By Jerome Edet
I have closely watched the Governor of Imo State, Senator Hope Uzodimma, since he assumed office on January 15, 2020.
For more than six years now he has been on the saddle, Governor Uzodimma has remained focused on the reason he was elected – to serve his people and provide leadership that may have eluded the State before he became Governor.
Uzodimma’s politics is devoid of the usual air of arrogance and inelastic egotism some politicians are known for.
No noise. No propaganda. No unnecessary name calling. No courting of controversy. No abusing of anyone, whether politician or ordinary people. Just focusing on the reason for winning election which is service at whatever level he finds himself, including outside his State.
You must understand Uzodimma’s governance philosophy properly to appreciate how his media minders also approach issues around their principal.
Whether the issue affects Imo State that Uzodimma governs, or the Country, as the case may be, his minders only deploy elevated languages that deal with the issue in question rather than unnecessary invectives and name-calling. You will not be wrong to say that his minders also operate with their principal’s template.
In fact, if I were to be interested in politics, I will adopt hook, line and sinker Uzodimma’s style of no unnecessary distractions.
I am constrained to look at the trending narrative between the former two term governor of Rivers State and current minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, and the Governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for which Wike has again behaved true to type, noise-making as politics.
I have taken time to watch and listen over again the media briefing of the Progressive Governors Forum and at no time was any reference made of the person of Wike. Not one place was his name mentioned.
Rather, the emphasis was on the coalition arrangement capable of undermining the commonality of interest of the APC members with regard to winning their elections – President, Governor, NASS and House of Assembly.
But, pronto, a man whose name is synonymous with noise jumped into the fray, and rather than focus on the harmless message that the APC is not cut out for any unholy marriage, descended on Uzodimma, a mere purveyor of the message in his capacity as the Chairman of Progressive Governors’ Forum. That is madness taken too far, and an indication that Wike was harbouring ill feelings for Uzodimma or seeking for his attention.
Before this latest outburst by Wike, he had, weeks back, taken his propaganda style of politics to a ridiculous level, calling out Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq of Kwara State who doubles as the Chairman of Nigerian Governors Forum and Uzodimma, accusing them of not leaving the APC doors wide open for intruders of similar mindset with him who masquerade as members of the Rainbow Coalition to jump in.
It is a big misnomer if one whose friend invited to join him to eat food expects the host friend to quit eating before him as guest.
Unfortunately, that is exactly the picture Wike is painting in the country today with his amorphous political contraption called Rainbow Coalition.
The APC family has a presidential candidate in the person of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and across the length and breath of the country, members are committed to working for his victory at the polls next year.
Even States whose Governors are not controlled by the APC-led government have quietly and tactically indicated interest in working for the victory of Tinubu.
Regardless, they are neither polluting the environment the way Wike is doing, nor are they interfering in the internal mechanism of the APC so as to be noticed as routing for the President. And that is exactly where Wike’s claim of support for Tinubu and not the APC is suspect.
Few years ago, precisely in March 2020, Wike told a media briefing at Government House Port Harcourt that, “APC does not mean well for Nigeria.
It is a party of strange bedfellows merely formed to take over power. I am not interested in what happens in the APC.”
Of course instances abound when and where Wike said worse things about the APC, and one therefore begins to imagine the philosophy behind this sudden love he says he has for the President as the leader of the Party that members of the APC do not show him.
The only way one can explain what Wike is doing with Tinubu is nothing other than seeking political protection to remain relevant after willfully destroying his own political Party?
And this is where Mr. President and some ill principled members of the APC should be careful the way they treat Wike and his antecedents with kid’s gloves.
Mind you, this was the same tactics Wike deployed when there was still a Party called the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), with some reasonable persons proudly identifying with it, but who were lacking in the knowledge about his intention to infect the Party with a virus akin to the last stage of cancer because he claimed to be the sole funder.
Today, that once behemoth of a political Party, an assemblage of the high and mighty, the who is who in Nigeria both in politics and business, across ethnic and religious divide, has now been reduced to a joke, a carcass, by an irascible character who views political activities only from his own perspective.
On several occasions, I have asked myself how characters like Wike happened to Nigeria. No doubt, I am sure so many of my country men and women are wont to ask themselves similar questions.
Sorry I digress. Let me go straight to the reason for this intervention.
Every opportunity Wike gets to face the camera to discuss matters ailing him politically, Uzodimma will flash into his mind.
And when he gathers momentum to speak, the only thing he remembers is that the Supreme Court in 2020 validated the stolen mandate which Imo people freely gave to Uzodimma during the 2019 governorship election, but which victory Wike and some of his Rainbow Coalition agents connived to steal from Uzodimma.
As I said earlier, should I join politics, I will adopt Uzodimma’s template which includes his mannerisms.
Here is a man whose election victory was manipulated out of his hand, and because of his trust in the Nigerian judiciary, unlike the Wikes of this world who pretend they do, headed for the courts, starting with the State Election Tribunal and then to the Court of Appeal and finally, the Apex Court of the land.
Uzodimma lost his case at the State Tribunal. He also lost at the Appeal Court, and yet, persevered in his determination to get justice and see to the end of the matter. Finally, he approached the Supreme Court where he eventually got justice.
It is, therefore, shameful for Wike to continue to denigrate the Supreme Court whose justices take full responsibility for giving Uzodimma what rightly belongs to him that was stolen by political thieves and buccaneers for reasons best known to them.
Is it not an aberration that a man who calls himself a lawyer, and his wife a Judge, will continue to allude to Uzodimma coming “fourth to be first” knowing full well that the matter about the Imo State Governor’s stolen mandate was subjected to the full processes of judicial trial and adjudication?
Wike should be ashamed that his desperation to have the Supreme Court review itself in the Uzodimma matter months after the ruling, deploying sponsored propaganda, covert and overt blackmail of the Justices who gave the judgement, yielded humiliating results in form of costs awarded to the appellants and open rebuke of their counsel by the Supreme Court Justices.
I thought lessons were learnt from that historic Supreme Court judgement on the Uzodimma case, but how wrong can one be going by the way Wike continues to stand that judgement on the head with the careless statements that gush out of his mouth.
I have had the privilege of visiting Imo State and can attest that Uzodimma came prepared to serve his people and to leave a legacy of performance.
Not by making noise, but by quietly delivering infrastructure and projects, across all sectors, that have positioned the State to ascert itself in the comity of States in Nigeria and even outside ready for the future.
I am a firm believer in the saying, “tell me who are your friends and I will tell you who you are.”
You do not need a prophet to tell you that whatever position of responsibility Uzodimma occupies today in the project Nigeria in his capacity as Governor of Imo State is never a product of lobby.
He ran for governor in 2019 and his mandate was stolen. By merit, he got it back through the Court in 2020. In 2024, he contested again for Governor and won landslide ( 27/27) in a manner no Governor, living or dead, who served Imo State, had ever won.
Therefore, when Uzodimma is being addressed as Governor of Imo State, Chairman of Progressives Governors’ Forum, Chairman of South East Governors Forum, Director General of Renewed Hope Ambassadors, Secretary General of Presidential Campaign Council, among others, it is not about loud noise, lobby, propaganda, blackmail, eye service, and fake love, but about his respect for constituted authority, personal mannerisms and fear of God.
So, if Wike and his ilk are worried about Uzodimma’s rising profile they should work on their character.
Edet, writes from Abomima, Rivers State
