By Onoriode Amrakpoyerin

FAR from the two James of the Holy Scriptures – Apostle James a Disciple of Jesus and King James who authorised a version of the Bible, our topical choice comes as a fitting metaphor in our rare attempt to find a way to respond to the immense confusion amidst observable paradoxes both anticipated and unanticipated, that appear to underline the search for a next suitably qualified candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the Delta State 2023 gubernatorial elections.

In finding a way through this uncharted labyrinth of a complex topical verbiage, we try to be deliberate and fair to all in our reference to random events that suggest any emergent trend which could provide a possible clue of who or where that suitably qualified individual should come from.

In doing so, we do not want to be unnecessarily vindictive nor apolitical as the issues being discussed are within the context of politics where interests become noxious and seek only to destroy that for which it should subsist. We are bothered by the tendency that when people prevaricate over interests, we see first and foremost the existential proof of politics rather than subversion and the grand opportunities and resources we stand to waste in our grab and gabble politics as if the beauty and progressive nature of politics might not attract as much attention if a causal link between politics and interests is not be established.

In dwelling on this hypothesised ‘interests,’ we find that the fascist elements who in their classic phrase ‘on top’ achieve a temporary solidarity after they refused to be leavened by the cultured nature of progressive politics, often end up with a solidarity like that of the “Gorgon sisters” after losing their eyes. We worry that when we raise these objections, we may confusingly come to many as being psychologically critical as if we have a score to settle with the Delta Central political establishment which continues to contend for space to create a political autonomy of its own.

We argue that we moved away from this position decisively in 2014, when against a carefully orchestrated and sold out party primaries, the resilient party delegates stood up to the vile chicanery of the autonomic proponents of “power belong to us” to ensure that the present serving governor of Delta State emerged as the candidate of the PDP.

We cannot go back to it. It should not be so easy to give up a psychological advantage. Intangibly too, we shudder at the thought that a political movement or family within a political organisation should dread criticism when the movement or even the political family is known to have emerged as a child of criticism in the past.

Even so, the freedom to criticize is both the safeguard of personal liberty and the source of progress in knowledge and in scientific development. Yet, it is trite that criticism and conflict are at the heart of politics on all levels but they should not exhaust the nature of politics which also expresses man’s harmonious and cooperative instincts. At a minimum, politics and criticism should imbibe the lessons of patriotism which presupposes self-esteem and self-sacrifice as eternal conditions for survival.

We think the absence of patriotism in our general politicking is what some of us see when we cautioned against the major danger facing our politicians, which is the prospect to become too inured to an attitude as to make even our most well- considered resistance to it fit within it both in terms of its means and goals?

It is possible that we are still enmeshed in these dangers, especially with the way we respond to political issues today where simple matters possible to resolve through humility and adoptability are allowed to subsist with telling degeneracy and suppuration. Not to press further on this, we want to ask – is the meeting between the two James – the genuflecting Senator James Manager and the patriarchal former Governor James Ibori sometime in July 2021, a veiled admission that perhaps there is as yet nowhere it was ever contemplated that power was going to be rotated among the senatorial zones in the ruling PDP? It is fairly true to suggest that the genuflecting senator is a member of the touted Ibori political family and by that fact should be conversant of its outlined agenda were any, in the context of immediate, near and long term projections.

 But if the genuflecting James, in his wisdom visited the patriarchal James to consult on his gubernatorial aspirations, does that not provide a ready clue that the distinguished senator know so well that a zoning agenda was never part of that political family’s contemplation and to that extent was more than willing to impose his own version of a political future? Could this recent approach by the senator not provide a sustainable basis to affirm what Governor Ifeanyi Okowa said that the idea of zoning in Delta State PDP was a ruse?

Isn’t this action of the senator and the response of the patriarchal James spoken to the gravamen of the Delta central perception that perhaps they are yet agents of an illusory history? We asked these questions in the knowledge that zoning as an artificial construct for political power distribution is first flawed in its intended stewardship because it is undemocratic and missed the salient issues its mission is premised on.

We insist that like every other tool designed to manipulate political productions, zoning is simply fetishistic as its agenda is driven more by a tendency to perpetuate capital and political control in a process where the clan of feudal fascists realise their values and reproduce their domination.

Not only that the illusion of autonomy of the producers of this zoning agenda, as well as the process by which its knowledge is produced and deplored, partly instantiate the translation of dominion into hegemony, for this illusory autonomy masks the actual political design and power relations which drive the zoning animations.

The salient actuality which is masked in this agenda, therefore, is that political power is commercialised and the average politician is commodified. As a commodity, the realisation of his political potentialities depend on access to the means of political production controlled by this small group; that is, on the exchange of his labour power, he is sequestrated from delivering on party promises made to the people and becomes no less a pawn in the hands of these assumed owners of political mobility, who then use the candidate to reproduce what is designed to keep this idiosyncratic tradition running.

In such situation, the society suffers in infrastructure, in development, in skills and manpower deficits. No society survives this nature of artificial simulation of its well-intended sons and daughters in positions of political leadership. What we know is that the whole idea of zoning never existed as a formalised structure.

It was essentially conjured in the minds of a small number of people and the illusion of its continued existence was used to the perceptual peril of those who believed in it. Its conjurers simply are in admiration of Niccolo Machiavelli who thought that a prince ought not to be concerned with ethics but only with the best means of achieving his end.

This Machiavelli went on to praise the actions of Cesaire Borgia, fourth son of Pope Alexander VI, and ex-Cardinal who had broken countless promises, murdered his friends, including his brother, ransacked cities, seduced his sister, defeated in battle after having escaped from a Spanish prison, being exiled, miserable and despised by society.

Indeed, what has subsisted in PDP primaries in Delta State since 1999 is the participation of aspirants that cut across the different ethnic groups, and the peremptory meeting of the five-term Senator Manager to the patriarchal Ibori simply illustrates this truism. The economic future of Delta State lies with us and cannot be wished away as hamitic hypothesis. We cannot also say that a Delta State with our kind of diversity, demographic profile and history will be asking for too much if our collective aspirations target its sundry all-round developments.

More than what the Delta Central conceptualises as its main inspiration to desire shift to it in the gubernatorial power ratio, our compelling need at this time should be more about putting stress on emergent phenomena than on evoked realities. We need more of several patriotic touches on the political process that constricts rigidities and defies all previous attitudes that have held our state hostage. The success of this historic trend will largely depend on an extensive distribution of inventive models in shopping for who next succeeds the present governor rather than depending on the imaginary zoning faux pas.

This line of thought is predicated on the idea that Delta State will continue to remain a PDP-honed state, but we cannot at this time afford to underestimate the forces clamouring for change and, therefore, to ignore their protest, as Edmund Burke did in his classic statement of the conservative viewpoint “because half a dozen grass hoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink…Pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or after all, they are other than the little shriveled, meagre, hopping though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour”.

How naïve and how fatal such views often are, for we know how the present air of ostrich illusion and pythonic aloofness of the political class has inspired a new sense of freedom and self-expression in the people, a force which even a Hitler must ultimately reckon with it in planning his regimen of terror and repression. In Nigeria as elsewhere, this subtle but palpable force swept off the PDP from the zenith of political power in 2015 into an uncoordinated opposition. At the sub-national, we saw the same populist rage flipped the carpet from Bukola Saraki in Kwara State. In Edo State, it completely swept off Adams Oshiomhole and we hope we do not allow their mistakes, as we have more of the signs here, to give Delta State away.    

In summing this enigmatic prosaic congruence of the two James, we conclude that what Governor Okowa should do must depend on the basic indexes highlighted in the body of our literature. He should show commitment and insights as an impartial umpire and work to maximise the opportunities of the historical moments.

The governor has to be very creative and flexible in his strategy and he has to make complex maneouvres even to achieve small advances. He must ensure the state must not be left in the condition it was when he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Delta State has largely become a predatory state and the arterial connection to that predatory instinct has meant that the state has become essentially rentier and has mortgaged its possibility to the pursuit of personal rather than the general good of the state.

We argue that the clamour for another Delta Central candidate at this time of our political evolution cannot be sustained. It is first unscientific and signally lacking in competitive systemic discretions. What appears to look more analytically viable and politically convincing is to shop for a candidate from an ethnic group other than the Urhobo. This is so because the indexes and rationalities have shifted from patrimonies to knowledge exhibition.

Sentiments or sloganeering would be too cheap and unsympathetic to the toxic political atmosphere. We need more than a common enough candidate, one that symbolises the hope of the party and the aspirations of the people, not a candidate who needs political power to foreground his serial linkages to unproductive representations of the people.

We need an unconventional politician, one who, like Babagana Umara Zulum, Governor of Borno State, was sought for and helped to lead his people at a crucial time of that state’s groveling inflictions from criminal insurgency, a candidate who possesses opinion and will, one who has honour, who will not lie, who can stand before a demagogue and damn his treacheries without winking. We do not need a candidate who wants to learn on the job but one who already knows the job and the pitfalls on the road so that he can safely steer the ship of the state from the damning icebergs on its path. That is what the complex politics of Delta State yearns for presently.