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Amanze Obi, The Guardian and Ohakim’s New Face in Imo

January 17, 2010

From the reaction of the Imo State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Amanze Obi, to the well articulated article by one Mr. Kodilinye Obiagwu, which appeared in The Guardian on Tuesday, January 5 2010, it is now clear that the Imo State government headed by Mr. Ikedi Ohakim is tottering to an irreversible path of inaction and ruins.

From the reaction of the Imo State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Amanze Obi, to the well articulated article by one Mr. Kodilinye Obiagwu, which appeared in The Guardian on Tuesday, January 5 2010, it is now clear that the Imo State government headed by Mr. Ikedi Ohakim is tottering to an irreversible path of inaction and ruins.
I was not surprised at the reaction of Obi, a hireling struggling to earn his pay in Mr. Ohakim’s government. What I was surprised at is the resort to over recycled fiction, which Obi embellished his reaction with. I am even more surprised that three years in power. Obi and Ohakim’s men have not found it necessary to tell Nigerians the actual statistics of the wonderful things their principal is doing in Imo State. Perhaps, what made Mr. Obi’s reaction unique was that it was sponsored as paid advert in nearly every national daily with scarce resources that could have done something, no matter small, to the total doldrums the state has been plunged into by Ohakim and his government, who are working in concert with the house of jokers that passes off as the Imo state house of assembly.

This is not the first time I read Obi react in similar childish, rash, unprofessional and thoughtless fashion to facts that every Imo man knows. A little enquiry even in Ohakim’s government house will approve all that was contained in Mr. Obiagwu’s article and more. I read similar reaction from the same Obi when after a visit to Imo State to bury his father, the notable Vanguard columnist who teaches journalism in the United States, Obi Nwakamma expressed his shock about the prostrate nature of Imo State under Mr. Ohakim’s watch while relentless propaganda in every available media space has become the only business that thrives in Imo State. In reacting to Mr. Nwakamma, Obi has stopped just short of calling that veteran columnist an ingrate because he visited him (Obi) during the period and they shared chummy moments together but Nwakamma went to tell his readers the truth of the grand era of deceit in Imo State. To Obi, Nwakamma would have suppressed the truth about the misrule in Imo as a reward for their chummy relationship.

In his reaction to Mr. Obiagwu, Obi spared no invectives on Kodilinye and his employer, The Guardian for stating what is almost a credo in every nook and cranny of Imo State and even in Ohakim’s Mbano area. He was so pained that Mr. Obiagwu was invited to the Imo stakeholders’ forum, another clowning session where Ohakim regales his audience, mainly solicited sycophants, with fairy tales of great developments that could be happening in any other state than an Imo that is squirming helplessly under Ohakim, Obi and company. Reading of how Obi talked of feting Obiagwu in Links hotel Owerri only for the later to write negative narratives about Imo State, one is led to doubt the credentials of some of the people that parade the corridors of power with Ohakim today. Their awful report card says all but then, one wonders how Obi would be talking of Imo State funds as if they belong to Ohakim and his lackeys. We were expecting him to say of how Obiagwu and his employers solicited and got any undue favour from Obi’s paymaster  and went round to back stab his benefactor but there was none of such. Rather it was one silly narrative of how Kodilinye never returned the favour of being invited to the stakeholders meeting and being feted for the period of the meeting. In one swoop of unintelligence, Obi revealed the motive for invitation of the media to such hollow forums and the undue patronage the Ohakim’s government has extended to the media to the point that more than 98 per cent of Imo citizens believe that his government exists only on the pages of newspapers, on radios and televisions and on the thousands of self-glorifying fanciful billboards the government has caused to be mounted on all nooks and crannies of the state.
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Beyond the age-old recitation of ‘Ohakim is doing well’, with which Obi laced his tiring epistle, there was no real effort to either name the wonderful works Ohakim has been doing as well as counter the well-itemized article by Obiagwu. What a pity for those that struggle to write themselves into government for the purpose of satisfying their hunger and also manage the lies and untruths that now passes as government in Nigeria. In an article I read sometime ago, an Imo citizen had challenged Ohakim and his media hounds to itemize the projects that Ohakim has done in his nearly three years in power. This was a very fair challenge, which anyone would have taken were he to have something except vague claims to make. They have shied away from that challenge and rather glued themselves permanently to that stale and ludicrous phrase of ‘Ohakim is doing well’ to confuse those that have never visited Imo State in recent times. It takes just a casual visit to Imo State to know the extent of the fraud going on in Imo State at present, in the name of governance. In the said article, the writer made the claim that not even one new road project is going on in the state capital, Owerri. I thought that such direct claim could be simply refuted by a simple naming of just one road project in Owerri. It was even more damning when the writer asked rhetorically that if no such project is going on in Owerri, would it be going on in the rural areas? He challenged the heavy club of propagandists in Owerri government house to state to the contrary if there is but they shied away from that challenge-and fearfully, there is nothing really to point to and it would not be an overstatement to maintain that Ohakim is the worst performing governor in Nigeria today.

We have heard of such high sounding projects as Oguta Wonder Lake, the Oak refinery project, the Imo Airport-Port Harcourt Airport Road, the Songhai farms, permanent campus of Imo State University, Imo State secretariat, the ring roads, the road from Ngor Okpala to Oguta, the model schools and hospitals. I can restate it here that none of them is yet at the starting point, even as they form tales of ‘achievements’ Ohakim touts and bandies around at every forum. We have also heard of so much receipt in terms of revenues to the state since Ohakim came to power. Recently, and in a bid to canvass for votes, the former Central Bank governor and now the gubernatorial candidate of the PDP in Anambra State, Charles Soludo, claimed that Imo State had received a grant of N100 billion since Ohakim made the disgraceful entry into the PDP. This is an issue for another day but we also know that Ohakim has raised a controversial N40 billion bond for some projects no Imo man can point at today. This is in addition to various fonts of revenue from the federal government, not forgetting internally generated revenue. I equally make the well-known position that no new project is going on anywhere in Imo State except such bizarre scams as the dredging of Nworie gutter with N8billion by one Ohakim crony!

When he was maneuvered into power through the most absurd means, Ohakim went on a shopping spree and got over ten journalists including hungry editors, pretentious columnists, pervert stringers, media hustlers and cash and carry hagiographers into his government. With his early moves, it was not difficult to know that the man wanted to fool the people through media propaganda and nothing more. He has coveted over 99 per cent of media space in state owned media houses and independent local media in Imo State while he has bought generously into the national media with fictitious tales of superlative performance in an Imo State that is seeing the worst form of decay since its creation in the past three years. I challenge anyone with contrary information to disprove the fact that Imo State, through both official and surreal means, is the biggest advertising patron in Nigeria today. When he came in earlier, he made so much fuss about pulling down billboards in the state. It did not take long before he replaced them with those that sing his praises, those of his wife and those of ailing President Yar’Adua. All these are the cesspools that are claiming the hundreds of billions that have come to Imo state in the nearly three years Ohakim has been in power.

I don’t intend to use this space to talk about the misrule going on Imo State today. I merely wanted to point out few irrefutable points in replying to the poorly articulated reaction of Amanze Obi and the Imo State government to a simple and well founded piece that captures the popular sentiment in Imo State today. One issue I want to point to Obi and the government he serves is that lies have very short lives. It will take only a visit for someone that was hooked to the farce that Ohakim is doing well to know that he had been sold a cheap and very reckless lie. That is why from its almost total coveting of Nigerian newspapers as a forum for deceiving the people of Imo State, the government is finding out that even with the heavy patronage in the form of bribing editors and paying for adverts spaces that are very often unnecessary, it is losing patronages in droves. I bet that soon it will have its hands full in papers to abuse, even as this translates for money for the Amanze Obis. It will soon find out that it has no saving grace than to perform. As people visit to ascertain how well Ohakim is doing and discovering to their chagrin that all were mere propaganda and lies, sustained at very heavy costs to the Imo tax payer, so will the Ohakim government loose ground and find more people and media houses to abuse. The pity is that men like Amanze Obi, his colleagues and the master they serve believe erroneously that facts could be submerged in media hype and propaganda. They believe that the people will never get to know but in no distant time, if they are not getting it now, they will know that no amount of propaganda will save them from the verdicts of the people of Nigeria and Imo State than stellar performance, which they are yet to start.

Stephen Nwahiri ([email protected])
Mushin, Lagos.

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