Comrade Oshiomhole!!!

SOME time in August 2008 I found myself in Benin City. I had missed a flight from the Enugu Airport so I had to take a segmented road rip back to Lagos. While the bus loaded up in Iyaro Motor Park the heavens opened up and it started raining monkeys and baboons. It was my first time in Benin under a rainy condition.

It was quite an experience! The major road leading to the Benin Bypass through the University of Benin was deluged and people waded through belly-high floodwater. The water entered people’s homes. It came into the bus and rose to our ankles.

Somehow, there was little anger on the faces of the people. Rather there was total resignation. This was a problem many were born to meet. It reminded me of the picture a friend painted about poverty in India. He said unlike in Nigeria where people struggle to escape poverty, the Indian poor have long learned to accept poverty “with a church mind”!

In an interview, the Governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, put it this way: “In some other parts of the country, people organise prayers and fasting for God to send them rain. But in Benin, people live in fear of the day when the rainy season begins”. I wanted to see what the Comrade governor had done about Benin City’s flood headache.

The appointment to show me round was fixed for 9.00am on Friday February 17th 2012. I arrived at the governor’s office at exactly 9.00am and met Comrade Oshiomhole already seated surrounded by newspapers. This politician reads newspapers unlike some who boast they never do! He was wearing a faded blue Chinos, an equally faded blue jeans long sleeve shirt with an even more faded jeans fez cap on his head.

To make matters worse, he chose to drive us! When we came down to the car park, the governor simply pointed me to the back of his BMW SUV. He climbed into the driver’s seat and his ADC joined him in front. He sent for his Commissioner for Information, Mr. Louis Odion to join me at the back. Only the “owner’s seat” was empty, and an anxious Odion hung back.

“Sir, this is a breach of protocol”.

But he was asked to take the seat. As the elders say: when a father sends his son to steal, the boy commits the crime with authority. Oshiomhole painted the perfect picture of a common man, unlike Odion and I who were dressed more like his bosses!

A changed fortune

Oshiomhole has turned the fortunes of this state around. Edo State had suffered a long spell of poor governance since the days of Samuel Ogbemudia as military governor of Bendel State. By cutting out excesses, blocking leakages and allocating resources to priority areas, a state that could not find enough money to maintain schools, hospitals, roads and general infrastructure now has enough to post some of the most ambitious infrastructural masterpieces anywhere in the country. Through his policy of aggressive taxation, Edo State is now able to raise two billion naira per month, nearly half of the state’s total revenue.

This has translated into free education for all (including non-indigenes) mass modernisation of schools, health institutions and the expansion of rural and urban road networks.

Most major roads in Benin City have now been widened to six-lane dual carriageways, thus greatly easing off traffic flow. Oshiomhole has found the formula to partner with the tradition-minded people of the city for development. The result is that centuries-old homesteads and shrines have been voluntarily removed to allow government to modernise the road network of the city.

Most importantly, the drainage problems of the city have also been attacked with massive underground ducts constructed to remove surface water to the rivers outside the city. If the contractors are able to complete the job by June as promised Benin City may have seen the last of flooding.

As we moved from one construction site to the other, Comrade Oshiomhole put on some shows. He wound down the glass and acknowledged cheers from the common people. He came down to buy roasted plantain and ground nuts and shared with cheering bystanders. He calls it “voter mobilisation without campaign”. The political atmosphere in Edo State is warming up for the governorship elections that will be held in July this year.

Oshiomhole has decided to use his frequent project inspection assignments as strategies for touching base with the common people, the real voters.

At the time I was visiting, the chieftains of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) were also busy. Saturday, February 18th 2012 was their scheduled day for the governorship primaries. The governor gave orders for the cancellation of the monthly environmental sanitation exercise to enable PDP supporters go and choose the man who will face him at the polls. He even ordered for the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium to be made freely available for them, unlike when PDP was in power and denied him the use of the venue.

After the primaries, General Charles Airhiavbere, a former Director of Army Finance and Administration, emerged as the PDP candidate. He is from Oredo Local Government Area and therefore a Bini man. Apparently, the PDP’s strategy is to field a candidate from the majority section of the state and play the ethnic card against an Oshiomhole who is from the minority northern zone. The Party is also counting on the “federal might” which it hopes Chief Tony Anenih will facilitate.

But Oshiomhole, who is the likely Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate, says rigging will not be possible because the people will not allow themselves to be cheated.

The real tough job is not for the candidates for the coming election. It is for President Goodluck Jonathan. Will he have the gumption to come to Edo State and ask the people to vote against Oshiomhole, who has helped him resolve so many Labour and related crises? What would he point to as PDP’s legacy in its nine years in power in the state?