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Is Ambode Still Sleeping?
Many admirers and supporters of Lagos governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, have been worried. They had hoped the pain of unreciprocated goodwill – I mean, the essence of being hardworking, visionary, active and progressive in service delivery and other indices of governance, is that at the end of one term of four years, you are in a pole position to be adorned with a medal of second-term candidacy.
Ambode’s peculiar fate signposts the faultlines in a broken political chicanery practised all across the African continent. A big man somewhere, or a coven of fat-cats, whose grip on the veins and arteries of state power and funds is embarrassingly firm and red-hot unyielding. They, the so-called godfathers, turn legitimately elected officials into vassals, vendors and vessels of rent-payers.
It is in such depressing cesspool of political husbandry you are blessed with “words-on-marble” similar to this: “Yes, he performed as a governor, but didn’t do well as a politician”. Such incredulous “wise-crack” is why our politics and governance will often be pressed down by irreverent greed, pseudo-diabolical machinations, barefaced pilfering, morally destitute fat-cats… and clogging the channels of good governance.
So, we appreciate the profound disappointment of Ambode at being fed the humble-pie, and being visited with same whip other ambitious but unfortunate aspirants have had the distateful pleasure of embracing in the past. We understand that the shock of betrayals may cut both ways, and he has been left with the blunt edge of the machete (well, some of his traducers also have their own haunting stories to tell).
Yes, we get it… and we are genuinely incensed at the foul situation. We also have accepted that though politics has been variously slandered as being dirty. However, some of us believe that it is the practitioners that are dirty, unprincipled, avaricious, conniving, inveterate liars, and more.
Politics can be used for the good and benefit of a huge swathe of people, when fair-minded, industrious, purpose-driven and people-loving men and women take the harness of power. Stretching the argument further, it is clear to operators and observers of party politics in Africa that the game (or business) is akin to a binge at the casino jackpot box-machine – you may hit a jackpot once in million moon, but mostly the pulls deliver “dud-cheques”…fluffy nothingness. Except a cotton-wooled naive puppet, no politician should be shocked by betrayal, disappointment, disapproval or dissension…in this climate, the ugly expression of human’s psychological or mental failings is the rule, rather than the norm.
It is therefore worrisome to note that Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, since the October firestorm, appears to be in a sleep-walking mode. What exactly is wrong with Ambode? Is he really so shocked that he had absolutely no inkling of the political back-stabbing that visited his exalted office? Is it possible that he actually believed his deputy and commissioners (picked for him by a time-tested system of remote proxyism) would turn against their authentic source of relevance, and pitch their tents with him? Or are there prevailing forces still sitting on his head or heart, choking his vision and insisting on rubbishing his legacies?
Well, the focus of this article is neither to probe the psychological state of the governor, nor his mental capacity to bounce back from a tormenting trouncing from erstwhile friends and associates. Our purpose today is to wake Mr. Governor up from what looks like a slumbering inactivity – at least, from an outsider’s perspective.
