NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2021

COMMENT
as its candidate, Professor Chukwuma
Charles Soludo, a first-class brain and
former Governor of the Central Bank of
Nigeria. The People’s Democratic Party
(PDP) presented Mr. Valentine Ozigbo,
the immediate past President and CEO
of Transnational Corporation of Nigeria
(Transcorp), who took a First Class
Accounting/Business Administration
degree from the University of Nigeria
in 2000, and an MSc in Finance with
distinction from the Lancaster University,
United Kingdom in 2004.
There were 16 other candidates, a
good number of whom had benefitted
from substantial education. Spectacularly,
President Muhammadu Buhari’s All
Progressive Congress (APC) presented Mr.
Emmanuel Nnamdi Uba (mostly known as
Andy Uba) to govern Anambra State!
Anambra people were scandalised.
How could anyone deploy the blind to
lead the fully sighted? Andy Uba had
lived in the United States for over two
decades before a chance meeting with
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo impelled him
to wing his way back to Nigeria. But he
hit town without as much as an Ordinary
National Diploma (OND) which is, in
a manner of speaking, only a halfway
house to a first degree. In Anambra and
the Igbo country in general, only those
not completely together upstairs would
abandon the panoply and sumptuous
dishes of an Ozo title-taking ceremony
for a ritual in propitiation of Agwu – the
god of recklessness – that is performed
with the sacrificial blind or lame chick.
People wondered whether Anambra’s
Federally imposed orphanage had hit such
a dismal nadir for alien interests to be
trumpeting from the rooftops that its next
Governor must be a bloke whose School
Certificate the West African Examinations
Council (WAEC) had pronounced forged,
a fella who in the not too distant past flew
into America to the charge of currency
offences, and a chap whose sole distinction
as an upstart federal lawmaker was recordshattering
victories in sleeping matches
inside the chambers?
Well, as they say, the taste of the
pudding is in the eating! President Buhari
had, weeks earlier, announced in the
presence of his party’s grinning candidate
that he couldn’t wait to see him elected
as Anambra’s Governor! Anambra people
knew differently. They remembered
that in 2004, a rogue band had abducted
Anambra’s Governor Chris Ngige, razed
Government House in Awka, the state
capital, to the ground and proceeded
to incinerate the offices of the electoral
commission, the Anambra Broadcasting
Service, the state-owned Ikenga Hotel and
many other key buildings. They recalled
that the perpetrators of those treasonous
acts went scandalously unpunished. It was
not lost on them that, on account of that
atrocious development, Chinua Achebe
had rejected the national honour offered
him by President Obasanjo, declaiming
thus in an October 15, 2004 letter:
I write this letter with a very heavy
heart. For some time now I have watched
events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay.
I have watched particularly the chaos in
my own state of Anambra where a small
clique of renegades, openly boasting
its connections in high places, seems
determined to turn my homeland into
a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am
appalled by the brazenness of this clique
and the silence, if not connivance, of the
Presidency.
The people knew that the name of
the candidate Abuja was impatient to see
inside Government House, Awka, was
linked to those described by Achebe as
“a small clique of renegades.” Election
morning dawned. And polling station after
polling station the people resolutely stood
their ground. They refused to forfeit their
franchise for a mess of porridge. Each
‘
Anambra 2021 is a
rejected every entreaty to sell their vote for
filthy lucre worth no more than a carton of
noodles. They obstructed those minded to
“abduct” ballot boxes and falsify election
results. They said an overwhelming
NO Abuja’s candidate. They voted
overwhelmingly for Professor Soludo.
In retrospect, Anambra people could
not have acted otherwise. Days before
the ballot, there had been an election
debate by candidates of the APC, the
APGA and the PDP, the three leading
political parties. Through the hours of
that debate, the APC candidate played the
conspicuous spectator; he could barely
place what all the statistics being churned
out was about. The welter of allusions and
citations to international examples on good
governance, and the dire consequences
inherent on clueless political leadership
eluded him. He was a mere passenger,
riding wearily in a speeding vehicle
headed he knew not where.
The people were not impressed by
the man’s promise to connect them to
the politics of the Centre, as they found
repugnant any alignment to a Centre
quaking violently in the cesspit of the
corruption of nepotism, state application
of brute force and bankrupt and rudderless
leadership. They had for far too long been
subjected to the spite of the Centre, its
endless deceit, its treachery and double
standards, to now allow themselves to
be bamboozled by the voice of political
debauchery and its promises of the
meretricious. The so-called Centre
and its tentacles harboured the most
violent examples of terrorist activities,
kidnappings, decaying infrastructure,
unpaid salaries and pensions, festering
social dislocations and the interminable
shedding of innocent blood.
pointer to the presidential
ballot of 2023
’ Anambra 2021 is a pointer to the
presidential ballot of 2023. If this worthy
example of repudiating nonsense is
replicated, the much-vaunted Federal
Might will prove wholly incapable of
keeping in place a nightmare that, to begin
with, should have been obviated. AB
AFRICA BRIEFING NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2021 9