By Chuka Nnabuife
The axe is on the tree trunk. Any moment from now we will commence the felling of the tree or cutting it to required shape.
In a matter of days, the highly craved date, Saturday, November 18, 2017 will come to pass. The suspense, frenzy and upbeat heart pulses that have marked the date will depart with the eventual conduct of the Anambra State gubernatorial election 2017. The noise, furry, vituperations and crazy drive for votes would then be over. Our land will be ours because no matter what we know, do not know, accept or chose not to accept now, the aftermath of the election is the squarely the yoke of the ndi Anambra – citizens and residents – not really solely the politicians’.
Surely, the end of the polls will pulse the stress of majority of the candidates and their promoters who are currently passing through sleepless nights and tedious regimes of denials, denigrations, defamation, demystification and excoriation, called voter-campaigns (a.k.a. electioneering campaigns). But as they take the take the deserved rest the rest of us pick up our own stress, and our own period of the pressure will definitely last longer. It will be for another four years.
Our share of the stress can only be blissful, worrisome or troublesome based on the choice we make of the 37 persons presented as the gubernatorial candidates of the various political parties in the Saturday, November 18 election. If ndi Anambra make the right choice, the next four years will be memorable and glorious. If they make the wrong choice we stand to face an accursed four-year span of sorrow, tears and even blood. The cross is ours and the onus is on us to do things right now or rue our lot in gnashing teeth and cringing pains.
The huge crowd hustling for the throne they crave in Government House, Awka, make many promises and present several ideological postures to substantiate their candidature. Three major issues (from a plethora of themes) are recognisable from the campaign calls of the many candidates of the opposition parties. Calls for ‘change’, turning a ‘new direction’ in the state and doing governance in a ‘better’ way, sum the predominant messages in the opposition quarters. Then there is the promise of continuing the regime of good work; strong economy, prompt salary payment and security of lives and property by the incumbent governor, Dr. Willie Obiano, who is seeking a second term mandate. A mandatory job for the voter in Anambra is to discern what all the sloganeering portend for him/her and the state.
Those who yell ‘Change,’ exhume bitter memories of a similar chant we chorused across Nigeria in 2015 only to land in terrible economic recession which still persists. We plunged a country that had only a year before that poll lifted Nigeria to such an enviable economic height as the biggest economy in Africa and was zealously gunning for a top-20 position in the world to such an abysmal low and still falling. But surely, we got the change we called for in that general election. The result is here with us and persisting. It will continue until we have the next poll in 2019. Therefore, we the citizens’ still have a long while to bear our crucifix which we got out of our deliberate option during the last general election.
In that mire of wannabe governors there are those who claim that with their coming things will begin to be good today, from the Igbo aphorisms ‘obido taa diba mma o di gboo’ or ‘taa bu gboo’ among others which both mean that if good things begin to happen from today, it will be early enough. Such slogans, carved from the deep expressions of a people’s culture get easily into their mind and swell their heads emotionally. They plant what does not exist in the voters’ mind and could dazzle them to the extent of not questioning claims made by the campaigners that are neither proven nor substantial to what is expected of the seat the aspire to. More so, if the candidate panders to populist affiliations and you find him adept in using the now trendy social space of rave groups such as IPoB and MOSSOB he will be very conspicuous. Should he be one who knows how to deploy well-sounding grammar to smear his foes; deploy the art of youthful political showboating and demagogy to attract attention he can easily dribble and deceive voters. Before voters could catch their breath to ask vital questions or say ‘Jack,’ he would have stolen their votes and ran away.
But, candidates’ political campaign style or youthful exuberance, notwithstanding, the task is still for the Anambra voter to ask himself or herself the most important question: what do I want of or for my state? If the voter examines his/her conscience thoroughly with this interrogation, he will unravel the many lies in the razzmatazz politics. He will decipher the lies in the notion that Anambra is performing badly. Economically, socially, politically and generally, that claim is false. It is maliciously aimed at the head of Anambra people to make them get disenchanted from their state. It is also a heartless desperate ploy to get power at all cost by diminishing the hard-earned success that the people and their government have achieved. Worse, it is a scaremongering ideological stance that can scare away people who genuinely want to be part of the on-going transformation in the state and make investors lose interest in it.
Nobody in his or her right sense, except a loudmouth will say that Anambra as it is currently is not working and excelling. The pace of developmental transformation in the state is immense and radical. In the past fourteen year, Anambra has been in steady upward transformation in such areas as infrastructure, healthcare facilities, quality of education, agricultural development, trade and commerce as well as social cohesion and social issues.
In the last four years, especially, the state’s economy has been performing well, recording growth and positive rating even when the national wealth and cash flow is on the negative. So, what would any candidate implying by saying that Anambra has not been doing well before now if not deceit?
From the camps of those who say they are going there to provide better governance the voter needs more conviction. There are needs for them to identify clearly where governance has gone wrong in the state and how they will do things better to achieve better results than what we currently have.
What one often heard from those camps is a cry about ‘roads’, ‘roads’, ‘roads’ yet hours to the election, they have not told the voters which other roads should have been done apart from the over two thousand kilometres the incumbent governor have embarked on; how they will do the roads; where they will source the money; and why Anambra should prioritise the building of such roads against Obiano’s current options of prioritising the prompt payment of salaries, social security, improving quality of education, boosting healthcare, facilitating investment in the state and ploughing money into communities as well as markets and schools to checkmate the vagaries of national economic recession on the populace.
They have not proved to the Anambra voter what they really found wrong in the incumbent governor’s economic ideology of Akulueuno (which advocates the bringing home parts of the wealth the natives have made in diaspora to boost the economy of homeland), and his zeal for zero tolerance of such crimes as kidnapping, armed robbery, brigandage among others that have jointly given huge encouragement to sons and daughters of the state who have businesses elsewhere to head homeward with their wealth.
The have yet to fault the economic ingenuity of the incumbent governor which has raised the internally generated revenue (IGR) fifty billion naira in three years. Compared against the nearest high IGR figure in Anambra State’s history which below thirty billion naira (achieved in eight years) by the former governor, Peter Obi’s two-term reign Gov. Obiano comes shoulder and bust higher than any other in astute economic governance of the state.
Yet the naysayers in the better governance of Anambra, one of whom, Sir Obi promotes would inundate their listeners with claims that Anambra needs better governance. What the voter needs to ponder is what their betterment really means. Does it portend backwardness to the days of economic gloom and crime or to brighter clime and economic boom? The voter who wants a secured society in economic boom knows that the best option is the incumbent governor whom, records show has done far better than his predecessors including Obi who now props one of the ‘better days’ crooners.
Obiano’s campaign theme: “better today, greater tomorrow” and “one good term deserves another” makes more sense to me as a voter because I have seen, vividly, how he has made the state better than he met it in March 17, 2014. His strides in his current stewardship point clearly to a greater second term.
Characteristically, he has also stated in clear prints the promises he will fulfil for all the 179 (now extended to 181) communities of Anambra State. So ever voter has a document to charge him against should he renege. Knowing that of all the 37 candidates only Obiano has just four more years to stay in government house and he has pledged openly to hand over the mantle to someone from Anambra South zone I have something I can hold concretely from him unlike the rest who are deliberately obtuse and talking too vague to be trusted. His records and his words therefore convince me that surely, this his “one good term” really “deserves another.”
More so, no true Igbo son and daughter of would want the noise and fury of the election make ndi Igbo lose the only state (Anambra) that their sole political party, All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA ( in which Obiano’s runs) has in Nigerian politics.
To my fellow voters in Anambra, I say: beware… the lies flying over our head in this campaign are just too many. The lies are told with such sugar-coated tongue that they are beguiling. We should watch the mesmerisers and think deeply before we cast our votes. Least we plunge ourselves and our land into abyss and cry bitterly later. Anambra voters, ‘shine your eyes wellu wellu!’
*Sir Nnabuife is the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of Anambra Newspapers and Printing Corporation, publishers of ‘National Light’ and ‘Ka O Di Taa’ newspapers
