By Gabriel Atumeyi
I was in Owerri a fortnight ago, and a party man I have known since 2019 took me out for an evening walk. I had wanted to taste some spicy suya somewhere around the metropolis and then settle down for a bottle of beer before delving into politics — our usual passmeal. But when I asked about the governor, he didn’t hesitate to throw the topic under the bus. It appeared he was simply tired of talking about the man, the way a husband avoids discussing a wife who has embarrassed him in public, and he just shook his head and chewed.
It is the mood in Imo today. The base has quietly gone home to sleep like a snail observing the dry season in estivation. It seals itself behind its epiphragm and shuts down. This is the mood within Uzodimma’s camp.
Last week, when the Federal High Court in Abuja handed the Imo West ticket to Rochas Okorocha, I expected fire from the Uzodimma camp and got nothing beyond a press release or two and the familiar assurance that the judgment was being studied. Okorocha’s people, by contrast, were all over the place, which tells you something about the two camps, since in politics the side that speaks first owns the story and the side that is still studying is usually the side with no one willing to speak.
That evening Okorocha turned up on Channels Television’s Politics Today, and the man walked into that studio like a boxer handed back his title by the referee, barely able to keep the music out of his feet. He was all over himself, expansive in the way of a man who had held his breath for many years and was finally permitted to exhale, and the shade came out of him in buckets. He called Uzodimma an Aso Rock boy, a man with no base at home, a tenant in Government House who had forgotten that power in Imo is borrowed from the people and returned at will. He said it with that Okorocha smirk, the one that has infuriated half the state for a decade, the smirk of a man who knows he has been handed a loaded microphone and intends to use every bullet. He spoke of the Senate as though it were his personal property, retrieved by court order, and he invited the governor to come and contest against him if he had the courage, and the presenter could barely get a word in.
By morning the talk in Owerri had moved from whether Okorocha deserved the ticket to whether Uzodimma ever had a home. Where were the governor’s men? I mean his kitchen cabinet and, of course, his foot soldiers. Nothing, silence, a scattering of blame and a bit of damage control.
The Aso Rock boy was called out on national television and his people were at home, demoralised, unpaid, watching the man insult their principal and having neither the platform, the energy nor the incentive to reply. One aide I reached by phone that night told me he had seen the programme and had no instruction to respond, and that even if he had, there was no budget for a media counter-offensive.
Let me state this that Okorocha is not the answer, because the man was governor for eight years and senator for four and the road to his own community remains a disgrace, and Imolites know it, which is why they grumbled about the judgment. But grumbling about Okorocha is not the same as fighting for Uzodimma, and therein lies the governor’s real trouble, since his own people would rather watch him suffer than see his rival win, and when your base is neutral between you and your enemy you have already lost something considerable.
The blame for this rests with the governor himself, and I have said it before and will say it again: Hope Uzodimma is the architect of his own headache. Begin with the media. The Commissioner for Information is a good man, I am told, and a personal friend of the governor, but this is a war and you do not send a friend to a war, you send a soldier, and the man is analogue in a digital fight, timid in a season that demands audacity. The party’s Publicity Secretary has a PhD now, and congratulations to him, but a PhD is not a microphone, and he cannot command a room, hold a camera or trend a hashtag. The other handlers are demoralised for so many reasons, including the motivation work. They sit in offices watching freelancers do their job for nothing and receive no credit, so the governor’s roads and flyovers stand there with nobody telling the story, while Okorocha and Wike’s people tell it for them. Wike especially, because that man’s media machine can sell sand to the desert, whereas Uzodimma’s men cannot sell a flyover to a man stuck in traffic beneath it.
Okorocha needs one television appearance and the whole state is talking about Aso Rock boy by breakfast. Uzodimma has a hundred completed roads and the state is talking about Okorocha. In a media age the man who controls the microphone controls the memory of the people, and the man who controls the memory of the people controls the ballot. The governor has built concrete. The former governor has built narrative. Concrete does not vote. Narrative does.
Then there is the matter of appointments, and months after names were compiled for advisers, senior special assistants and board members, those names remain in a file while the men who delivered their wards sit at home and wait. Waiting is dangerous, because a man who waits too long begins to think, and when he thinks he remembers that he carried the governor on his back and the governor forgot him. I also hear the governor interferes in party nominations, picks his favourites and runs the local governments from Government House, which may be his prerogative, but you cannot run everything and then complain that nobody stands with you, since men you never empowered will not bleed for you. Somebody asked me the other day who the men standing with Hope Uzodimma are, and I laughed, because I could not name three, and I am not his enemy, so imagine what his enemies are saying.
Okorocha, whatever else may be said of him, has never lacked for men. His camp is loud, visible and shamelessly loyal, and even those who despise him will concede that he knows how to keep a following. Uzodimma has the machinery of incumbency and the silence of a deserted cathedral. He has the commissioner’s office and no commissioner’s voice. He has the party secretariat and no party chorus. He has the Government House and no government messengers. A governor can survive many things in Nigeria, but he cannot survive the discovery that his own appointees are afraid to speak his name in public.
Yet it is not too late, because politics is a game of tomorrow, and the governor can still call his people, pay the handlers, appoint the advisers, free the party and bring in people who know how to fight in the media and let them fight. He has the roads and the projects, and what he lacks is soldiers to tell the story, or he can keep studying the judgment while Okorocha’s people eat his lunch. The suya man in Owerri is still waiting, and so is the base.
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