Rochas Okorocha, the governor of Imo State, has no doubt had a very long-standing association with Northern Nigeria. His profile says he grew up in Barkin Ladi, Jos, present-day Plateau State, where he is said to have begun to hawk groceries even before he reached his teens. Invariably, you could say that the North nurtured him. So, it is only natural that he should show gratitude as well as maintain his friendship with the North, especially for a man who lives with an undying obsession to rule Nigeria.
Long before he became the governor of Imo State in 2011, Okorocha was known to have occasionally organized some Igbo leaders to pay courtesy visits to prominent traditional rulers in the North, especially whenever his presidential ambition consumed the better part of him. He was also known to have extended his widely publicized philanthropic gestures to the North. For instance, as at 2011, two out of the five campuses of his Rochas Foundation College were located in the North (Kano and Jos), two in his home state of Imo, and one in Ibadan, Oyo State.
Like Tantalus, like Okorocha
But in his attempt to build new friendships in the North and maintain existing ones, Okorocha has behaved like the mythical figure Tantalus.
In Greek mythology, Tantalus, a son of Zeus and the nymph Plouto and the father of Pelops, Niobe and Broteas, was known to have been welcomed to Zeus’ table in Olympus, but he misbehaved by stealing ambrosia and nectar to bring back to his people, revealing the secrets of the gods. In order to pacify the gods, Tantalus offered up his son Pelops as a sacrifice. He cut up Pelops, boiled him and served him up in a banquet for the gods. But the gods, aware of the gruesome nature of the menu, did not touch the offering; only Demeter, distraught by the loss of her daughter Persephone, absentmindedly ate part of the boy’s shoulder. As a punishment for his act, Tantalus was cursed with eternal deprivation of nourishment, with a threatening stone, like the one that Sisyphus is condemned to perpetually roll up a hill, towering over his head. Though standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, he could not reach for the fruit as each time he tried, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp, and whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any.
Though he rode to power on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), a party which he in 2011 described as an Igbo identity and culture, to the extent of urging all Igbo to join the party to be identified, Okorocha quickly dumped the party and joined the coalition that eventually emerged as the All Progressives Congress (APC). In other words, like Tantalus, he sacrificed APGA, which by his own admission is the identity of the Igbo people, in pursuit of a personal presidential ambition.
But just as the gods rejected Tantalus’ sacrifice, Okorocha’s sacrifice failed to please the insatiable gods of APC as he was roundly rejected at the party’s 2015 presidential primaries.
The 2015 elections
But like an obsessed worshipper, Okorocha during the 2015 election campaigns, against popular sentiments in the South-East, again made frantic efforts to sell Buhari’s candidature to Imo people and indeed the entire zone, even to the point of giving Buhari an Igbo middle name “Okechukwu”. He promised the Igbo that voting Buhari and APC was a direct ticket to heaven. Pundits add that he must have followed it up with monetary incentives. Though Buhari won the election eventually, garnering reasonable votes in the South-East to consolidate his victory, the overall results showed that Okorocha’s tactics failed as Igbo people staunchly rooted for the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) Goodluck Jonathan. It could be said that the much result Buhari got from especially Imo was a result of Okorocha’s dogged efforts.
Has Buhari appreciated this immense sacrifice? The answer, as they say, is blowing in the wind. Suffice it to say that during Buhari’s visit to Imo State shortly after his victory at the polls, he told the Igbo that they remain strong partners in the development of the nation.
“I am here to thank you very much for at very difficult circumstances, you stood by the APC and you stood by me…. Imo is very strategic and this is the sixth time I will be coming to Imo. I am overwhelmed by your governor, Rochas Okorocha, for his tenacity of purpose. I have watched him fight tooth and nail to see that Imo people have a level playing field to vote for the party of their choice,” Buhari said.
Subsequent events, however, have showed that President Buhari had his tongue in his cheeks when he uttered these seeming words of appreciation. He would eventually make it clear, in faraway United States, that he would not treat those who gave him 97 percent votes the same way as those who gave him a paltry 5 percent.
‘It’s the fault of the Igbo’
But Okorocha, like Tantalus before him, is ever ready to offer up his own in order to make some angry gods happy. So, when his ruling APC schemed the South-East out of the principal offices in the National Assembly, he quickly rose in the party’s defence, saying the “unholy act” exhibited by political leaders in the South-East during the elections robbed the zone of the opportunity to produce either the Senate president or the House of Representatives’ speaker as all the National Assembly seats in the zone went to PDP in the March 28, 2015 elections.
“The South East is entitled to either the Senate president or the speaker of the Federal House. But as I speak to you now, because of the unholy act of last Saturday they (Igbo leaders) have not been able to give us any ranking member of the Senate or the Federal House,” he said in Owerri at a rally organised by the South East APC to celebrate Buhari’s victory.
“You cannot be a Senate president or speaker unless you are somebody who has been there before. It was our plan that Osita Izunaso should go to the Senate, Ngige should go to Senate. Gentlemen, the truth is that one of them should have been Senate president of Nigeria. But our people, in their myopic thinking, in the smallness of their brain, could not see the light and today this act of theirs has denied Ndigbo the Senate president; this act has denied Ndigbo the speaker of the Federal House,” he added.
He had also further glorified his Northern gods by claiming that political leaders in the North do not play the kind of politics being exhibited by South-East leaders, even insisting that Buhari won the election in Imo State but was rigged out.
When President Buhari made his first appointments in July 2015, not a few Igbo saw the appointments as tilted in favour of the North and against the South, specifically the Igbo. But again, Okorocha defended Buhari, blaming the Igbo for their travails.
Alfred Ononugbo, his special assistant and Lagos liaison officer, at a press conference to announce a solidarity rally and grand reception in honour of Governor Okorocha in Lagos, told the people of the South-East region to be patient with Buhari, saying the administration needed time to carefully consider those he wished to work with so as to make the right choices.
“I think we should allow the Buhari administration find its feet. The administration is studying the situation of the country, because the APC met a totally broken-down infrastructure and system in the country,” Ononugbo said.
“Our major problem in this part of the world is that we are too hasty in judging the Buhari administration that has barely spent three months that it’s discriminating against Ndigbo. That is not correct. In a country of 170 million, if barely 17 people have got appointments, I don’t know how we want to assess that. We are not in a hurry; we have no fear and doubt in Buhari. We trust the man we have elected as the president of Nigeria,” he added.
But Osita Okechukwu, then South-East spokesman of APC, had quickly countered Okorocha, asking him to “take responsibility for Igbo exclusion in the appointments rather than passing the buck to Ndigbo”.
Aligning with Okechukwu, the South-East PDP leadership also blamed Okorocha for the fate of the Igbo in the Buhari government. In a statement signed by Regis Uwakwe, publicity secretary of PDP, South-East, the party said Okechukwu was right in the blame it apportioned to Okorocha as he was clearly the problem of Ndigbo in APC.
“It is on record that Okorocha, while campaigning for his party APC after he had dumped the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the platform that made him governor, promised Ndigbo that he would take them to the ‘mainstream’ and ‘centre of power’ immediately APC wins the presidential elections. Unfortunately, he has failed today to take them not even to the periphery of the ‘mainstream’ nor near the ‘centre of power’, judging by President Muhammadu Buhari’s total exclusion of Ndigbo from his kitchen cabinet,” the statement said.
“Instead of apologising to Ndigbo, Governor Okorocha is now telling Ndigbo to blame themselves. What an irony! Ndigbo beware! We know subsequently that South-East states are entitled to a ministerial nomination each, constitutionally. We also know that it is not a favour. It has been severally said by close associates that the president appointed into his kitchen cabinet only those that he could trust. Then it follows that amongst all the leaders of APC in the entire South-East, including HE Ogbonnaya Onu, Senator Chris Ngige, Osita Izunaso, Chief George Muoghalu, Chief Festus Odimegwu, Hon. Emeka Nwajiuba, etc, none could qualify to be trusted?”
On Okorocha’s claim that he would have given Ndigbo the Senate president had they elected an APC senator, the South-East PDP asked what he did with the two House of Representatives seats his party captured in the South-East.
“The principal position of deputy whip was zoned to the South-East by the new leadership of the House of Representatives. What happened? Before Nigerians, his party’s national leader lobbied the powers that be in his party to garner the position of majority leader, inclusive of the deputy speakership as his zone already had, thereby denying the South-East the deputy whip! It should be noted that this is the first time since the return of democracy that a principal officer of the House of Representatives has not come from the South-East zone,” the party said in the statement.
“The entire Ndigbo of the South-East and South-South know the party that has protected their interest, appointed their sons and daughters into very prominent positions, and also given them opportunities in the mainstream of power politics in Nigeria. That party is the PDP. It is known that the South-East is a PDP zone and very tiny interlopers and Nollywood politicians would know their end come 2019,” it added.
Charity begins abroad
Just recently, at a ceremony marking part of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the creation of Imo State, Okorocha announced plans to establish the Rochas Foundation College in Bauchi State in order to help the poor and less privileged in that state to get quality education. It was also reported that Governor Mohammed Abubakar of Bauchi State has already issued him with a certificate of occupancy to quicken the actualisation of the project.
This is even as workers and pensioners in Imo State have not been paid for several months. Last Wednesday, pensioners in the state trooped into the streets of Owerri to protest non-payment of their pensions and gratuities running into upwards of 36 months. A particular picture trending on social media shows a nurse trying frantically to resuscitate one of the protesters, a man who must have been over 75 years old, who had collapsed in the course of the protest.
While Nasir el-Rufai, Kaduna State governor, has hailed him as “the Nostradamus of the South East” who saw tomorrow and joined the APC for the betterment of the Igbo, many Igbo people see Okorocha as a naïve politician who does not understand the politics of Nigeria, adding that however he tries, he would never be able to win the confidence of the North.
Meanwhile, Okorocha’s announcement that he would build a college for the poor in Bauchi has continued to generate opprobrium, with many wondering why the governor’s charity should be felt more abroad than at home. Recall that apart from the two campuses of the Rochas Foundation College located in Imo State (one in Owerri and one in Ogboko, Okorocha’s hometown), the college has no presence elsewhere in the entire South-East.
When the news broke on Nairaland, many Nigerians who reacted wondered whether the governor was truly an Igbo man. A commenter who simply identified himself as Histemple said Okorocha (whom he renamed Okorohausa) “is the only governor of a state from another tribe”. Some also asked whether he had finished helping the poor in Igboland before extending such help to the North, arguing that there were so many poor people in Imo State who needed that gesture more. Some said he wanted to finish Imo budget on the Northerners so that they would vote him as Nigeria’s president in 2019, adding, however, that even if he should build duplex for every Northerner, when the time comes, the Northerners would not look his way as long as he was neither a Muslim nor of the Hausa/Fulani stock. “He still can never rule Nigeria,” said HurricaneChris.
“Frankly, I see this as misplaced priority. In a depression like this, rather than making your state more competitive you’re swallowing Panadol for Bauchi headache. Well, let me say what most people want to hear; Good job, Mr Governor,” said Cyph98(m).
“Using the lean resources of Imo State to build a school in Bauchi? At least a hundred primary schools in Owerri would have gladly and prudently utilized the money that Okorocha wants to waste there, but what do I know? When maga wan pay please receive it with open arms,” wrote RZArecta(m).
Grazing Reserve Bill by another name
But the sorest point in Okorocha’s drive to maintain friendship with the North at the detriment of his people so far has been the so-called ‘Bill for a Law to Establish Agricultural Estates and Farm Settlements in the Three Geopolitical Zones of Imo State to Increase, Improve and Enhance the Production of Food and Cash Crops, Livestock, Poultry, Fishery and Dairy and for Other Matters Connected Therewith, 2016’, which, though purportedly sponsored by a member of the State House of Assembly, is believed by many to bear the governor’s insignia.
At a time Nigerians, especially in Central and Southern parts of the country, have vehemently rejected the innocuous Grazing Reserve Bill in the National Assembly, calling for government to establish ranches instead, analysts wonder why a similar bill by another name should be smuggled into the Imo State House of Assembly, with so-called honourable members debating it.
Onwuasoanya FCC Jones, a public affairs analyst, laments that despite desperate, well-coordinated and very loud denials, rebuttals and disclaimers from the Imo State House of Assembly on the one hand and the sponsor of the bill, Uju Onwudiwe, and her aides on the other, what the parties involved have succeeded in doing is to allegedly tinker with the title of the bill to deceive the gullible, while the pathetically obnoxious contents have remained the same.
“I never believed any Igbo, no matter the incentives, would accept to smuggle in a bill that intends to snatch people’s lands from them and possibly give those lands to strangers, who may eventually attempt to keep those lands for themselves and possibly eject or at least attempt to evict the original owners of the land from here,” he said.
“Should this House of Assembly led by Rt. Hon. Acho Ihim do the unthinkable by passing this highly vesicant piece of poison called a bill, then they would have made it clear before the whole world that they are ready to sacrifice the future of an entire people and sell Imo people off into slavery for the smallest peanut,” he added.
Summing up the bill, which he said is dangerous in all shades and angles and even more toxic than the much-hated Grazing Reserve Bill, Jones said its major targets are:
“To forcefully take away most arable lands from ordinary people of Imo State and either sell or give them away to the cronies of those in government.
“To monopolize farming by ensuring that only a select group of highly placed individuals are allowed to farm on a large scale.
“To destroy subsistence farming through which many families in the state survive.
“To allow the Fulani cattle-herders to have unfettered access into our land and in future try to evict us from our land.
“To Islamize Imo State, by bringing in the Fulani and Hausa herdsmen who will have equal rights and access and even more opportunities, as they will be in possession of most, if not all, the productive lands in the state.
“This bill if passed into law will ultimately destroy farming in the state and endanger food security the more as most of these lands when acquired by the government and leased or sold to wealthy individuals will most certainly be converted to residential buildings, hotels and even malls that will have nothing to do with farming. This will ultimately destroy the agricultural sector and make the people die of hunger.
“This bill when ultimately passed will deprive the ordinary people of the state ownership of their lands as the only thing needed for government to take over these lands is for the proposed Agricultural and Farm Settlements Agency to mark those lands as productive and the government will quickly take them over. The Land Use Act already leaves a lot of loopholes for that.”
Quoting Part Two, section 5 of the noxious bill, Jones said it establishes the reason for rightly terming the bill a Grazing Reserve Bill.
The said section, according to Jones, reads: “The Agricultural Estates and Farm Settlements when established shall maintain operational offices in Orlu, Owerri and Okigwe geo-political zones which shall coordinate operations of the farm settlements for the purpose of the production of food and cash crops, livestock, poultry, fishery and dairy and for the employment and empowerment of women and youths.”
He said the purported sponsor of the bill, Uju Onwudiwe, perhaps believes that Imolites are not intelligent enough to know when they are being led to the slaughter.
“When has Imo State become a dairy producing centre or state? If Uju Onwudiwe was being sincere, she would have come out plain to tell us that she was proposing a grazing reserve or cattle ranches across the state, instead of smuggling that in the name of dairy products. How do we get dairy if not from cattle? Which people are mostly known for their cattle rearing lifestyle? The Hausa/Fulani. The bill simply intends to snatch our lands from us and cede them to some individuals from outside the state,” he said.
He further said the bill’s proposal of a Public Private Partnership was another reason to believe that the bill, as confusingly titled as it is, was actually a Grazing Bill targeted at snatching majority of the lands owned by Imo people and giving them to some of the governor’s cronies and relatives.
“The governor, we are fully aware, grew up in the North and has most of his friends from that part of the country and he considers his Northern friends and political compatriots more valuable than his friends and compatriots from this part of the country,” Jones said.
“A good number of the concession and privatization exercises carried out since the coming of Okorocha as governor have benefitted his friends from the North. While his men and his image makers have laboured most vigorously to refute the allegation that some of his friends from Kaduna have had Imo State hospitals conceded to them in one of the most bizarre and veiled privatization exercises ever carried out in the history of the state, there are few Imolites who have bought these denials,” he alleged.
Jones further said the proposed bill was a contradiction of the government’s clear stance on reducing the involvement of government in the running of most public services.
“Governor Owelle Rochas Okorocha has privatized more agencies and parastatals than any other governor in Nigeria, and he was recently quoted as saying that he would not mind privatizing the Imo State University to ensure more effective service delivery. Is it not ridiculous or do I say insulting that the governor who privatized a service as essential as water provision would be toying with the idea of getting the government involved in agricultural business which is mostly a private business in all parts of the world?” he queried.
He added that if the sponsors of the bill were truly keen on making the agricultural sector boom in Imo and enhance the chances of food security for the people, they should go the way of lending support to farmers in the state and providing them with the necessary facilities for their agricultural businesses, instead of coming to grab the peoples’ lands.
“If Hon. Uju Onwudiwe and her friends in the House are keen on pursuing legislations that will guarantee food security and agricultural boom for our people, they should pass a motion on the floor of the House compelling the government to invest more in encouraging individuals to go into farming, while providing the necessary facilities and support to those already in the agricultural business. Government should subsidize seedlings, farm equipment and other things that will help farmers prosper in their businesses, while providing quick and unsecured loans to them,” Jones said.
Okorocha and Tantalus’ fate
Political analysts say Okorocha’s ultimate obsession, for which he is making so much sacrifice, for which he is eternally serving as the Northern voice in the South-East, is to be the president of Nigeria. They add, however, that given the way Nigerian politics is configured, and given that a man who is not trusted by his people can hardly be trusted by outsiders, however he tries, Okorocha may never realise his ambition of becoming Nigeria’s president. As in the case of Tantalus, the insatiable gods may well despise his sacrifices and, ultimately, perpetually deny him of the nourishment which he so much yearns for – the presidency.
