Shortly before the November 11 election in Imo State, Joe Ajaero, the Chiarman of the Nigeria Labour Congress was beaten to a pulp.
In Kogi State, what was circulated was a ridiculous circular which informed hoteliers within the state that all their hotel rooms, including booked-out ones were fully booked.
These two events, separated by distance and difference, had everything to do with the November 11 election, and very much defined Yahaya Bello and Hope Uzodinma, delineating in the process their kind of politics: ruthless, reckless and rotten.
In Kogi State, a titanic tussle quickly ensued between Ahmed Ododo of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who was backed by the incumbent Yahaya Bello.
Yahaya Bello who is at the the end of a fortuitous two-term stint as governor since decided to change tack. He has long acted like the man whose proverbial nut was cracked for them by their chi, who promptly forgot to be humble.
Having benefited from the untimely death of Prince Abubakar Audu who would have been governor, he has found nothing obnoxious about his choice of Ahmed Ododo as his successor even if the latter is said to be his cousin.INEC has since declared the latter the winner of the election.
In Imo State,Hope Uzodinma who had nothing but hopelessness to dish his people in the past four years, has seemingly passed what was billed as a test of fire with flying colors. Having acquired a predilection for making outrageous promises to his people while on the election trail, the long-suffering people of Imo State seem doomed to another four years of gloom.
The lessons litter the Nigerian landscape like stray refuse.
Nigerian politics is like the proverbial Augean stables, and a major question is about who will clean the Augean stables?
Many Nigerian politicians have high-handedness flowing in their veins. Many of them are very much like the gladiators in Imo and Kogi States, and like the APC deputy Governorship candidate in Bayelsa State, who resorted to open incitation to violence when he felt the chances of his party slipping away a couple of days to the election.
Nigerians collectively experienced the pains of childbirth between February and October when they went to the polls to elect a president, and when the Supreme Court made a final pronouncement on the winner of the polls. For many Nigerians, that birth ended in a stillbirth, and what a traumatic experience it was.
One thing that has become obvious is that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has lost whatever miserly credibility it had with everyday Nigerians who staff the court of public opinion.
The Commission has long been suspect in the conduct of elections in Nigeria. But for some time, the Commission showed signs of appreciable progress in breaking from its past, until the February elections came and exposed it as a collection lacking in character and courage which was never the less content to serve a constant conundrum to Nigerians.
It is this conundrum that has now been served the people of Kogi and Imo State.
For eight years, Yahaya Bello huffed and puffed as governor of Kogi State. His peculiar brand of politics, which mixed loquacity with vanity, soon acquired a ruthless streak when he saw signs that his people were fed up. His running battle with Senator Natasha Akpoti who represents Kogi Central in the National Assembly bared the worst of the man who took over as.governor of one of Nigeria’s most impoverished states and failed to do nothing to help his people.
Hope Uzodinma may have ridden to the Governorship of Imo State on the back of a curious Supreme Court judgment, but rather than provide succor to his people smarting from justified feelings of being robbed, he went about consolidating political power in the worst possible way.
His chief means of doing this was his clever exploitation of the security nightmare in the state. There have been strong allegations that the governor, who is the chief security officer of his state has been at the forefront of driving insecurity in parts of the state for political gains.
It is no surprise that both men belong to the ruling All Progressives Congress, a party which came to power eight years ago, promising much, but has so far delivered embarrassingly little.
It is not surprising that the party is throwing everything but the kitchen sink into maintaining the status quo of retrogression in Kogi and Imo States.
For the citizens of both states, it is another case of emancipation from clueless governance cruelly deferred.
But at least, they can hold out hope that someday a country where hitherto adamantine institutions are being convulsed by dysfunction can find its bearing and its beacon of hope.
For Ndi Imo especially, this cloud of calamity will pass too.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
