Laughable reinvention

Hardball

Now that Edo State Governor Godwin Obaseki has left the party that brought him to power, and joined the party that had been opposed to him and his administration, he seems to have lost his sense of history, if he ever had a sense of history.

After failing to get the support of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for his re-election ambition, he jumped to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) where he struck a deal that favoured his re-election aspiration. Suddenly, he forgot his history.   Before he became governor in 2016, he was the Chairman of the Edo State Economic and Strategy Team (EST) inaugurated by the immediate past governor of the state, Adams Oshiomhole, in 2009. For seven years, he occupied that position in the Oshiomhole administration. He was also the Chairman of Tax Assessment Review Committee for Edo State Internal Revenue Service (TARC), and the Committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).

In other words, there was no reason for him to feel that he was not in the right party.  Indeed, there was no reason for him to leave APC until the party gave him a reason to leave.

In his new political party, he wants to give the impression that there was nothing to be happy about in his old party. In other words, he is trying to rewrite his political history. Of course, he enjoyed happy times in his former party before the sad times forced him to exit.    When he spoke at the Abuja secretariat of the PDP on June 27, at a ceremony to endorse him as the party’s governorship candidate, he said ridiculous things, all in an effort to erase his political past.

Obaseki, who spoke for himself and his deputy, Philip Shuiabu, said: “It was only when we entered the house (PDP) that we realised that this was the house we should have been in the first instance.

“Because we now saw that the values in the house are the values we cherish and the values we lived for; values of justice, values of law and order, values of care for our people, putting the people first.

“These are the values we have always been in pursuit of, which we found in this new house in which we have been graciously accommodated…In our hours of tribulation, when we were pushed out in the rains and storm from our political party, you came out with that huge umbrella to give us cover and shelter.”

There is no doubt that he will say more laughable things to reinvent his history as the September Edo State governorship election approaches. But Obaseki’s denial of history cannot change history.