Keen observers of events in Benue State would not be surprised at Governor Samuel Ortom’s declaration that he has been given red card by the All Progressives Congress APC. If such weighty statement pulled any surprise at all, it is in the innocuous occasion he chose to announce it.
Inaugurating a Special Adviser to the Bureau of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Jerome Torshimbe, Ortom told his audience, “As for party, I have been given red card and I’m outside the pitch. So if I have been given red card and I’m standing outside, I’m a free man. So I don’t know what will happen next; but I’m waiting. If approached, then I will tell the Benue people that I’m joining another football club”.
The governor’s choice of allegory of red card in a football match has been interpreted as a sign of having fallen out of favour with his party leadership on account of some infraction. What remains uncertain perhaps is at what point the red card was issued, the issuing authority and the infractions that attracted such a harsh penalty.
The issuing authority would not have been at issue since the umpires of a political party are known but for denials of such by the national chairman of the APC, Adams Oshiomhole. Last Thursday, he met with Ortom reassuring that the party will not let him go and that the APC has no red card in its cupboard and therefore cannot give what it does not have.
He alluded to disagreements involving a former governor of the state, Senator George Akume and expressed hope that he (Akume) also recognized the need for peace within the APC. Ortom unveiled the source of the red card when he said “I was given red card by a senator…but the leadership of the party told me the decision of the party leadership at the national level is superior to any individual and I think that is good enough”. The embattled governor appeared to have reversed himself when said though he was given red card, he is still flying the flag of the APC.
It would appear that Ortom is still keeping his cards open after the intervention of the APC national chairman. Before then, he had hobnobbed with the PDP leadership fuelling speculations of imminent defection. In the days ahead, his fate would depend on the fence mending efforts of the APC between him and Akume and the outcome of his negotiations with the PDP. Though none of the parties has come public with issues to contest, there is everything to suggest they have to do with the outcome of the last congresses of the party in the state.
Akume is said to be in control of the structures of the party. Given the above, it is difficult to fathom how Ortom can make it in the primaries if he no longer enjoys the confidence of his benefactor. That is the source of the red card. That was the reference when Ortom said a senator gave him a red card. That is also why Oshiomhole spoke of fence-mending between the two leaders. How far the party can go in stripping Akume of the party structures to make Ortom realize his second term ambition is a different kettle of fish altogether.
The reality on the ground especially following events of the last couple of weeks is that Ortom is undecided on whether to dump the party or remain in its fold. It will all depend on the cards placed before him by his party reassuring of the ticket for the 2019 elections. If he receives concrete assurances of that, he may remain in his party. But where the contrary happens, he is likely to sojourn elsewhere. Before now, he had dissolved his cabinet and sent packing all loyalists of Akume. All these will impose constraints in efforts to reconcile both of them as the issue of trust will count very seriously.
But even if Ortom is fully reconciled with Akume and his second term bid guaranteed, he is bound to face another huddle from a different quarter entirely. He will have to contend reconciling himself with the dominant feelings and sensibilities of the Benue people that have badly been ruptured by the insurgency of herdsmen.
His predicament has vicarious linkage to internal feelings of revolt within Benue State against the APC-controlled federal government’s indifference to their plight in the face of continued killings and despoliation of their ancestral lands by the herdsmen. In the last two years or so, Benue has seen the worst form of killings from the rampaging herdsmen.
Many communities have been sacked even as allegations of forced occupation of ancestral lands of the farming communities have been rife. Many, especially the most vulnerable have lost their lives in these recurring killings with the insurgents operating with an air of near invincibility. This year alone, hundreds of people including innocent women, children and the aged have been sent to their early graves in the most inhuman, despicable and dastardly manner by herdsmen who value cows more than human lives. Benue has been the theatre of the absurd in these atrocious killings, maiming, and despoliation of farming communities, places of worship.
In the face of this savagery, the reaction of the federal government has at best, remained tepid. Its inability to stop the killings and bring culprits to book has fuelled suspicion that it is complicit in the killings. Instead of rising to its statutory responsibility of maintenance of law and order, the government has sought to hide under nebulous excuses to rationalize the continued carnage.
Thus, we have seen officials of the government blaming the continued carnage on the enactment of anti-open grazing laws, blocking of grazing routes, climatic and environmental factors. But states that suffer the insurgency of the herdsmen rated by Global Terrorism Index as the fourth deadliest terrorist group in the world finger claims over land ownership as the oxygen that propels and sustain the conflicts. There have been copious claims by indigenous farmers that herdsmen are helped by security men to take possession and rename communities vacated by local farmers on account of the killings.
Ortom is one of the governors that implemented wholesale, the state’s version of the anti-open grazing law and has told whoever cares to listen that the state has no alternative to that law. He has more than any of his colleagues, raised the bar both within and outside the shores of this country on the unmitigated danger which the activities of the herdsmen pose to life and property in his state. He had said severally that he knows the killers and called for their arrest and prosecution but all to no avail. In this campaign against open grazing, he has in no small measure exposed the duplicity of the federal government in finding realistic solutions to the festering killings. A few months back, he accorded state burial to over 100 people killed by the herdsmen to the discomfort of the federal government.
A regime that has been fighting insecurity in several fronts with little success is bound to view with discomfort, the rising attention killings by herdsmen had come to assume through the protestations of the likes of Ortom. Not only has the federal government not hidden its strong aversion to the anti-open grazing law, its officials have publicly been pressurizing the states to modify them. They have even gone further to allege that conflicts between herders and farmers are sponsored by unnamed politicians to gain advantage.
Given the above, there is everything to indicate there may be some unseen hands in the current predicament of Ortom. If indeed Akume was able to oust him, cornering the structures of the party with a sitting governor standing akimbo, there should be more to it than ordinarily meets the eyes.
It conveys the governor as a toothless bulldog; an inconsequential in the political chess game of his state. There should be more to it than he made us to believe. There are extant sentiments within the Benue polity that are in conflict with the body language of the leadership of this country. The direction of such feelings is bound to rob off either positively or negatively on the political fortunes of the governor.