The danger of political anointing. Part 2

And I can guess how he will achieve that. He may begin to say that Engineer Vita Abba whom, I learnt carved in at the inception of the anointing gambit, should either become the new Reps or present a candidate so as to pay him for being a good boy. Then the Nwodos, who are known gladiators in not just Enugu politics – but Nigeria at large – and who have been echoing the reason for Hon Ugwuanyi’s consensus emergence, may also be given the opportunity to do something with the senatorial seat currently in the kitty of Ayogu Eze. This will be a good comeback streak for the Nwodos .

I have not inched in very closely to see the place of Uzouwani axis. But it will end up being a very interesting thing. There is also need to know what Senator Ike Ekweremmadu has in his kitty. Will he join hands with Senator Eze to upturn the anointing? We cannot say what is brewing in this direction. But this is where I do not want a large block like the Enugu North to dampen political agitation on the sole ground that Gov. Chime will anoint one of them. If this plays out well this time, all well and good but it should not be their pattern. What will even make me happy is for any other group such as APC to use the opportunity of what will come out of an ill fatted anointment to produce a governor. And I know that Chief Okey Ezea has tried to be as independent as he could be in the politics of Enugu state. But unfortunately he has not shown serious enthusiasm in the whole saga.


But this is even what makes me quarrel the mode of Enugu politics the more. Because of this anointing business, you will never have a robust or boisterous political debate that will throw up the best candidate. You will never have an opportunity to sample the wealth of knowledge, the competence, and the capacity of people who are supposed to be you torchbearers. The bandwagon that follows anointing is excruciating to say the least. Youths – both educated and uneducated – the elderly, even fellow contestants get cowed to a dismal point.


You will only be left, helplessly, to know them when it is already too late in the night before you understand that you’ve made the biggest blunder with your card. But that is not too bad to most of us whose sole concept is that an Nsukka man has become the governor in the making and that Governor Sullivan Chime has fulfilled his promise.

I am not a politician so I would not know what all the ingredients in this process of consensus and anointing – a creed PDP has carefully tucked into their constitution for some clandestine purposes – are.
I would have said that there are elements of creativity in this consensus and anointing thing but when I hear that there is always a rift amongst the big players after anointing, I become left with no option than to say that anointing is the reason we have problems and not the reason there will be no problem. There is what I regard as an uneasy calm. And experience has shown that most of the infractions in the political grouping has always, directly or indirectly, been triggered by one consensus and anointing or another. Throw the thing open and let the players do it on a level playing ground. When you are trounced with a superior argument or performance in group primaries or elections, except you do not know your capacity, you are most likely to concede without grudges. But when you are not given the opportunity to know who is better than you, through bottled up consensus and anointing, you will always feel cheated. And in Nigeria where there is no ideology, you immediately look for another plank.


It is important that PDP has “zoned” the governorship to the North of the state, but it should have stopped at that. But my argument even has been that if people come in and do thorough job, this zoning thing should have become an aberration that would have been done away with, in our political lexicon. Zoning becomes an issue, when people who come in to deliver service to the citizenry, either by omission or commission, refuse to use their offices to give a fairly distributed service. So people now say, let us wait, when it is zoned to us we will get our people favoured after we would have lined our pockets thoroughly.


Rulers, using the odious platform provided by consensus and anointing – in the process – try to conceal their treachery after they have taken their full turn in a given level in the political ladder. They then try to run away with the naive thought that they can have a robot in place after them and, have always had this erroneous and wacky thinking that the best thing is to use anointing to minimize how they are perceived and probed when they vacate office. It has succeeded to the extent that actually, their stooges give blind eyes to their misappropriations in office but experience has shown that it stops just there. Jim Nwobodo tried it with Chimaroke Nnamani. Chimaroke Nnamani, in turn, tried it with present Gov. Sullivan Chime and now Chime is trying it with Honourable Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi.


I have followed all the reasons adduced by major stake holders on why they resorted to anointing. First from the Nwodos and second from Gov. Chime himself. None of the reasons revealed any known ingenuity in the process of democracy by any yardstick. Why are people always afraid of boisterous and robust democratic rivalry that should ordinarily have been the surest avenue through which people who know what service is all about would emerge?