Those with abiding sense of history will remember the beginning for Deacon Udom Emmanuel as governor of Akwa Ibom State. I remember full well how it was in those early days. Before the Supreme Court judgment and in its immediate aftermath, Emmanuel was the loneliest man that ever lived in the Hilltop Mansion, the seat of government in Uyo. No one wanted to be associated with the new governor. No one of political weight in the state would congratulate or visit him. He would be the first governor in the state that was treated by most of the political elite as a leper.
Udom Emmanuel was the very definition of a political orphan; he was seen as a misbegotten governor, given the reprobate manner of his emergence.
He so felt the emptiness of his scorned elevation and the near zero solidarity of the people with his governorship that he began to throw around false claims of solidarity and congratulatory messages, which were routinely repudiated by those alleged to have sent them. In fact, the blasphemous coinage ‘divine mandate’ with which Udom characterizes his ascension to power, according to those in the inner circle of the administration at the time, was a pugnacious riposte to the near total rejection of the improbable governor.
For a long time the elite and most men of conscience in the state stayed away. Emmanuel was thrashing around for support that was not forthcoming.
Over time, however, Emmanuel used the instrumentality of hunger—a well-known weapon of coercion—to extract support. For a state where government is everything Emmanuel was in a pole position to command political behaviour through patronage. The urbane architect and well-known politician, Ezekiel Nya-Etok, gave life to this public view of the governor in a recent tribute to NsimaEkere, the state APC governorship candidate, where he testified to the support he received from Ekere over a federal consultancy job, despite their political differences at the time, contrasting same with his experience with Governor Emmanuel in the following words, “For a man to put the ultimate good of his people far and above his personal ambition is something that must be commended. It definitely speaks volumes of his person and character.
“What makes this more ‘touching’ to me is the extent to which I have begged to be paid for the professional service I rendered in the last administration, which Governor Udom Emmanuel has treated with the worst ignominy—notwithstanding that I was one of his greatest advocates, and have since NEVER approached him for any form of appointment nor project patronage (Contract)”.
That is a live experience. Emmanuel used patronage—the reverse of which is hunger—to extract involuntary support from politicians who had strong moral grounds and other reasons to be disdainful of his government.
The strong arms tactics worked up to a point. That is the nature of coercion. It can be effective only up to a point. Once that threshold is reached, resistance sets in and then the inevitable bailing out begins.
Udom Emmanuel is facing the bailing out phase now. Since the beginning of the year, Emmanuel’s supporters and political family members have departed in droves. In the last few months, no fewer than seven of his advisers have left in a huff, tossing in the governor’s face complaints of deprivation, denial and discrimination. Those who have voted with their feet are Dr. Anthony Usoro, senior special assistant on demographic planning; Barr Chris Okorie, special assistant on electoral matters; Elder IbangaEtang, special assistant on project monitoring; Mr AnietieEbe, special assistant on project monitoring; Barr MfonUdeme, special assistant on electoral matters; Mr Joe Iniodu, special assistant on media; and Mr IdorenyinEsikot, special assistant on small and medium scale enterprises. One of the aides who resigned warned of an exodus before the elections. House of Assembly members have also left; and so have some commissioners.
The most tectonic departure to hit the Udom Emmanuel administration convulsed the political landscape in in the state in August when the immediate past governor of the state and Mr Emmanuel’s political backbone, Senator GodswillAkpabio, walked out and joined the APC. Emmanuel’s inner circle saw Akpabio’s defection to the APC as a declaration of war, prompting the director-general of the governor’s re-election campaign organization, Air Commodore IdongesitNkanga (rted), to advise the governor to raise an ‘army’ for imminent war.
Since Akpabio left the PDP for the APC, entire PDP political structures in a majority of local council areas in the state have declared for the APC. Key politicians across the state, including a former deputy governor, former senators, a retired deputy inspector general of police, have all recoiled from the current state administration and its party, the PDP, to embrace the APC.
Udom Emmanuel is deserted. Affliction has arisen a second time for the deacon. The blizzard of political orphanage has come full circle for a governor whose shenanigans have worn out, and who no longer enjoys the shelter of a political godfather.
The political talking points and teachable moment from the fate that has befallen Udom Emmanuel hold a deep message for politicians and leaders of all hues: Performance is the only enduring rampart that guarantees survival even when a godfather departs.
Udom Emmanuel has not performed and the people know he has not, which is a tribute to the limit of propaganda, sadly missed by the coterie of his courtiers on social media. The governor’s lacklustre run had been the subject of the whisper network in the ruling party in the state and the focal point of the opposition’s criticism of the governor until last December when it became a state-wide chant following Senator Akpabio’s still-reverberating “All is not well” statement.
To be fair, Emmanuel is not the first politician with a dumb record at election time. I remember former President Goodluck Jonathan admitting before an assembly of Akwa Ibom people at the GodswillAkpabio Stadium in Uyo in 2015 that he had done nothing for the state, then apologized and asked for a fresh start. The point, however, is that Mr Emmanuel is different in a critical respect. The childlike sincerity of the Jonathan accounting is absent in what Udom Emmanuel is telling the state. He is not accepting his failure but making up achievements that cannot be collaborated by any objective evaluation.
This is part of what has set up the centrifugal field around the governor, repelling supporters and aides alike. This in part is why the Udom Emmanuel administration is being shorn off support across the state, thereby leaving the governor as a political orphan for the second time in his four-year stint at the Hilltop Mansion.
- Jimmy, a communication strategist, lives in Lagos.