His thinlyveiled attempt to absolve President Tinubu from the raging insecurity in the country is pathetically lame and disgustingly absurd.
Governor Monday Okpebholo comes across as an uncharismatic and uninspiring figure, one who rarely weighs his words before uttering them. He lacks the kingly elegance, poise, class and intellectual capacity that the office he occupies requires. However, he appears to have a uniquely disconcerting way to make up for these palpable deficiencies by trying to pander to those whom he believes he owes his emergence as a governor by being obscenely obsequious and embarrassingly sycophantic. By trying to overcompensate for his intellectual shortcomings and disturbingly average personality he makes blunders that tend to put those he is trying to please in a tough place.
Last week, the governor shared his perspective on the nation’s perennial security crisis. He stated that the national insecurity, especially the mass abduction of school children in recent weeks, is an attempt to undermine and sabotage the president Bola Tinubu-led government. He added that the kidnappings are an attempt to blackmail Tinubu, but the government will not succumb to such blackmail. “We will not succumb to blackmail. Because what they are doing now is that they will go and kidnap people just because they want to discourage Mr President,” Okpebholo said.
He is not the first governor or prominent member of the ruling All Progressives Congress to excuse the inability or, some will say, refusal, of the Tinubu’s government to intentionally, consciously and comprehensively address the nation’s security challenges and find a lasting solution to them but always find a way to deflect and pass the blame for the precarious and perilous state of the nation to others. Many people tend to ignore their remarks on Nigeria’s troubling security and other other socio-economic ordeal as they are mostly coloured by politics and greed. However, what made Governor Okpebholo’s case different is the comparison drawn between the nation’s current economic situation and the reality under former President Goodluck Jonathan.
One cannot tell if the governor’s remarks were spurred by his obvious lack of tact or his jarring lack of self-awareness, or even both. It is doubtful and highly unlikely that he would have attributed Jonathan’s loss of his re-election in 2015 to the intemperate and cutthroat pursuit of power by some dangerous and perverse elements, who he claimed engineered insecurity and instability in some parts of the country to undermine Jonathan’s government and eventually gain power, if he was capable of engaging in deep and logical assessment of his statement that would definitely make him realise that his linking of Jonathan’s ousting from power to an artificial insecurity is an indictment on his party.
The insinuations and assertions of Okpebholo regarding the circumstances and events surrounding Jonathan’s loss of his second term bid are well known by those who followed the happenings in Nigeria and the politics played by the opposition during the former president’s administration. Many top APC members have either implicitly or explicitly admitted to orchestrating some unrest, instability and embarking on campaigns of destabilisation to unsettle Jonathan’s government and turn Nigerians against him. In 2022, Abubakar Kawu Baraje, a chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), disclosed that the current insecurity in the country is connected to the influx of Fulani from neighbouring countries like Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal, Niger and Chad brought into the country for election purposes in 2015.
It may be difficult for Okpebholo to grasp the import of his statement for two reasons; first one is that he may have been far too engrossed in his pandering to and hero-worshipping of Tinubu to the point that his need to forever be in his good graces has clouded his ability to think and reason clearly and soundly which is in turn making him say things that discredit Tinubu and paint him and APC bad light. The second reason will be that he was probably too far from the charged, tense and volatile political terrain of the pre-APC era, he was an inconsequential bystander who watched from the sidelines, hence not in the thick of things politically some 10 and 12 years ago which will then mean that he does not fully understand to which extent his party was involved in upending of the Jonathan’s government and what they did to achieve.
Whatever the case is, his remarks further show how the forces, of which the current president was part, that conspired against Jonathan did not care so much about the country and its people but to grab power at all costs. Also, it is important to note that the insecurity the nation faces today is far worse than whatever it grappled with under Jonathan, and he was excoriated, vilified and lampooned for it despite his best efforts to address the situation, which he did to a reasonable and appreciable degree before he left office.
Furthermore, it will be disingenuous at best and at worst disgraceful to now claim that some persons are trying to undermine and sabotage Tinubu’s government by masterminding kidnappings in the country when the president himself has not sufficiently demonstrated the capacity and ruthlessness needed to get rid the country of those who profit from the never-ending cycle of violence, wanton killings and the general insecurity that pervades the nation. And if we are to stretch imagination and logic a tiny bit and assume there is an element of truth in Okpebholo’s claim, it will then mean that former members of the APC and comrades of the president who have since fallen out with him and have left the party and are now in the opposition are the ones fuelling insecurity in the country.
Finally, while the governor’s remark may have lent credence to the assertion of those who believe the tactics and strategy deployed by APC to clinch power are despicable and abhorrent and have only stunted the growth of the country and pushed it further down the paths of regression, his thinlyveiled attempt to absolve President Tinubu from the raging insecurity in the country is pathetically lame and disgustingly infantile.
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