From apga, two wrongs can make a right

Earlier in the year, this column made a case for the All Progressives Grand Alliance

Earlier in the year, this column made a case for the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to reflect and move for a lasting peace. It argued that it offends good conscience to see someone who conceived an idea, nurtured and brought it to birth to be thrown out by people who came from the wings. Such maneuverings thrive for a while but not all the while; when they crack, it’s with a bang.

Maybe the actors didn’t read it then; that crack is showing and issue now is how to prevent a bang?  All along, it’s been Peter Obi and Victor Umeh behaving like Siamese twins in the caging out of Chekwas Okorie, the founder of the party. From a distance, they looked like knowing all better and with the solution to anything with a semblance of a problem to the party. They won all their court cases but lost the truth. That truth is, they were building on a foundation whose bricks had moved. So it was just a question of time before a crack. They also forgot that like a covenant, so is a foundation; you don’t change it at will without a cost, usually the devastating type.

Now it’s Obi and his uncle on one side and Umeh on the other. What people should know however is that it’s not about these gladiators; it’s about the people’s identity they had kept to themselves, looking like mascots but ending as public-finger-pointers, each looking for sympathy they jointly arrested. It’s about the people.

In the 60s, NCNC was East-driven so much that it became the national party relegating others to regional competitors. APGA was expected to do just that and more- a rallying point for all Easterners and beyond, be you South-South or Southeast. The stranglehold on APGA by these now public-criers has denied the people that. Today, we talk about PDP, ACN, CPC and nothing for these peoples. Implication: Their interests are packaged and channeled through others who also have theirs to promote.

If you understand politics as a game of interest, then these two regions are off-beat; just used to complete numbers. They have been economically marginalized and now, they are unconsciously marginalizing themselves politically. The APGA debacle is therefore a wake-up call. They should not be distracted by the waves called Umeh and Obi/Nwobu-Alor but focus on regaining their lost identity. The architecture of the wrangling is that Nwobu-Alor who’s said to be Obi’s uncle has lately realized that APGA was going down. It took a dismal performance at the general elections for him to hear the gong of decline. Keeping his nephew Obi at the background, he unleashed on Umeh.

Hear him concerning Umeh, ‘All I am saying is that he has lost the capacity to lead APGA to greatness. We cannot sit and watch a great party like APGA remain stagnant because of one man. APGA would have grown more in the South-East but for his dictatorial tendencies. He keeps doing things wrongly’.

Then Umeh to Nwobu-Alor,  ‘1000 Nwobus can’t push me out of APGA leadership because all the party leaders in the country are behind me. His nephew, who is Governor Obi, should call him to order. At 85 years of age, he has nothing to show for again in Anambra State, he has no future again. ‘He is not anybody in the party, I doubt if he has APGA membership card, his only credentials is that he is the governor’s uncle’. It would be unkind to deny these teasers comment.  I’m compelled to doubt Umeh’s integrity as a leader. There’s no remorse whatsoever for leading a party down the drains; all that fascinates him is the droves of party members he has cornered to his side as reserve-support to fight a call to oust him. In other words, it’s about Umeh not necessarily the party. Nwobu himself has been sitting and watching APGA go down from party with Eastern flex to an Anambra party. It took the stubbornness and resilience of Imo indigenes to add APGA in the last election. Maybe, just because of the person of Rochas Okorocha or a rejection of Ohakim. That success had nothing to do with either Nwobu-Alor or Umeh- the two wrongs. If the South and East can see the political finger which others are already writing with and get their identity spelt, those wrongs may well make a right.

These peoples can do it not by reading this piece and staying back but by reading it and stepping out. The slide in these regions should begin to find a conscious stop. And it starts with the politics of foresight and purposeful blending.