BY DOMINIC KIDZU
Put away the tough talk and bombast, the flash champagne and glitterati. Forget the tokunbo cars and the usual motorcycles for a moment.
Just place Senator Jarigbe Agom and Senator Ben Ayade on a fair and square scale and tell yourself what you see. Can you not see a community asset and a fast guy? Can you not see a genuine leader and a dramatic gooble the gook?
Or just imagine for a moment that the universe forces you to make a compulsory choice between Jarigbe and Ayade, and you are blind from birth like a bat. So you run your fingers through their faces and bodice. Who would you chose, because blind eyes can also verily see.
Some choices are like day and night. Not really difficult to make. Even a thoroughly reformed and rejigged Ben Ayade, will still be Ben Ayade. Fast talk. Big grammar. Tall promises. A new dance style or two. Even a drop of tear or two as well. And the curtain is drawn on the stage.
All these would be farce. Just melodrama, to hoodwink and to befuddle. By far the biggest apple on the political dinning table is state governorship. If you couldn’t do anything with it, you couldn’t do anything with God’s throne either. Just take a frech leave and stay in bed forever. Because, as Nyesom Wike has taught us, if it didn’t de, it didn’t de.
In political office, what you really need is genuine desire and passion to assist, to change lives and to impact. If all you genuinely and passionately care about is the enrichment of yourself and your family, then, brother-man, you are at the wrong address. Just keep moving.
See what difference Governor Bassey Otu has made in just under three years as governor! Not show business, but real, purposeful grinding work at the forge. Dead bodies and tragedies have come back to life. Hope is restored and all his promises are steadily being kept. This is leadership.
Ayade left a gargantuan behemoth of dead projects behind his unfortunate reign. Broken promises still litter the floor of Cross River State as he faded away from the stage. Governmental systems and conventions were blatantly trampled upon until the locusts left the city.
What else does Ben Ayade want? By Jove this man has a lot of courage to still be able to do the double-shuffle and show his face around! Is he not the man who shut Cross Riverians out of the stadium for Governor Otu’s inauguration because he felt unsafe? When a leader begins to hide from the people then he has himself passed the verdict on his own reign.
So what has now changed outside his feeling of deja vu for the bright lights and awe that power brought him which he must now rue in many a lonesome night. All he ever wanted was money and he now should have it. If he wanted relevance then he should have tried to be a better governor. Be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it.
The people of Cross River North are not daft or ignorant. They will take the cars and bikes with a wry smile and move along, because they know on what side their bread is buttered. Senator Jarigbe Agom is the bread of life that every zone is praying to get a semblance of. He is the real deal. Don’t we know the contenders, pretenders and revisionists ?