Oshiomhole’s Illogicalities

By Okharedia Ihimekpen

When William Shakespears copied the Roman historian who reported Caesar’s last words in Greek ‘Kai Su, teknan?’  in his play, ‘Julius Caesar’, little did the celebrated playwright known that it will typify events in Edo State centuries later but it did happen.

Caesar entered the Senate and all Senators stood to show respect, but some moved behind his chair and others approached as if to greet him. One pulled his robe to show the beginning of the attack, and then, the circle of Senators tightened around Caesar and stabbing him.

When Caesar saw Brutus stabbing him in the groin, he was found to have been stabbed 23 times. Such was the frenzy of the attack, started by Casca that some of the Senators were themselves wounded.

That captured the story of Edo State Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, governor of Edo State as he dumped the organized labour and Edo people to be main apostle of the removal of fuel subsidy in 2011 during the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.

The organised labour had enumerated a litany of conditions that must precede the removal of fuel subsidy. This includes the revamping of our dilapidated refineries, tackling corruption in the sector and building of new ones which experts said if in place will reduce the refining cost to N40 per liter.

The government thought otherwise, that the wise thing to do was to remove the subsidy and use the money to revamp the economy in other to rescue the nation from the grasp of economic vampires. Oshiomhole like most of his colleagues then agreed, they gave the president the assurance that they will go to their states and educate their people of the need to support the removal of fuel subsidy.

Getting to Edo State, Oshiomhole hosted the Organised Labour and protesters on the first day of the strike, this to assure them of his total support of their protest. This gave the hoodlums the impetus to go hay wire to inflict mayhem and destruction on innocent people and properties belonging to the Peoples Democratic Party in the State.

Ironically when the issues got to its front burner, in the negotiations between the Organised Labour, the National Assembly and the Executive, the same Oshiomhole joined forces with the executive, abandoned the labour and the masses, to press for the petrol subsidy removal. Could that have been double standard? No, I do not think so, as the leopard hardly change it’s colours.

In fairness to Oshiomhole, he in an Executive Position also needed the money that would accrue from the subsidy. He need the money to continue to fight Federal agencies in his state, especially of who should reconstruct the Federal roads at the expense of state roads, education, health, unemployment and of course to pursue elections.

In 1994 during the struggle for the actualization of June 12 in the repressive regime of Gen. Sani Abacha, a struggle that sent many Nigerians and Labour leaders to death, Oshiomhole was the Secretary General, of the vibrant Textile Workers Union. He and other labour leaders, of Ovie Kokori stood to sing, that “on June 12 they stood”. As soon as the draconian Abacha regime sent Kokori and other Nigerians to jail, Oshiomhole, like Nicodemus sneaked into Abacha’s government and became the junta nomination to the Constitutional Conference to formulate laws against the interest of Nigerians. The organised Labour lampooned and officially boycotted the conference. Oshiomhole was on his own.

This has being Oshiomhole’s appointment with history. The irony of his situation is compelling. He represents the hurried and desperate gamble of a ruling class that has exhausted all its permutations. Oshiomhole’s strength lies in his reputation as a mobilizer and agitator. Ironically, his strength is also his weakness. He may be led to misconstruing his political mission as that of a stop gap between two progressive eras. Government then becomes a perpetual hostage of the manipulators of our differences.

Between 1999 and 2007 when Oshiomhole was president of the Nigerian Labour Congress, he led Nigerians out for strike six times and six times Nigerians got the fuel prize increased from N11 per liter to N65 per liter, and each time he negotiated  with the government he negotiated the people out, for a bargain.

A friend of mine once asked why governor Oshiomhole did not come earlier. I had told him that, in the societal anguish and anger of the post Igbinedion era, a short sized comrade governor, would have been a contradiction in historical terms. That, Oserheimen Osunbor with his meek unsmiling visage, his lean and rather anxious futures, captured the mood of that moment. The rulings class together with its apparatus especially a judiciary that was utterly contemptible in its cringing buffoonery, compromise with controversial judicial pronouncement and disgraced itself.

That Oshiomhole betrayed its mission and in so doing compounded the image problems of a ruling class, is a fact too well known to delay us here. And in the absence of genuine revolutionary circumstances, this betrayal paved the way for a different kind of political patronage; a shortish figure; a double faced comrade, corrupt and model day political tyrant. The irony of his situation is compelling. He now represents the hurried and desperate gamble of a ruling class that has exhausted all its permutations. Yet the integrity, dignity and the image of the Comrade Governor had steadily devalued and eroded since Oshiomhole” emergence as Edo State Governor.

One may therefore ask what has happened to the sweet romance between the governor and his deputy. Today Oshiomhole is at war with his deputy, his commissioners, market women his party APC and with Edo people over his plan to impose Godwin Obaseki as  Governor. He feels he has destroyed all the structures he used to fight godfatherism in the system to become a governor in 2008.

Like in the “Animal farm” he is now the defector Godfather. This writer had always reminded him that, “tyrants that flex the sward of Brutus in the Capital always meet the ghost of Caesar in the Philippine.”

For Seven months now, President Mohamadu Buhari came to power Oshiomhole had virtually being in Abuja at the expense of his State functions dabbling on national issues he is poorly educated about. From the NNPC allegedly missing fund, to the 2^nd Niger Bridge and now to the security votes which is currently under probe. Since Nigerian’s independence, that is the first republic I have never heard of security votes of a governor, or a president probed, what is making it more amazing, is when people like Oshiomhole are seeking roles in the saga, when in actual fact he is only seeking cover for the corruption mess that is trailing all the economic sectors in his debt ridden Edo State.

Unless President Buhari knows something the rest of us do not know about Oshiomhole, the government must distance itself from the Comrade Governor now and fast.