Peter Obi is an entertainer. Maybe he knows. If that is true, he would not admit it. If he is not self-aware of his comedy, it makes his humour authentic but ominous. It makes him so because his acts do no one a favour. They are goofy and unspool a phony integrity.
This essayist must confess to a few hearty laughs over his skits. His Obidients may not call them skits, though.
Not the many China allusions, even if they also tickle.
Not when he proclaimed himself godfather to Governor Soludo’s child, and the governor’s wife denies it.
Not his botched trip to IDP camp in Benue State. He said it was not a political visit. Yet, he sported a face cap with his party emblem.
Not the one about his life as a rambler from party to party in search of an ideology. A fellow who wants others to give him an ideology must amuse as a parody of a leader. No wonder he is as fickle as a fly. Recalls a farce by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello titled: Six Characters in Search of an Author.
For a real laugh, check out his role as a grasscutter for nurses as governor of Anambra State. We thought we had one with Babachir Lawal during his stewardship as the secretary to the government of the 3federation. Lawal did his for IDPs. Obi was his John the Baptist. A decade earlier, he crafted a more humane thrust: at our winsome ladies in tender white.
But all those are pregame shows. Last week, we saw a first act over his finances as the first citizen of his state. We all knew he was always not forthcoming about money. Isn’t he the Mister ‘no shi shi’?
Then he spun a new skit. He threw a challenge to the Anambra State governor, Prof. Charles Soludo, the boom of Anambra orchestra. He dared him to unveil any fact that he left any debt behind.
Then the governor boomed. With documents, that is. Scene one was the question of N2.13 billion. Obi responded with bravado. He did not only say he received the money, he named the account at First Bank. That’s bravado because he acted as though he had the facts, so the public could start impugning the motives of his successor. Alas, it was what Shakespeare described as a much ado about nothing. There was no shi shi of N2.13 billion in that account.
That amount had never, in its life, harassed, breached or even decorated that First Bank account. How now, Mister no shi shi. Where is the money? Anambra’s N2.13 billion is not chin chin money. It is money that could have changed the lives of many in his state. Thank God, he did not say monkey ate the money. That would have been revolutionary for a primate to raid First Bank and swallow that much ink and paper. Up till the time of writing, we have heard nothing by way of clarity from our saint made in Awka. How did the money vaporise? Over to You, St. Peter.
He has not been able to answer the queries about unpaid salaries to the Water Corporation workers. This is not only about unpaid salaries, but a tyranny of indifference, or even contempt. Under Governor Mbadinuju, it accumulated. It was 30 months in arears when Obi mounted the throne. Ngige had started to pay some months before. This was the best Water Corporation in all of the southeast for pipe-borne water. It was so vibrant that military governments saw it as a cash cow if they installed meters.
Ngige revived pipe-borne water in its big city, Onitsha, and “began liquidating salary arears before his ouster in 2006.” When Obi took over, he allocated N805 million to the corporation in the 2006 budget. Yet, nothing happened. The land opposite the water plant in Onitsha was where government lodge was located where Obi allegedly resided. He enjoyed water supply while the rest of the community did not. “Following the accumulation of the arears, the staff withdrew their service at the water plant and the place was eventually shut down,” said a source. “Obi then made the government lodge at Amawbia (a town near Awka) his more permanent residence.”
Jonathan Achufusi,who knew his onions as an engineer, was the head of the Onitsha water treatment plant.
Meanwhile the salary arrears mounted. It eventually crested 62 months. A man of compassion watched as workers with spouses and children with rents and school fees to pay waited for his drop of water. It was not the Water Corp alone that fell at Obi’s Golgotha. “The state environmental authority suffered worse,” my source noted. Theirs was up to 84 months without pay. There was a copycat element to the tale. Obi saw LAWMA under Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and also set up his own called Anambra State Waste Management Agency (ASWMA), but rather than clear waste, they fined innocents and worsted their pockets. “I can say that the whole state became one huge refuse site,” a source said. He sacked all Anambra State Environmental Protection Agency (ANSEPA) workers in a letter dated 13th February, 2012 and signed by Engr. Dr. Michael Egbebike.
They were promised a payoff. Obi gave them no chi chi. They went to court to garnishee the state account. By the time Obi left office, according to a staff, they were owed 54 months. Obi defied court order to pay them. It was Governor Willy Obiano who paid them in 2014. The Water Corp and ANSEPA staff forged an alliance in their court cases. Obi copied Tinubu’s LAWMA but did not learn from his handling of the environment. For instance, look at how he transformed a Bar Beach catastrophe into a miracle of home and profit. What of where Oriental Hotel is located today? It was a pile of refuse and corpses. That area is prime property.
Some persons died while waiting for their pay. One of them was Alice Ezeuzo decomposed in her room. Obi needs to address this. Under Governor Soludo, a payment plan has been ongoing as his government announced last week. Two tranches have been defrayed.
Obi granted an interview last week, and he made another rhetorical laugh. He said he did not negotiate the IDA/World Bank loan nor did he sign, but the money came to the government account amounting to $123.7 million. The sum of $92.35 million was left. Obi says, “I do not go to World Bank or DMO to borrow money.” Yet he spent part of it, and his successors have been paying from their allocations, including the Boom of Anambra Orchestra.
He says he saved money, but it is clear he did not say the truth. Why not admit. The point he is escaping is that he had money but he had no vision on how to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. Money is not a habitue of banks but a force for good. Under Tinubu, for instance, the NNPC obliterated 23 years of failed remittances. The NNPC has remitted $15.3 billion dollars to the federation account in three years besting the combined tenures of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and Buhari. It is from that account that states get their fabulous allocations.
The tragic thing is that his Obidients are sticking with his story. Barrister Gabriel Amalu, a columnist and member of The Nation editorial board, characterised Obi during our meeting last week. He said Obi has a gift for warming himself into people’s heart with his personal stories, especially his simple life and frugal ways. He responded to my assertion that even professors, pundits, pastors and otherwise literate persons have fallen into his net. I said that is the attribute of charmers like James Steerforth and Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield. He also reminds one of Alec D’Urbervilles in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. One otherwise literate fellow on a Whatsapp group quipped that the N2.13 billion story happened a decade ago and should not count.
I replied that that same fellow was ready to attack President Tinubu over certificate issue or drug allegation of over two decades.
“I believe it because it is absurd,” said Tertullian, author and father of Western theology. Obidients have capsized that sublime quote. When a literate person cannot ask a candidate to account for the whereabouts of N2.13 billion, or why he says he left no debts behind while saying he spent the money and his government was supposed to pay it back, then we have to worry. If you are to pay it, is it not a loan? It is no charity. That, though, is the flipside of populism. Hence, Oscar Wilde mocked that state of mind when he wrote, “I can believe anything, provided it is incredible.”
That is why some might think Obi is evincing what might be called a will to lie, if his supporters exercise a will to believe, or even to obey. There is room for emotion in politics, or else it will not excite without theatre. The Romantic era in Europe responded to the scourge of the Enlightenment because its writers and philosophers from Kant, Hegel, to Hume placed premium on reason over emotions. Revenge came from the poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and novelists and philosophers like Kiekegaard, Rousseau and Dickens. It was called the cult of reason, and they thought humans could reason with science into perfectibility. The French Revolution began with reason but collapsed on emotion and guillotine.
Nothing shows the excess of the Romantic obsession like Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the best novels ever written. It mocks a young man who idealises a married woman as a great beauty. The lady is captivated but never yields. Its tragic end served as a cautionary tale to the Romantic age, just as the flipside was to the Enlightenment.
Obi may be a charmer, but the country is more important than our emotion. Hence Kant wrote a classic treatise, A Critique of Pure Reason, where he defined the Enlightenment as “dare to know, and dare to use your reason.” We may need to read Kant on one hand and then Goethe and Adorno on the other.
But Obi should begin to answer the question, even if most media outlets are unwilling to address it: Where is the N2.13 billion ecological fund? Anambra State was one of the worst hit ecological disasters in West Africa when Obi was its chief executive. Soludo needs the money to correct that image.
