Enugu politics, Okey Ezea and his delusional morass

BY UCHENNA NWATU

There’s no reality more difficult to accept than the knowledge that one is sinking into irrelevance. Depending on the individual involved, the reaction to such grim reality may vary from a stoic acceptance to a smug cynicism, akin to urinating in a public pool so no one else can use the facility. I get a sense of the latter as I observe the Enugu-born politician Okey Ezea experience an embarrassing meltdown in the public glare in very rapid succession.

Ordinarily, running for public office a couple of times without success may be seen as an indication of some passion for public service. But there is nothing remotely redemptive in his quest for political reckoning. It is rooted in malice and propelled by a mercantilist vision of politics. His many utterances confirm this. For instance, in one of his social media diatribes in June, Ezea, who is desperately angling to be the candidate of the Labour Party for the Enugu north senatorial zone, claimed that Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi has “refused to economically or politically empower his people in order to become the only ‘cock that is crowing’ in the Nsukka cultural zone”.

There was a rehash of this divisive, patronage-driven identity politics last month when Ezea declared in a video, without tongue in cheek, that the Nsukka cultural zone should be awash with “billionaires” given it is the zone that the governor comes from. To rationalise this, he noted that the state’s other two senatorial zones had substantially benefited, in material terms, on account of having produced former governors. It was, essentially, a shameless clamour for pork-barrel politics from a supposedly elder statesman, proof yet that ageing is not quite a criterion for wisdom. Such an open campaign for skewing policies in favour of the incumbent governor’s home region does grave harm to any society’s collective interest. Governor Ugwuanyi understands this. His administration’s deliberate inclusiveness is a testament to that.

However, such a unity-enhancing policy is anathema in Ezea’s worldview. The fact he is unpretentious about that says a lot about him and should actually be an unmistakable note of alarm to be taken seriously. In the so-called open letter referenced earlier, Ezea made the following claim unabashedly: “Even when I withdrew from the tribunal on account of being my brother from the same Nsukka zone, he has refused to do the road about 14-kilometre, from Ibagwa to Alor Agu which was my only single demand”. For the purpose of emphasis, the road whose rehabilitation Ezea had demanded as a precondition for withdrawing a petition to an election he clearly lost is actually located in his local government area and, in fact, is a major thoroughfare a few meters from his country home. So, he is basically implying that had he been elected the governor in 2015, this road would have willy-nilly become a priority project.

I do not know if it is indeed only a two-kilometre stretch that has since been fixed, as Ezea had alleged. I’m inclined to accept whatever claims he makes with more than a spoonful of salt given his scant regard for facts. In his desperation to disparage the Enugu state governor, Ezea claimed in his open letter that “general hospitals and primary health care centres are not functional”. In fact, the impression he gave was one of general despondency. But a sense of how a government has performed can always be gleaned from statistics of unbiased independent bodies, not subject to any whimsical pronouncement or demagoguery. For instance, the falsehood in Ezea’s claims about the state of public healthcare in Enugu north senatorial zone was laid bare just weeks after his open letter  in a survey conducted by ONE Campaign, a global non-profit advocacy group devoted to the fight against poverty and preventable diseases in Africa.

According to the survey, Enugu had the highest ranking among the country’s 36 states – bar the federal capital territory – in primary healthcare service delivery for the 2019-2021 period. The sustained construction and equipping of unique Type-3 primary health centres by the Enugu state government has been a cornerstone of its basic healthcare services, and it is a major development that earned the state this accolade. A large number of these facilities are spread across Nsukka and contiguous local government areas. And yet Ezea says “no viable hospital exists in Nsukka”. This is even despite the fact that the soon-to-be-inaugurated State University of Medical and Applied Sciences, Igbo-Eno is within the Nsukka locale.

Ezea and his ilk should know that the era of politics fueled by toxic rhetoric is gone for good. That is the reason he is literally a megalomaniac stuck in the past in spite of attempts to burnish his image and present himself as a force to reckon with and counterpoint to Governor Ugwuanyi in Nsukka politics. However, the contrast is stark. Where Ugwuanyi is perspicacious, Ezea is impulsive, seeming always to be in competition with his own self to outdo previous indiscretions and register a greater degree of ignominy in the public mind.

Even those with whom he had forged political alliances in the past are apparently wary of his noxious attitudes. Was it not so, how is it that virtually everyone else who was a part of the All Progressives Congress’ top hierarchy in Enugu state in 2015 (including Ezea’s gubernatorial running mate) has been somewhat accommodated by the ruling party? Who would, after all, be comfortable with a lawyer and a two-time gubernatorial candidate of major political parties who hurl invectives and openly defame public figures the way Ezea does?

As I try to make sense of Ezea’s shocking meltdown, I’m reminded of this wise saying by Socrates: “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser”. So one needs not to look far to situate the bitterness eating up Ezea. The man is fast sinking into irrelevance.

Nwatu wrote in from Enugu