Edo 2016: Clowns Now In Search Of Crown -By Erasmus Ikhide

Seven plus years ago, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole became the governor of Edo State as a result of the degenerate and decadent state of affairs. His dynamic personality, the clarity of his mind, the catholicity of his ideas and his remarkable talents as an organiser and former union leader infused a new life and determination into the polity and the people’s hope to dream anew.

It’s left to Edo people to now tell whether Governor Oshiomhole has lost his illustrious name; become a shell of his admirable former self, dispirited by raw power or has become an intrepid tribune of social reengineering, change agent or out-and-out democrat! Whatever perceptions or views one holds of the comrade governor depends largely on the political divide one finds him/herself.

Today, Oshiomhole is one significant politician who has the same and equal popularity across the divides. Those who admire him and those who despise him do so with equal passion. The succession political battle by the two main political parties, the ruling APC and the opposition PDP will be prosecuted on Governor Oshiomhole’s failures or successes in that last seven and half years in office.

However, Governor Oshiomhole, undeniably, has enviable development records going for him. Since he assumed office in 2008, he has tackled the dearth of functional infrastructural facilities and basic amenities that had turned the state into a living hell. He has repositioned completely a scruffy political system where graft had become a pastime, and a dejected populace in dire need of purposeful leadership. He has restored sanity to a decapitated public service staffed by a disgruntled workforce; and the stone-aged educational system that was turning out ill-equipped individuals without the required productive capacities to contribute to the development of the state.

The Comrade Governor has resuscitated the lethargic health sector that left the sick at the mercy of charlatans, the health vendors who profit from the ignorance of help seekers. He has managed to contribute his quotas by buying hundreds of Hilux vehicles and communication gadgets for the Nigeria police to stem the tide of the mind-bending state of insecurity spurred by widespread cultism across the state. More than anything else, since 2008, Oshiomhole has striven to correct all the systemic woes that had bedeviled the state from its creation, performing feats that have confounded even his harshest critics.

But there is a snag on Governor Oshiomhole’s political empire. “One man, one vote” (or “one person, one vote”) is a name that has been used in many parts of the world where campaigns have arisen for universal suffrage. During the 20th-century period of decolonisation and the struggles for national sovereignty, from the late 1940s onwards this phrase became widely used in less developed countries where majority populations were seeking to gain political power in proportion to their numbers.

The phrase was used in this form in an important legal ruling in the United States related to voting rights; applying the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that state legislatures needed to redistrict in order to have congressional districts with roughly equal represented populations.

In 2012, Governor Adams Oshiomhole exhaustively dramatised the phrase in his reelection bid to draw a link between democracy and freedom of choice. He made the point then that democracy is a set of ideas and principles about freedom of choice, which consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. The point he was trying to make was that democracy is the institutionalization of freedom, which includes human rights; the right for the civil populace to freely elect their leaders in government and equality before the rules. He also meant to say that candidates in an election has his/her own Everest to climb without undue favouritism and manipulation.

Now, a great deal of the electorate are in an irritable mood on the governor’s moves to truncate the “One man one vote” mantras with his rumoured endorsement of Mr. Godwin Obaseki. The believe is that the less well-known Obaseki did not entertain governorship notion until Governor Oshiomhole drafted him into the race, thereby trusting his candidacy down of the APC party leadership and Edo people. There is the for the governor to clear his own name.

– Erasmus wrote in from Benin City