Okpebholo's Touted Budget Presentation Gaffes as Irrelevant Ado

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By Tony Erha

The ever slippery political tuff of Edo, the heartbeat state of the Nigerian nation, is again on the boil.

Therein rages a meaningless hullabaloo, from the exuberant state, to the global world, that Senator Monday Okpebholo, the newly-elected governor of the state, who was sworn in only few weeks ago, had made ‘unpardonable blunders’ in the pronunciation of the total figure of his first annual budget, presented yesterday, at the instance of the State House of Assembly, the legislative arm.

For about two days in a roll, the reading and listening public have been similarly inundated by a rapid but unpleasant media news from Benin City, the state capital.

The city’s High Court arena, at its highbrow, was turned into an orgy of ‘ring and sideline fights’, allegedly by supporters of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the ruling political party in the state and at national level, with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Suffice that this sacred venue of the Election Petition Tribunal, where the last governorship election dispute holds between the APC and PDP, was the platform for the brawls likened to the American free-style wrestling bouts, viewed daily on the television networks.

The only differences were that whereas the American fighters chose to go adding the Greco-Roman style and the pummeling of opponents with weightless objects, their more daring Edo counterparts opted for the use of battle axes, cutlasses, bottles and other dangerous cudgels, thus resulting to bone fractures, injuries and bloodletting.

Whilst Emperor Jarret Tenebe, Edo APC chair, asserted that it was the PDP thugs who besieged the court’s venue to initiate vicious attacks on APC members and the tribunal lawyers, the PDP retorted that it was the APC urchins, who had attacked them.

But, the public had been taken aback that such brigandage could be let to happen in broad daylight and at the city centre, closed to the state’s police headquarters and the operational commands of two other security agencies.

This has readily left the public to the opinion that Edo police commissioner, the state’s Directorate of the Secret Services and the Civil Defence corps should live up to their billings at arresting, forthwith, the menace.

The escalation of the Governor Okpebholo’s alleged difficulty at reading the speech, must have been provoked and informed by the strategy of the PDP to douse tension and demean the weighty allegations being unearthed by a Governor Okpebholo, who was thought to be inarticulate, judging that he had begun to make more sense to the Edo populace, especially about his expressed misdeeds of the Obaseki’s government, which he took over from.

The APC’s media assemble, pointedly dismissed the touted gaffes by Governor Okpebholo as having been doctored by the PDP, in order to denigrate the governor and avoid issues being raised by it on the Obaseki’s atrocities, whilst in office.

As could be seen, Senator Okpebholo had been dutiful voicing out the flaws of the Obaseki’s led PDP government, while inspecting some public schools within the city centre.

He had moaned and criticised the dilapidation of its primary and secondary schools, wondering what Mr. Obaseki, had done with the humongous educational funding accrued to him during the eight long years he was in power for.

Governor Okpebholo was also angst at the huge heaps of donated books, which ex-Governor Obaseki had long received on behalf of teachers and school children of the state, for onward distribution to them.

More of the regrets by the incumbent governor were that Mr. Obaseki shouldn’t have received the donated books, from an APC president, only to turn around and deny the poor recipients of its use, simply because the books had the picture of the opposition president imprinted on them.

This is at the backdrop that the books would have been left to rot away, if Governor Okpebholo did not come around to distribute them to the original recipients.

Simultaneously, the Verification Committee set up by the Okpebholo’s government, to pry into and receive definite statement of financial and other accounting of the immediate-past era of Obaseki, had shock-stiffed the public with its finding that the Obaseki’s government, that was widely touted as prudential, had incurred over N1 trillion domestic debt and some N280 billion external debt.

The huge figures, reeled out by the Accountant General of the state, who was said to be Obaseki’s Man Friday, had further infuriated financial and development experts.

This somewhat had given credence to the recent arrests and detention of some top treasury civil servants under Obaseki by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the anti-graft body, on the sticky financial impropriety allegations against them and the Obaseki’s government.

But, usual investigation and finding by the discerning public watchdogs, coupled with fore-knowledge of the propaganda gimmickry of the immediate-past government, will obviously mean that the hallucination (even sensationalisation) of the Governor Okpebholo’s alleged budget-speech’s gaffe, is nothing but a mere happenstance, that had been magnified into a mountain.

With the earth-shaking declaration of the spending free by the Governor Obaseki, who all along drummed his financial meticulousness and thriftiness to the high heavens, the same holier-than-thou gambit, would have evaporated, dawning on the public that the ex-governor was a blatant liar.

This would also have put another lie to Obaseki’s consistent accusation of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole of attempts to be a godfather, with the intent to milk and corrupt his government.

Also apparently, the rude revelation of the debt profile, which Obaseki and the PDP had previously denied and could now only feebly challenge, had actually portrayed the immediate-past government as one who actually had plunged the state into a cesspit of insolvent debts, a transferred epithet that Obaseki and his government had eaten the bread meant for the future of an unfortunate Edo and her folks.

Incontrovertibly, there would be no right thinking public- spirited person who would not ask the obvious question; as to what lethal threats are there in an elected leader, who may innocently stammer or goof on a budget figures, which he had read from a prepared and well circulated speech, whereas the budget statement (including the actual figures) have been duly presented, and etched as valid public record by more of the media sources and vested budgetary institutions, than for a leader who was alleged to have dissipated the commonwealth of the people, a weighty allegations which he had had no tangible responses to?

For a Governor Okpebholo, who had been largely commended by the public for his display of the capacity to lead, including Chief Dan Orbih, a deputy national chairman of the Obaseki’s PDP, only within a little while he assumed governorship office, it could pose an arduous task to deflate him before a discerning public, on frivolous and a dramatized lack of eloquence and imperfection at speaking ‘Turenchi’, an Hausa word for English language.

And for a long-suffering voters of Edo, there seems not to be a rendezvous of indictment that ‘all-talk-na-do’ (precepts followed by examples) is only expressed by the quantum of English a sitting governor must speak.

And it also holds that a maliciously denigrated Governor Okpebholo can’t be nailed to the cross by some uncoordinated armchair critics, simply on the account that he is naive and unpolished. Obviously, a governor who possesses a better understanding of the human chemistry of the Edo public is one always desired as a governor.

And from most Edolites, the question is always posed as to what actual benefits had the acclaimed linguistic proficiency of Obaseki had brought to the Edo table, on the donkey eight years has held sway, more so that he was a touted wordsmith, who graduated from the premier University of Ibadan?