As political events in Cross River State play out, in the run-in to the 2023 elections, my mind has remained firmly fixed on William Tagbo, the central character in Anezionwu Nwankwo Okoro’s 1972 classic, “One Week, One Trouble”. The character Wilson Tagbo, who begins secondary school during the colonial period had more flaws than virtues and got into trouble almost every week with all the authority figures in the school. I remember that he sneakily roasted yams with a refuse heap fire in the school or is it his desperate abandonment of his Bible Knowledge class to go and read the book, “How to Jump Six Feet”, hoping it will aid him get selected into his school house sports list? I cannot forget too that he spiced up that selection by interrupting the school house sports event when he rode the school’s bull, and even tampered with laughing gas in the Chemistry lab.
Tagbo in Okoro’s 112 paged juvenilia unequivocally comes across as an impulsive character whose mischief nearly earned him expulsion from school.
While I was on the streets and witnessed firsthand, the fury unleashed on government property during the EndSars protest in Calabar, it was not lost on me that that fury was driven by seething discontentment at how those knightly ordained to govern us, govern, tacitly shielded from any real connection with the reality on the ground…and the consequences have continued to be serial.
To the present. It appears too difficult for our leaders to understand that political democracy is simply expressed in YES and NO; the acceptance of actions by a majority and then, the acceptance of the majority position by the minority. Our dilemma has simply been that our calculation of majority and minority continues to be recorded in blurred figures suited only for the eyes of those in authority. But if those who govern Cross River State are not disconnected from the people, they would have understood that too many people have become united against them because several family heads and dependents are bearing economic difficulties that gratuities, NOT PAID, would have solved. Our governor is so unaware that those rented rallies at surmounted summits, have become a path to riches for those who are able to convince, or is it confuse him, that the massive printing and distribution of t-shirts to young people, dancing to loud blaring music, will benefit the state more than those who produce and market those t-shirts in Aba.
To a present again. I have consistently maintained that the difference between the PDP and the APC is akin to that marked differences between a security man and a night watchman. Both are one rope, tied to a goat, make the goat no run. Several of those individuals running the affairs of this two parties, know each other, at so close a range that it is so difficult to see where they differ, except in semantics and the sharing of commonwealth slices of cake on the table. You therefore can understand why when they bark at each other, nobody scares anybody.
Permit me to therefore say that, it is an overdrive to believe that if today’s APC in Cross River State, dominated by yesterday’s PDP men, advice a former PDP man that those who ‘sholved’ him aside must be prevented from organising a gathering, it will hold solid water. That gathering was going to hold in Calabar, at the Calabar Sports Club, and it held.
To the “Back to South” movement; see what I think. Apart from the governor’s personal interest, what makes him best suited to select for more than three million of us, a person to elect as governor? Can we be allowed to pick from our collective first eleven instead of wait on Ayade’s calisthenics. Tell me Liyel Imoke did it and I can tell you for free that the political dynamics then and today’s, are different.
If our brothers and sisters in CR South want a CR governor from among them, it cannot be out of place. But then, they must employ political persuasion which will yield better fruits instead of the current abrasive position that has been annoyingly stuck in people’s faces. A friend, an aide of my state governor told me in a text, “if God helps us from the South to succeed, with all the things Central is putting us through because of greed, when we finish we will project North to take another turn, I hope you will like it?” This is the kind of disposition that threatens common sense, even before “their governor ” has emerged.
That John Owan Enoh, Usani Usani and Chris Agara are on the same political flank, just opened up the game space. This trio show no vehemence, but have only echoed through their personal ambitions and public demonstration, what Democracy permits…a right to vote and be voted for. Added to this is the simple fact that the paralysis of governance in Cross River State has become open food for thought and whoever thinks he/she can, wants to step in and right close to eight years of wrong doing. Those who are calling them names and insisting that what they have done is insubordination, are yet to realize that right now, the action of these men, unlike Tagbo’s, is not impulsive and mischievous, it is simply a clear case of all man for himself and God for all because CRS don cast, like they say on the streets.
