My friend Ezugwu Okike apart from being a beautiful writer with persuasive skills have always had a profound desire for the ideal. A lot of writers do. I too did. But between idealism and realism, we will always concede the immutability of the superiority of the later, as all things can never be equal. No society has ever been ideal. None will ever be. So, having realized that, I have long concerned myself with the reality around me, much more than I do with the impractical things one can be forever lost in its unhelpful revelries and wishful thinking.
So, in looking at our politics, I am rather more realistic and practical, than dreaming of a never happening ideal world, where “all things are equal”, which is a manner of saying as things ought to be, but never are. And coming closer to the subject of Okike’s writing with the title, POPULISM; WHY EKWEREMADU MATTERS, one can see how people like Senator Ike Ekweremadu, in shaping the inescapable dystopian reality of our current political environment, cannot represent the ideal nor the repair of the present, as Okike idealizes. This could happen, neither today nor in any near future, especially through his (Ike’s) self serving disruptiveness within the political order he was part of it’s foundation and enthronement. He had neither repented nor undergone any genuine transformation espousing any known progressive ideology.
In this context, the ideal is therefore an unrealizable dream which reality in it’s preeminence will never let happen. Politics is a culture that is social and thus behaviorally sensitive which also cultivates commensurate responsiveness where it happens. It also follows a pattern that can be difficult to be disrupted in a tight, culturally monolithic environment as Enugu is. We know why Buhari’s disruption occurred. Nigeria is bigger and more diverse, with many cracks that could be pried open to reveal compromising clevages of divisions. Even so, It happened because the operators, Jonathan and his inner circle, wanted it to be, most naively though. And then we are now where we are.
Ekweremadu who was singularly groomed and has thrived well by the same order Okike thinks he could now overthrow, can only achieve nothing but class suicide. So, if you like, and would want to see it in the leftist hue where most idealists stand, Ekweremadu joined and has since become inner circle member of his proletariat shortchanging political class and thus can neither overthrow the status quo he is part of nor offer anything different beyond his selfish ambition and the rhetoric of its desperate marketing.
Buhari succeeded with such rhetoric of change but failed woefully in office became he is worse than what he pretended he wanted to change. Ike Ekweremadu is not like Buhari majority of Nigerians in 2015, being too you to remember his earlier outing in 1984, didn’t then know. Ekweremadu is well known by the members of his ruling elite in Enugu. He is well known by the masses, who understand he had fully exploited the opportunism of his class and only now wants to hoodwink them hence he currently parades himself in the messianic garb of a self-appointed saviour, chanting slogans he uses to peddle his deceptive idealism, appealing but highly unrealistic mantras, which my friend Ezugwu Okike had most surprisingly fallen for.
That is why he will be resoundingly rejected. His co-travellers in the power train and others who are realistic and accurate readers of the Enugu political weather, know when a fresh breath of air is blowing and when a drought like Ike is coming, upon them. They also know the true profiles of the players and as such cannot be deceived by his current fake posturing. At best, Ekweremadu, from the outpost he presides, can only provide a mirage as an oasis to his gathering of the politically disgruntled, the malcontents and motley of other losers and disconnected leaches of the system, who are all falling through the mainstream of the super cohesive structures of Enugu politics, into the political void they would be floating until they reconnect once more with reality.
He knows what he is up against in the formidable structures he had rode it’s crest to his height, from which olympian height he will have his hard fall. He knows Enugu is totally PDP and will always be, with all of its whole bandwagonism.
So, Ike will make noise. Huge noise at that, but will neither ‘come’ to the Enugu government house nor go back to the Senate. This is a fact known to those who are acquainted with the realities of today’s party politics in Enugu state, as well as the state of the PDP in Nigeria. They are aware of the waned influence of Ike Ekweremadu, which they have been cleverly hiding from the undescerning segment of the Enugu electorate, most of whom are being fed on the unwholesome diet of his past glory. That is why, to the consternation of the many who thought he should be going national, he scurried home where he could at all be heard, after hitting the ceiling at Abuja, to become a provincial overlord. But even so, there is no room in Enugu for his antics; pure swindle swaddled in the deceptive foil paper of service.
Wordshot Ugwuele wrote from Enugu
