The hoopla about Enugu 2023

BY GREG ENEBE Jr

A few weeks ago, specifically on Tuesday, May 25, 2021, the prestigious Adada Lecture Series of the Association of Nsukka Professors (ANP) held. Over the years, the lectures have become a major intellectual platform for civic engagement of the people of this great Igbo cultural zone that is synonymous with Nsukka city, inarguably the Intellectual Capital of Enugu State, nay the Igbo nation. Each year when the lectures are held, they hold the audience spellbound, exploring topical socio-political issues that stand at the core of the people’s lives.

One other feature that marked the lecture series out was the quality and caliber of its resource persons. Give it to them, perhaps because they themselves are the intellectual crème-de-la-crème of our society, in the last four years of its existence, its organizers sought out the best for the purpose of this intellectual engagement. Thus, year in year out, attendees looked forward to the coat of many colours of intellects that were on parade at the annual gathering of cerebral giants at the Adada Lectures.

However, like everything bright and beautiful which the cancer of politics, favouritism and deliberate lowering of standard for spurious advantages has eaten deep into in Nigeria, the Adada Lecture Series, this year also witnessed its own plunge. It was a mortal attack at its credibility and prestige. By the time the virus was done with the series this year, due simply to the organizers’ choice of a square-peg-in-a-round-hole resource person, it must have lost more than – at a conservative estimate – half of its reputation and and honour.
Although this year’s Guest Lecturer was Mr. Peter Obi, the much-admired poster boy for Igbo renaissance, the role of Distinguished Chairman and Keynote Speaker was curiously conferred on Mr. Chinyeaka Ohaa, the scheming, wily, sneaky former civil servant. With the huge and unquantifiable wealth he acquired after occupying cash-loaded state and federal offices, Ohaa, who now goes by the borrowed moniker, Odalije, may have been seated at the high table to underscore inclusivity in the choice of resource persons. However, for a Lecture Series that had over the years accumulated so much affection and respect for its depth and brilliance, a moneybag former civil servant was the least of persons who should mount that podium to intellectualize and pontificate.

Many reasons have been adduced for the choice of Ohaa. While many have claimed that the hitherto well-respected professors caved in to the lure of filthy lucre, some affirmed that knowing Enugu people’s fascination with leaders imbued with high intellect, Ohaa bulldozed himself into chairman-ing the lecture so as to get himself inducted into that sacred conclave. With the lecture, he apparently hoped to give himself the semblance of an academic and intellectual. However, allowing a man who is anything but an intellectual symbol to blather at such a prestigious podium of intellect was a huge letdown, a major dis-advertisement for the Adada Lecture Series.

If the choice of the chairman and keynote speaker for this year’s lecture was tragic, more tragic were the hushed allegations that Ohaa equally stole and obtusely plagiarized the ideas he rambled on. The content of his keynote speech very narrow, lacking concise depth and bereft of the candour that was expected in a lecture of that magnitude. He had apparently hired a hack to articulate the garbage of thoughts which he eventually inflicted on the audience. Vague, intellectually scanty and full of clichés, the content of his presentation was to say the least disappointing to qualify as an intellectual contribution.

In any case, Ohaa’s intellectual deficits are fairly well known. As federal permanent secretary, he appeared to anyone who came in contact with him as uninspiring, drab and inarticulate. His television appearances lacked verve, confident grasp of issues and clarity of diction. These Nsukka professors erred badly for lending such an elevated platform to a governorship wannabe who is a known intellectual dimwit. Those in attendance at the lecture also hammered on its very poor presentation and the inability of the Distinguished Chairman to pretend to take ownership of his prepared keynote speech by making a single statement without shifting his gaze even for a second from his script.

Many have posited that this junket of pseudo intellectualism by Ohaa is an attempt to give fillip to his purported quest to become the governor of Enugu State come 2023. Which ordinarily shouldn’t be a misplaced desire since everyone has the constitutional right to aspire for whatever position. However, per adventure that idea is real and not hyped, any pointer in his direction is an attempt to stagnate Enugu State which needs everything but a civil servant as its leader come 2023.

With this in mind, it then becomes glaring that the Nsukka professors lent Ohaa their podium for a humongous fee to project him as an intellectual. If this effort of being invited or acquiring a high podium from Nsukka professors is an attempt to shut out the other zones from the guber race, the move will be resisted by Enugu West because zoning in patently undemocratic and will not define this 2023 election. Zoning is antithetical to merit, competence and proven capacity to perform. If the invitation was intended by the Nsukka professors to burnish Ohaa’s stale image or boost his chances, then one wonders whether the Nsukka professors were working at cross purposes with the senator representing the zone, who has vociferously laid out the arguments in support of another Nsukka shot at the seat, zoning having run its full cycle.

The question to ask those urging him on is, is he all Enugu East can offer? If the lecture was intended to package him as the best candidate the East can offer, then the Nsukka professors should look around Nkanuland and they will surely find brighter, younger, well-educated prospective candidates from the zone. It must never be said of Nkanuland and by extension Isi-Uzo that all they can offer is a mediocre polytechnic product who wangled his way to the top of the civil service by exploiting the crooked Nigerian system.

What Enugu needs far more than the mere psychological satiation of zoning the governorship seat to the East is someone with extensive political experience at federal or state executive level who understands the nuances of governance. Enugu needs a dexterous, smart and savvy politician with a solid political base, not someone with one leg in a political party and the other leg in another party. Enugu needs someone with strong links in the private sector who can leverage on such relationships to attract and drive investments locally and internationally. It is time for Enugu to shake off timidity and go for a man of inspiring personality and chutzpah. I have looked afield and if Chinyeaka Ohaa is all that Enugu East can offer, then zoning should be blown to smithereens. Enugu deserves better, be it from East or West.

By the reason of the remarkable strides it has made in the last 21 years when democracy took firm roots in Nigeria, the journey from 2023 for Enugu State should be one that is anchored on vision, merit and competence. The reality on ground is that Enugu, as it is today, is a civil service state. This is reflected in its inherited burden of a bloated workforce and of course, wage bill which the current governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, has adroitly managed amidst a depressed economy that has left many states unable to meet their monthly salary obligations to workers, much less investing in infrastructural renewal. That Enugu State has stayed afloat without wage crisis should not be surprising given Ugwuanyi’s private sector background as an insurance executive whose singular act of hiring a former bank executive as the head of the internal revenue board of the state turned the agency around and quadruped the state IGR.

Enugu urgently needs to come out of hole of a civil serve state, into a 21st century model anchored on entrepreneurship and commerce. To now place the future of our beloved state in the hands of someone who is wholly immersed in civil service mentality would be akin to willfully capsizing the ship. Surely, Enugu East, like the West, is endowed with a surfeit of seasoned and entrepreneurial-minded politicians with connections to big businesses locally and internationally, credentials that Ohaa not only doesn’t have but is too impudently bereft of.

His life-long career as a civil servant may appear lustering. However, in terms of brick and mortar, as they say, it is a minus for an Enugu State which is trying to swim ashore from the impediments of national financial suffocation. As Nigeria’s oil revenue is dwindling by the day, states are looking for avenues to bypass the monthly ritual of dole outs from the federal government. Enugu must think out of the box in the recruitment of its top leadership. To be tied and bogged down by the bogey of a humdrum and lackluster civil servant leadership is worse than the freezing of development. Enugu surely cannot survive as a civil service state moving forward, especially from 2023. It needs to attract investments to provide jobs for youths and further boost IGR.

The only hope for the Coal City State is for it to be run by an investment-savvy leader. In this wise, it is only those with deep connections in the business sector that can seize the gauntlet and totally evolve an entrepreneurial polity from the ashes of the state’s dependence on monthly doleout of the federal revenue. Entrepreneurs possess such ingenuity, the innovation and creativity to think outside the box and expand the economy of Enugu for the benefit of all. Certainly not a man whose mind and thoughts are frozen in the rigor-mortis of civil service and its obedience to order and bureaucratic process.

Rather than Ohaa who had been a civil servant all his life, forward-thinking, entrepreneurial-minded Enugu East gladiators like the Prince of Mburubu, Prince Lawrence Ozoemena Ezeh, a major player in civil engineering sector and notable philanthropist, Chief Uche Nnaji, a former elected senator and businessman with vast connections in places that matter, Barr Peter Mbah, a big player in the upstream sector, Captain Evarest Nnaji, a prominent airline operator, Frank Nweke Jr, the former Minister who later became the DG of Nigeria Economic Summit Group, all fit the bill. Certainly not a man whose thinking is circumscribed by the regimentation of the civil service.

What is also alien to Enugu’s political template is an aspirant who, ostensibly due to the humongous war chest at his disposal, had commenced, two years before election, a full blown gubernatorial campaign. Enugu had never seen such level of desperation. Again, when you look at the aspirant closely, one wonders whether Enugu is progressing or retrogressing. By his official age, he was 60 early this year when he finally retired from the civil service and by the time of the election in 2023, Odalije will be 62, post-retirement from the civil service. It is on record that Dr Chimaroke Nnamani, became the Enugu governor at the age of 39 years. Sullivan Chime was also governor at the age of 49 years while Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi became governor at 51 years. Are we going forward or backwards? Are there not younger people of intellect, energy, vibrancy, drive and hunger to transform the state from the East?

Recently, Ohaa doled out the sum of N20 million for the much hyped Enugu East Senatorial Rally with zoning as the battle cry. He was applauded for this generosity. Methinks that, rather than applaud this, the rally planning committee, if it had any scintilla of integrity, should have demanded where the money came from. Here was a man who had not done any job outside the civil service in the last 40 years or so and who has no known business address till today. We all know what the salaries of civil servants are at the state and federal levels. So where did he get such a humongous sum if not from plundering the finances of the state and federal governments? Is the EFCC still functioning at all or is it blind to the illicit funds being flaunted by the former civil servant? It hardly needs to be said that supporting such a man will be catastrophic to the finances of our beloved state. Enugu deserves better, zoning or no zoning.

Enebe is a lawyer. He writes from Enugu, Enugu state