WHERE FAILURE IS PREFERRED

Josef Omorotionmwan urges leaders to do what is right

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was perhaps right, when he wrote: “sweet are the uses of adversity”, and we may add, sometimes.

This friend of mine was a Permanent Secretary in the service of the defunct Bendel State. He built a house in that part of Benin City that was underdeveloped at the time. Of course, that was the natural habitat of mosquitoes. 

The first night they moved into their new home, my friend and his family could not sleep because of the mosquitoes. The mosquito netting and all the fans and air-conditioning provided were not useful either. Around mid-night my friend came out to see what outside looked like. To his utter surprise and amazement, the watchnight outside was sound asleep. That’s God for us – Those inside with all the mosquito netting and air-conditioning facilities could not sleep, but the one in the den of the mosquitoes was fast asleep. My friend decided to allow the sleeping dog lie. God is great!

Nigeria has seen it all – the good the bad and the ugly. When armed robbery and kidnap cases were making their entry into this country, the perpetrators discriminated which victims they wanted. They made sure that their catches were people of means. They did not hold ‘anyhow’victims – the type of case where the kidnappers found that the victim they have at hand was a cobbler, was unheard of.

So it was that while the affluent in society at the time were prepared to buy safety at any cost, the poverty of the lower class, was their insurance against harm. They could go anywhere and sleep anywhere. After all “them dey take juju serve juju?” Even where poverty was an insurance against harm, nobody ever woke up in the morning and prayed to God to make them perpetually poor.

It was in the early 1980s and this writer had just returned home from the Coasts. I lived at the Ugbowo end of Benin City. Whether by accident or by design, I was classified among the affluent with the paraphernalia that came with the classification – police protection and all that. We lived in a block of flats off the Benin Technical College Road. My co-tenants, who were mainly young staffers of the University of Benin, did not like that the security around me was constituting a hinderance to their freedom of movement, because they could not go out and return home whenever they wanted. Trust the Nigerian Policemen to maximize whatever they see as an advantage. The policemen attached to my house soon mounted a roadblock on the Benin Technical College Road for their “small – small” collections. One night, I was driving home in my disguise vehicle – a jalopy that I had procured in a public auction, when they accosted me. Before they could make their demands, one of them recognised, “this is the oga that we are supposed to be guarding his house”. They apologized profusely as I left. Soon after, I asked for them to be removed because if anything happened to any of them, there would be tough questions to answer. The Anini saga in which Anini and his boys wanted the head of every policeman, was at its peak then.

We have since moved on. It was surprising that the bad boys also kept their own surveillance. My friends at the Benin Technical College Road flats cried to me that not quite a month after I left, the bad boys came calling, ransacked all the flats and carted away their money and valuables!

 What is all this noise coming from Kano? See what success is brought to them?

In politics, your best friend today could be your worst enemy tomorrow. At a time, these politicians could not sleep without seeing one another. It is Hosannah today and crucifix tomorrow. All the same, as soon as we get to the point where the success of a party is determined by the number of structures of the predecessors the incumbent pulls down, then, there is something seriously wrong. 

 Their state is worse for it all. 

Rivers State has not always been like this. At first, it was a closely-knit family. Time was, when the immediate past Governor of this state, Nyesom Wike, even in the middle of a war, chested out and would’ve said of Chibuike Amaechi “Shoot me; leave my master!” But today, everything has gone awry, all to the detriment of the state!

There was a time when the Mono-Rail Project of then Gov. Amaechi was the envy of everyone in the country. In 2014 , this writer wrote a piece titled “Straightening Amaechi’s K-leg”, which was widely published in Nigeria. Today, that laudable project has been abandoned, no thanks to the success of succeeding administrations, so-called. 

This is one way of explaining why we soon get to the point where failure is sometimes preferred to success. 

[Enter Edo State]. In any election, the prayer of every political party is 100 percent success. That 100 percent level of success was where Comrade Adams Oshiomhole took the All Progressive Congress (APC) to, before he left in 2016, when he handed the baton to his Godson, Godwin Enogheghase Obaseki. At that year’s election to the House of Assembly, the APC cleared all the 24 seats in the House. 

That was the level of success inherited by Obaseki. That was also before he embarked on his escapade of pulling down every good person and good thing in his way. Much to the chagrin of all, the APC of which he was member up to 2020, also attained 100 percent success at that year’s election to the House of Assembly. 

In the manner of the bed-wetter who must be the first to wake up to repair his tracks, Obaseki had embarked on his plan to emasculate the APC and, indeed, everything good in Edo State. Knowing fully well that 16 of the 24-Member House were more predisposed to Oshiomhole, Obaseki quickly devised evil mechanisms on how to swear in just eight members of the House and ask the majority of members to go to hell. What an innovation in political engineering, where somebody who wins an election is denied inauguration!

That was the beginning of Obaseki’s preference for failure rather than success! 

History will judge for itself, what it wants to do with those illegal laws, including those that gave him the annual appropriations for eight years. 

A man who rode into government on the back of a worthy God-father with 100 percent of members of his party, is today hanging perilously to power with a House of Assembly as a coat of many colours. 

He is no longer selective. He has gone ahead to inaugurate the House, that coat of many colours. That’s where failure is preferred to success!

It is becoming increasingly clear why, in the telling paragraphs of the Bible, God speaks unrepentantly of good success, which also presupposes that some successes are bad.

Clearly, that success is bad, which enables a person to go into office with the sole purpose of destroying structures provided by his predecessor. Government is about human needs, the satisfaction of which is the sole justification for governance!

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada