Dreams of greatness are usually inviting but getting there is not a picnic. So, most desperadoes embark on all forms of shenanigans including dancing naked in the marketplace, just to illusively satisfy the daydreaming. Reagan Ufomba is of that stock. His obsession to be at the helm of affairs in Abia is gradually turning his seemingly gentle mien to that of a hunger-stricken carnivorous being, ready to engage its owner.
In fairness, there is nothing wrong with having an ambition or aspiring to a high office, but there is everything wrong in running down the entire system, may be to play to the gallery. For anybody to struggle to make a political capital out of the vexed issue of disengagement of non-indigenes from the State civil service on account of mounting recurrent bills, necessitated by the new minimum wage, which has long been rested, as Governor Orji had approved the re-engagement of the affected persons, is a mischief of monumental proportions.
Is it not contradictory for someone who claimed to have rebelled against societal ills in the seminary school, PDP and APGA, to have, without a hoot, quietly resigned his position in the obvious maladministration in place in Abia State in 2003?
Ufomba’s claim of rejecting to negotiate with TA Orji in 2011, when he couldn’t have bargained from a position of strength, by virtue of his woeful performance in the governorship election, is laughable. His character and careless utterances betray him as someone beyond his political turf. A thinker from Cameroun once admonished that when you give man money and power, you will see the beast in him. And for a man like Reagan who will remain far from the corridors of power to be behaving like a carpetbagger in his perpetual sojourn as a governorship aspirant, pollutes our political space and portends grave implications for the State, if such characters, by hook or crook, assume the reins of power. A hood does not make a monk! Even his borrowed robe of Ochiagha title is a mark of hollowness and superiority complex. Does he understand the meaning of Ochiagha (commander of troops)?
In fact he is behaving like a former governor of the State who hoodwinked the people of the State with titles of DR and a national honour of MON when they were not earned in actual sense. Come to think of it, may I ask, which troops have Reagan commanded. Is it in the military or where else? Or troops of brainwashed never-do-wells that hang-on around him with a false sense of hope, typical of the inordinately ambitious Sorcerer’s Apprentice? He should update us on how he attained the title Ochiagha before insulting the people’s psyche with a charade of falsehood and toxic megalomaniac grandstanding.
His unrepentantly cocky assertion of being the next governor of Abia is as amusing as it is provoking. Abians are yet to forgive him for daring to insinuate a popularity work at Aba with Governor TA Orji in April 2012, just because he claims to pay the school fees of his relations and those of his concubine’s children, while those who run robust scholarship schemes and Foundations to uplift the poor are shunning publicity. Where was this uncrowned Ochiagha when kidnappers almost overran Aba? Why did he desert the area until Governor Orji restored normalcy to the troubled spot? Who does not know that the feat of stemming the scourge of insecurity turned-in harvests of laurels to Governor Orji?
Perhaps Ufomba should be reminded that Abians are not suffering from amnesia and that his antecedents cannot be burnished by orchestrated media campaigns. It is only a myopic person like Reagan who fails to realise the gains of relocating the markets from the heart of Umuahia, the State capital to more spacious sites. Instead of taking the present administration to the cleaners for summoning the political will to do what has been the wish of successive administrations from the East-Central State days, the likes of Reagan should have kept quiet so that people will take his silence for maturity. Now he has inadvertently revealed his lack of clear-cut vision that qualifies him to aspire to govern the people of God’s own State. Abians should therefore be weary of people like Reagan as he will be more dangerous as the 2015 elections gather momentum.
*Nwankwo contributed this piece from Isiala-Ngwa North LGA, Abia State
