Don’t pity Mr Ini Okopido. If he is gone, let him go. He is crossly incompetent to be a state Chairman of an opposition party with multiple interest lines.
If he is not incompetent and clueless, we would have had ward and chapter exco in place now three months after the Congress unanimously agreed to retain the 2014 party leaders at the ward and chapter levels.
If his blind loyalty to Obong Nsima Ekere is going to cost him his career, so let it be. In politics, one man’s blunder, is another man’s advantage. If Dr Amadu Attai did not close his eyes to reason, run after money with sheepish loyalty to Obong Nsima Ekere against Senator John Udoedehe who brought him out of obscurity to become State Chairman, Mr Ini Okopido would not have become a state Chairman today. Dr Amadu Attai and his team would have remained as members of the State Working Committee of our great party, the APC. Blind loyalty that retired Dr Amadu Attai from his seat as State Chairman, is also going consume Mr Ini Okopido if care is not taken and a more articulate and diligent party Chairman who would not reduce himself and office to the whims of a single aspirant shall take over from him. Very soon, we shall prove the point that Obong Nsima Ekere and his group met us already seated in the APC and as such, their root in APC politics can NEVER be deeper than ours in this house. Whoever wishes to sink with Obong Nsima Ekere and his gubernatorial ambition, can go head but they won’t sink with our party.
It’s not Obong Nsima Ekere who noninated Mr Ini Okopido as state Chairman. Senator John Udoedehe did! Obong Nsima Ekere had wanted Chief Tony Esu as State Chairman. It’s Senator John Udoedehe who after dismantling the Amadu Attai exco, was asked to make nomination and he went for Okopido when Bar Francis Effanga was rejected. I don’t expect Ini Okopido to be loyal to Senator John Udoedehe. I only expect him to be fair to all the seven governoship aspirants in the APC by ensuring that decisions and agreements reached are executed to the latest. A man who jettisons a unanimous agreement of stakeholders and keeps APC in the cool for over three months now just because one aspirant has an afterthought, is not man enough to be a state Chairman and does not possess the leadership qualities to lead a political party. He must be shown the way out. He can’t be allowed to kill our party just because of the ambition of one man. In matter of days, APC is supposed to start selling nomination forms to aspirants. In matters days, APC is supposed to start it’s nominations and yet, no consultation has started because aspirants don’t know who to consult, party politics is totally dead and chance of mobilising the electorate and talking to convince them of our party ideologies are slim. Does that show we have a state working committee? I don’t think so.
Whatever judgment that will be passed on Mr Ini Okopido, is a judgment written by himself. Ini Okopido is a product of consensus arrangement. It is the same arrangement that made him the State Chairman of APC that had already retained the ward and chapter excos. If there is anything wrong with that structure at the ward and chapter levels, then the State Working Committee is built on a faulty foundation and where the foundation collapses, the State working committee shall surely fall. We are waiting for it to fall so we can have a proactive and pragmatic leadership for our party at the state level.
My vision and position is that Obong Nsima Ekere’s governoship ambition is doomed to fall. If Mr Ini Okopido wishes to use criminality, illigality or breach of trust to hold it, he too shall fall and in shame like how Dr Amadu Attai fell. Obong Nsima Ekere is building his ambition on greed, selfishness, desperation, lies, propoganda hatred for the party structures he met holding the party firm. Obong Nsima Ekere is very much aware that 80% of the ward and chapter leadership of the party shall not support him because he used and dumped them. He used them to purportedly expell Senator John Udoedehe from the party and preached PDP zoning, barred Uyo Senatorial District from the governoship race just to disqualify him. He promised to give the ward and chapter Chairmen contracts and retain them as party officers while he goes in as governor. The last time I checked, instead of giving the local Ieaders the contract and retaining them, he was using PDP defectors to replace both the ward and chapter leaders. How can the local party leaders trust him? How can they support him?
If not that Senator John Udoedehe came to their rescue, these hard working men and women would have been sacked from the party. Obong Nsima Ekere is very much aware that protecting these vulnerable party leaders even after they worked against him, has endeared Senator John Udoedehe to these party leaders and that they surely will reciprocate it by supporting his givernorship ambition in 2019. That’s why he is taking Mr Ini Okopido hostage. For Obong Nsima Ekere, if his governoship ambition is failing, APC must fail too. We can’t allow him.
Whenever one brings a policy and it fails, he must stand and bear the consequences. Nsima Ekere brought the policy of replacing original”owners” of the APC. It failed when he failed to sack the ward and chapter executives. He must bear the consequences and allow our party to move on. If Ini Okopido wants to dress up this sour, he will do it at the risk of his job because the truth is that those ward and chapter Chairmen MUST be so far as Congress accepted them back. The truth is that we shall insist as we are insisting that the 2014 exco list which Obong Nsima Ekere earlier agreed with other stakeholders must stand and where it cannot start, no part of that agreements which extended to making Mr Ini Okopido state Chairman can stand.
To those who go about promoting zoning and campaigning for Obong Nsima Ekere saying he shall spend only one term in office, I ask, can a man who cannot honor a simple agreement of retaining an exco, possibly honors an agreement not to go for a second term as governor? He shall not honor it because this path that he treads, has exposed him as a man of greed and inordinate ambition. We are going to check him and curtail his excesses and power drunkenness.
Cheers.
Solomon Johnny
