Edo 2024: How APC’s Okpebholo GRA Skit Gone Wrong
By Uwa Aigbe
The difference between skit and life is that life has to make sense, skit doesn’t have to.
A skit is a short play or performance. Skits are quick little scenes that are usually comedic. That was what the All Progressive Congress, APC, gubernatorial candidate for the September election in Edo State attempted in a viral video. However, sadly, he could not achieve the comic part which skits are known for.
In the video, Senator Monday Okpebholo, the oftentimes media shy APC candidate seen talking gibberish and wadding through a flooded street purported to be a road in the Benin Government Reservation Area, GRA. Unlike most skit makers, he was with armed guards, fishing political aides who are on the wings to tap into the coffers of Edo State treasury, while his commissioned photographers were seen walking on the dryland of the road he called a river. The irony!
The level of lack of intelligence in the video is too obvious, and so painful. In the said skit where Okpebholo said their cars could not cross, they showed a planted vehicle crossing. The photographer showed his entourage walking with shoes by the other side which was okay, not flooded. He was the only one wadding through the depth of the flood. They could have done better.
What Okpehbolo did was to make a joke without the audience laughing. The question before every lip that has seen the video is, “where is the 30 billion Naira loan that the Senator Oshiomole’s APC administration took for the Benin Storm Water Project?”
Well, we can recall that in 2021, Obaseki declared the project as a fraud perpetuated by the administration of Senator Oshiomole who was then acting as a sole administrator of Edo State. I think Okpebholo should have started from there in a way of inquiry. He should have put Oshiomole on the spot for that fraud instead of wadding through the flash flood that occurred due to continues rainfall.
Perhaps I am not sure the incompetent Okpebholo is not aware that Obaseki is not the first governor of Edo State.
As a matter of fact, as he has addressed a lot of infrastructural challenges in Edo State, Governor Obaseki met with residents of the said GRA to embark on massive drainage system which is in the master plan of the area, however, influential residents argued against it because according to them, the project will amount to the potential destruction of their properties. This was part of the reasons why the project never saw daylight.
Come to think of it; if not for dirty, mundane, parochial politics, how was Okpehbolo able to sneak the name of Dr Asue Ighodalo into his failed skit attempt? Of course it is nothing more than an attempt to score the usual cheap political point.
Come to talk to the people, let us debate, he is running.
Perhaps the skit plot lost all its salt by bringing the Peoples Democratic Party’s, PDP, candidate, Dr Asue Ighodalo to the narrative. “River GRA, River Obaseki, River Asue Ighodalo…” what a shame!
The greatest disservice to the skit was the introduction of the APC Acting Chairman, Hon. Jarret Tenebe. If the APC must be taken seriously in Edo State, they should stop Tenebe from addressing the public. What he brings to the polity is violence, brutality, savagery, barbarity, brutishness…and all that the 21st century should not accommodate in Edo State. We all know he is not the first cultist in Nigeria, and one wonders why he is always brandishing such mentality every time he addresses issues. Whatever kind of opposition he is playing, he should know it is trite he respects the office of the Edo State governor.
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Well, the skit might have achieved the minimal aim of deceiving their party members – the gullible, but the average Edo State citizens cannot be deceived into believing their collective coffer will be returned to Lions and Tigers to manage. Edo State is moving in the right direction, and Dr Asue Ighodalo is poised to steady the sail when elected in September. Skits and highfalutin propaganda cannot be used to govern properly.
Uwa Aigbe wrote from GRA, Benin City, Edo State.
