By Robert Obioha
In an election season, political campaign can come in diverse forms, including crude use of language to possibly settle an old score or even attempt to diminish someone’s rising fame and political relevance. Even lending support to one’s favourite candidate can be subtly or brazenly done depending on one’s choice of words and deployment of language, which can also be brutal and lacking tact and diplomacy.
Although politicians have been tasked by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), National Peace Committee and other stakeholders to engage on campaign based on issues and desist from campaign of mudslinging and calumny, but every day, the polity is suffused with hate speeches, diatribes, incendiary comments, ethnic stereotyping of some leading presidential candidates all in an effort to pull some of them down.
If political
contestants throw the usual banters at one another, it will be understandable
and even rationalized that it is part of the political game. But when such
hate-filled comments, which border on jealousy, pettiness, hatred and emotional
insecurity, emanate from gubernatorial quarters, they raise cause for concern.
And when such ill-digested comments come from the governor of the state of a
presidential hopeful in the 2023 polls, the handshake has really passed the
elbows. It is against this background that I examine Soludo’s needless verbal
attack on the Labour Party presidential candidate for the 2023 polls, Peter
Obi.
When Anambra State governor, Prof. Charles
Soludo cavalierly dismissed the “investments” of former Anambra State governor
and presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in Anambra State as
“worthless” during an interview with Channels Television, it clearly shows that
something is fundamentally wrong with our politics and some of those who play
the game, often referred as dirty in some quarters. It also shows that there is
indeed something to worry about the quality of characters that occupy political
positions in the South East, Igboland and Nigeria.
Soludo’s poor
outing is unbecoming of a former professor of economics at the University of
Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), and ex-governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN),
who supposed to know the value of investment and even the need for instituting
the saving culture whether at individual level, corporate or governmental
level. Soludo’s vicious attempt to demonize Obi’s saving culture and prudent
management of Anambra resources cannot fly.
His
attempt to tarnish Obi’s rising political profile is dead on arrival, no matter
the level of sophistry, oratory and opprobrium. Although words are not entirely
innocent in the way they are used, Soludo’s words on Obi are political and full
of evil intent and obviously vague and empty. They were carefully chosen and
uttered with great hate and intensity for maximum effect for those he is
campaigning for.
His
obsessed hatred for Peter Obi, his political ambition and Igbo politics and
even Ndigbo is not hidden or disguised. His hatred for the “Obidients Movement”
is never veiled in his later needless and avoidable lengthy essay on the same
subject.
Soludo’s avowed hostility to Peter Obi and his political ambition
is embarrassing and uncalled for. Without Obi’s development of APGA and making
Willie Obiano to succeed him, Soludo would not have become the governor of
Anambra State. His earlier attempt to become the governor of the state under
the PDP failed woefully. That is why he should be humble enough to acknowledge
those instrumental to his later rise to power. He has not arrived yet,
politically speaking.
He
should watch his political utterances and chew his words before vomiting them.
He must exhibit tact and diplomacy as a budding politician. He is now a
governor and not a university teacher. Anambra State or Igbo politics should not
be taken as his experimental classroom where he acts as the headmaster. He must
accept the fact that he does not know everything. Like all humans, he knows in
parts.
He
is never all-knowing. That attribute belongs to the gods and not humans. Soludo
must acknowledge and accept his limitations and even shortcomings. He should
refrain from playing god. We know his banking consolidation programme and its
scars. We know people who lost millions and billions of naira in the stock
market on account of his restructuring of the banks and its inspiration for
people to invest in the stock market. Yet nobody has selected Soludo for public
excoriation for the fall in the value of their investments in the banking
stocks and others, which to use his words on Peter Obi, is worth next to
nothing now.
His demeaning comment against Peter Obi’s investment in Anambra
State, which has attracted opprobrium from the critical public, is worth
quoting in full. “I don’t know about the investment. Our interview is about the
2023 budget. I’m not talking about the investments of any of my predecessors.
By the way, the one that you talked about I don’t know about that.”
In an attempt to utterly rubbish Peter Obi’s investment, the erudite professor, orator and politician went ahead to say: “I think there was something I read about somebody speculating about whatever investment. With what I’ve seen today, the value of those investments is worth next to nothing. So, let’s leave that aside.”
That Obi has captured the national imagination is not in
doubt. That Obi’s political fame is steadily rising and that the momentum is
high is well acknowledged even by Obi’s critics and political opponents. Agreed
that Soludo has a right to express his political opinion and difference, he
should not abuse that right to twist facts and try to dismiss Obi’s rising
political fame.
Although I am not privy to many parts his planned lengthy
essay will take, he should either say the right and factual things or forever
hold his peace. His strive to tarnish Obi’s fame now will only ruin him
politically. He should concentrate on delivering his enticing electoral
promises instead of engaging in a worthless political rhetoric.
*Dr. Obioha is a commentator on public
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