Today, July 19, the vice-presidential candidate of the PDP, Peter Obi turns 58. Except to his business partners, when he became the governor of Anambra State, he was relatively unknown, but through his deeds, he sought to be worthy to be known.
When we talk of the remembrance of history, we are not concerned with the remembrance of man’s follies and crimes, but the encouraging remembrance of the acts of generative souls.
Obi will certainly be remembered for being the first governor to reclaim his mandate through the courts. Before him, Nigeria had elections as rigged as the last election. The common belief was that nobody ever recovered his mandate through the courts. With this mind-set, all those that went to court did so for formality sake without believing in its capacity to be used as an agent for the destruction of the old myrrh. Flowing from his nature, when he contested the gubernatorial election, he went to court. Even when everybody else, including his party abandoned him, he forged ahead. The moment the first judgement was delivered in his favour, they all ran back and as usual, through the press, started claiming the victory was as a result of their industry. Peter Obi’s victory changed public perception about the delivery of justice in Nigeria. He will be remembered for this and nobody will take it away from him.
As governor, Obi set another record by his obstinacy in insisting that governance is a serious business. It was an irony of history that the House of Assembly led by Hon. Mike Balonwu, with the active connivance of those that were supposed to be Obi’s friends, got him illegally impeached. Undaunted, Obi persevered. Though discouraged from seeking his return, he was reinstated by the courts. He is always prompted by the character of his aims, helped by the fact that he knows what to fight and want to forget. Thereafter, many people that suffered a similar fate followed his example. Certainly, history will remember him as the stubborn governor that fought against forces massed against him and was able to return from impeachment, thus strengthening the rule of law beyond measure. In this sense, Obi is a progressive force, establishing political stability, restoring the rule of law, disciplining characters, ending and mitigating political recklessness and re-assuring us on the beauties of democracy.
History records the follies of mankind; it also records the morality of the age and can tell us the worst leaders the world has encountered. Describing the morality of a particular leader, a historian conveyed it in a compact sentence: “He liked risqué stories and told them beyond compare”. History also transmitted the deeds of good leaders to us as well, including those that gave stimulating examples in morals and manners. History will certainly remind us that as the governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi shunned all manners of intrigues. He offered to Anambra people morals that were worthy of emulation. He “inherited” over 15 guest houses scattered around the state and closed all of them; only recognizing the comfort of the lodge, where his wife’s reign was supreme. In the eight years of his government, we did not hear of liaisons unbecoming of His Excellency. This essentially has to do with his psychological make. His mind, either through nature or pressure of work has the defects of romantic imagination, but has the realistic stimulus of daily battling with ideas crying for implementation.
Against the practice of the time, which returned after he left office, Obi as the governor did not set out to deliberately deceive the people of the state. He only said and promised what he would do and followed the dictates of his independent spirit. The propensity of men that govern the state to lie and deceive was long captured by Nikita Khrushchev. Shall we sample him: “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers”. Without compunction, some promise the people what they want to hear and thereafter engage in all manner of subterfuges to sustain the deception. History will certainly remember Peter Obi as different: he did not tell lies and soon the people came to appreciate his openness. Planning was his forte. Before he uttered a word and what he would do or not, he would sit down and examine the finances of the state. He knew the capacity of the state at all times: what was possible and what was not possible because he was orderly. You could feel it even at long range that the unity and hierarchy of his desires or those of the populace imposed a clarifying and directive order upon his ideas, actions, policies and government.
Education! Every school boy was familiar with the decay of the education sector in Anambra State. You cannot build a nation if you do not build the people. Obi came into office not looking for what some people mouth as signature projects that often leads to misplacement of values. Some leaders, at the state and federal levels, had this in mind and ended up building bridges that led to nowhere or even monuments that one can at best describe as prompted by brave idiocy. Obi understands the place of education in the advancement of civilization. One of the tasks awaiting man is his ability to gather his heritage and transmit it to the future generation and this is part of the fruits of education. Obi met Anambra State that was bleeding, a state that always took 27th position among other states in external examinations. By the time he finished with his educational revolution, Anambra State was taking first position. Obi first funded education in his first and second year and did not see corresponding result. Thereafter, he was convinced that something was fundamentally wrong. This was how he returned schools to the church and thereafter committed over N10 billion to schools in the state, including those returned and managed by the church.
Is it not instructive that many years after he left Anambra State, his projects keep attracting awards to the state? When Regina Pacis School at Onitsha conquered the world in Technovison Competition, the manager of the school easily traced that conquest to Peter Obi.
If we stretch his prudence to elastic limits, we shall accommodate the precedence he set in the history of Anambra State. For the first time, a governor left N75 billion to his successor; with the banks and details too clear to admit of any doubt. Though he recruited some people into the Civil Service, he left their two-year salaries in the vaults to avoid encumbering his successor. Some of the federal projects that delayed in starting because he wanted to get the permission of the federal government as required had the money for their completion set aside. What else shall history ask of a man?
Ndi Igbo have often been criticized for what some consider their noisy envy of one another, the bitterness of their political factions and disputes. As the chairman of the South East Governors’ Forum, Peter Obi made it clear that the era of “Igbo enwe Eze” (Igbos have no king) should be considered in the past and not in the future. He completely deferred to the leadership of Ohaneze Ndi Igbo on the understanding that we should not remain a nation of misanthropes. Under him, Igbo leaders met regularly to review the state of the nation and present a common front. He was fond of saying that nations must forge internal unity in order to fight external threats.
It is an incontestable fact that Obi also left his mark in the area of infrastructure. Under him, Anambra State had the best network of roads in the country. It is not the creation of the e-rats we talked about; the Federal Ministry of Works made that pronouncement and everybody that visited Anambra State under him testified to that.
Before Obi became governor, no health institution in the state was accredited by relevant authorities. Before he left office, he had 12 health institution accredited, including two hospitals: General Hospital, Onitsha and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu Teaching Hospital, Awka. The case of the teaching hospital is particularly interesting. The state university offered medicine as a course without any teaching hospital; thus could not graduate her students. Obi set up a committee headed by Professor Frank Akpuaka and they came up with modalities for the establishment of the teaching hospital, which Obi delivered within time and it is as he left it. This is one of his greatest legacies that will not evade the scrutiny of history.
- Obienyem is an aide to ex-governor Peter Obi.
