Edo 2024: Power in the Hands of APC’s Okpehbolo: a Psychoanalysis
By Chris Ojeikere
Although the All Progressives Congress, APC, candidate, Monday Okpebholo is mostly in Purdah, he has however showed himself in public spaces enough for us to psychanalyse him through his various utterances and general demeanour. History is replete with political men, who had very poor cognitive profiles, like Okpebholo’s, and so were thought to be malleable by their managers, who used their influences to push them to positions of power.
They however realised too late that they have created deadly dictators and tyrants! Monday Okpebholo is cast in that mold. His minders delude themselves and wish to delude the rest of us that he is humble and humane; a story for the marines!
Let’s begin with the way Monday Okpebholo tries to posture in public places, and compare with the eventual output of the initial posturing. In public, he virtually snatches the microphone, when it is his turn to speak and postures as if he would deliver such a seminal and novel speech, that it would take decades for the rest of us to catch up with him. He then walks with a confident gait accross the podium. Finally , he opens his mouth and start to talk.
Two sentences into whatever he has to say, and his minders are visibly embarrassed and jittery. You could almost hear them praying that the earth should open up and hide them there temporarily. Why? Because the candidate is showing such infantile cognitive dissonance and loss of contextual direction, that you could almost hear those who came with him whispering ” who send me come here?” in our popular lingo. Bad matters worse, the man is just rattling on in hurting English, totally oblivious of the atrocious pain in the neck he is and the calamity he is bringing on his Party and his own political image.
Suddenly at a point, when he thinks he has made a very important and wise point, he would expect the kind of rousing applause Ighodalo gets when on stage. It is then he should have realised that all eyes are fastened on the exit door and that his followers are all using their handkerchiefs, even in air-conditioned rooms.
But not Okpebholo. He would insist on getting their response. So he would ask ” can it possible?” . And, poor followers, what can they do? Some would say “yes” and others would say “no”, depending on which answer they think he expects. No one is sure, because no one was listening anymore. Every one is waiting for the nightmare to end!
All the while, he is wearing a look of morose belligerence and putting out the manners of a pontiff; a messenger of Justice and Wisdom, who is anointed to teach the rest of us the lessons of life, political propriety and good governance. It is in that buffoonery over-bloated ego, that he tries to be sarcastic at some point, and dismissal at others times. An example was the London saga.
In London, the question he was asked, was, what would be his policy on health care? He shot up from his seat, walks majestically to the book rest and announced that he could not understand how Governor Obaseki could finish building a MESUEM and up till now, he has not put animals there. The crowd roared in jest, he mistook it for cheering .
So, he lifted his face sanctimoniously, and added: ” I don’t know how someone will prefer animals to human beings!” Gbam! He sealed his infamy! But as I write now, I feel sure that, if you still put the question to him today, he is likely to give a similar answer. That’s how self assured his “slow engine” is.
Again, the question about Akoko – edo has not any hint to do with kilometres distance. Rather, the young man wanted to know where he stood in the LGA’s perennial issue about splitting it or not? Caught in the confusion of his abysmal Ignorance of Edo geography, and having not the slightest hint of any issue about LGAs anywhere at all for that matter, he decided to take a detour, he didn’t know that detours also required IQs too. So he relied on sounds, and reckoned that since “Edo” was in the name, all Edo were in Edo South, and therefore, Akoko edo must be one of those villages on the way to Benin from Irrua.
That’s why he thought you could get to Akoko edo in ten minutes from Irrua. The slow Engine could not even imagine where Esan land ended and where Edo land began. So he became superiorly dismissal. ‘ Oh yes Akoko edo, yes. Akoko edo, they are our neighbours here Yeah, I mean we used to go to Akoko edo all the time now. Just 10 mins drive and you get there!’ It was a grating sound to our ears. We had to stop our ears! It was criminal Ignorance of Edo State geography.
And to think that his people dare come to say, he is with his people at grassroots. He knows the land, bla bla bla. You can’t help but feel sorry for them, because what else is charlatanism? If old men can no longer judge or tell tales by evidence, what do we call that?
Monday Okpebholo has been released from his Purdah only a few times, and what we have psychoanalysed is a man that doesn’t know, and has no idea that he is so obviously ignorant, the blind can see it. A man full of false pretensions of humility, yet is never able to admit he doesn’t know. Again, he uses hard words “like: armed robbers in Government House “.
“I will flood the place with Esan people and heavens won’t fall” and other highly obnoxious words. We are seeing a mystery man, who chose an alias like “Akpakomiza” in the 21st century, proven by performances that have made his own party chieftain name him a “hard copy in a digital setting!” We have seen his power predilection, that his default sympathies lies with the leaders and not the membership of his party.
That, in itself, is a betrayal of the crave for acceptance into the privileged class; thereby revealing his inordinate ambition, especially for a man, who has the kind of O level results he submitted to INEC.
Power will be a dangerous weapon in the hand of such a character. His stigmata of ill education will make him hate knowledgeable people and he will spend his entire regime trying to bring them down. He and his die hard followers have already shown evidence of that severally. His vaulting ambition in a dim witted brain would make him a control freak that would demand 100% loyalty or you get the boot.
That’s fine, except that loyalty here means quite a different thing! Power will intoxicate a man, who insist on hearing an approving yes, as feedback when talking to people who have no idea what he is talking about! Let Edo people beware who we put power in his hands this time. We can see what Tinubu and Akpabio are doing with it in Abuja! As we speak, Nigerians are still on the street, because someone defined good government as _emilokan_ ( my turn).
It takes intelligent to use power for the good of all. We need more than failed o level result to lead us Forward ever and Backward never!
