s 97,833.

But that was after INEC which swore to return Obi at all cost had decapitated the suffrage in Idemili South, Idemili North and Onitsha South, Ngige’s impregnable base with highest voter population.

The 13, 000 plus margin was as a result of adept surgical manipulation to give Obi who lost the election a slim lead; a situation the then INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu, attributed to some people he wasn’t sure of, claiming they were adhoc staff.

Voter suppression and disenfranchisement in Idemili became the norm in all subsequent elections that he participated in. The choice of the vice presidential candidate of the PDP in 2019 was a huge factor in a zone the majority ignorantly wouldn’t hear anything APC.

No one should be deceived that because the APC now firmly controls the levers of power at the centre and the bread and butter politicians have flocked, it wasn’t a lone voice in the wilderness for Ngige all along.

If Comfort is conversant with politics in Anambra or did not choose to suffer selective amnesia, she would have come across buzzwords as “Ngige is the best but in a wrong party.”

To me, therefore, to gauge electoral strength via wickedly manipulated elections is bunkum. When a journalist whose premium must orbit in the sanctity of facts as a bulwark against ills demurs, the pen loses its might even to a sword of wooden blade.

Obidiwe, a journalist, wrote from Abuja

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