The Speaker of Enugu State House of Assembly, Eugene Odo have denied the media reports of the
purporting plans to impeach him from office.
The report had claimed that the state government has moved against Odo with threat of impeachment should he continue with his decision to go against the PDP consensus candidate for the 2015 guber election in the state, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi.
Copies of newspapers containing the story yesterday were mopped up in Enugu by state government.
It further alleged that House leader, Sunday Ude –Okoye was busy collecting signatures to effect Odo’s removal as Speaker.
Reacting, Odo told reporters yesterday: “I just read about it and I am surprised. I am working very well with my colleagues, my constituency and the executive arm of government. I really don’t know where this is coming from because if it is true, I would have known about it from my colleagues. So it is not true”.
Also leader of the state Assembly, Ude-Okoye denied procuring signatures of his colleagues for the purpose of removing Odo from office as Speaker.
Said he: “Reporters should report real. Nobody is collecting any signatures for the removal of the Speaker. Speaker has been a faithful citizen and has discharged his duties effectively. Reporters should promote peace and not cause crisis”.
However, the development has dominated discussions by residents of the state as it is feared that another round of crisis was in the offing at the State Assembly.
Odo was among the governorship aspirants that stoutly opposed the way the nomination of Ugwuanyi was effected by some stakeholders from Enugu north in a meeting called by Governor Sullivan Chime.
He had also at the meeting reportedly described the exercise as “ambush”, in that; they (aspirants) were not put in the know about the agenda.
However, he had not spoken to anyone over the incident after the meeting.
The immediate political thunderbolt that had struck in Enugu and had led to the above news situation all points to one thing: what goes around comes around! And for Rt. Hon. Eugene Odo, the Speaker of the Enugu State House of Assembly, it is even more instructive as he had been the hand that had spun the wheel not a few times in the past. He was indeed crying foul, that there was an ambush! Okay. Its now he knows how unpleasant intrigues can be just because he now sees himself as a victim.
Yes. Indeed he was a victim! A victim of arrogance; a victim of self delusion that led to over ambition; a victim of desperation; a victim of greed; a victim of victimization of perceived rivals, etc! And these were all self inflicted, to say the least. These goes to show that those who kill by the sword, by the same sword it is they are dispatched. He is agonizing. He is hurting. He is lamenting and in true confusion! I can help him a bit in letting him know how he brought this fate upon himself.
Everyone knew he could not hold his cravings for power and elevation. He was openly desperate, a trait Sullivan as the leader of the party in the state abhors. This was why he failed to see the indiscretion in flooding the whole state with his campaign posters. He failed to see nobody would believe him if he denied any knowledge of it. He failed to realize everyone knows he had not gotten such political clout to have friends that could bankroll such a poster project on their own. And so, everyone but himself saw through his antics.
But more than anything else, he failed to see that single stroke of fortune that saw him in the House and then become the Speaker as one of those one-off political spin-offs that needed to be well utilized in gradual but methodical progression through a road carefully and well paved with the good will of others. No. He too soon forgot where he was coming from, that he was not yet deeply rooted in the state not to talk of having grown the external tentacles that would have facilitated those network of strong allies outside that help establish and consolidate one in his base.
In other words, he actually was worth little that could elicit a tectonic rumble on his behalf in his locality should things happen not to go his way, like now. And having lost all sense of reality, his dreams became unrealistically over lofty. Being a green horn sort of, he was fed a false sense of political worth that took over in driving the rest of his actions. He felt as the number three citizen in the state in this dispensation, he was the number three most powerful politician in the state! This misconception further brought about a feeling of ‘the third biggest man around’.
And where was the best place to throw this perceived weight around? Igbo Etiti, his home Local Government. Apart from seizing the apparatchiks of power in installing his stooge as council chairman that effectively surrendered the purse strings of the Local Government, he carefully picked off every other person that had the slightest profile of becoming anything significant. Those he saw as a threat, not in what they could have done against him nor anybody, but in their perceived capacity to rise and and possibly throw their shadow against him, were viciously cut down politically.
It was this that brought about the ouster of Barrister Kingsley Asogwa, the very astute and vibrant erstwhile Leader of Igbo Etiti Legislative Council. His offense? He had shown a photo of himself and the Governor to his colleagues! Who did he think he was to be with the Governor? Who took him to the Government House? Did he not know the Speaker as the highest political office holder from the local government in the state must know when anybody from his place was visiting Sullivan? My people these were the offence that Hon. Asogwa committed that saw him being ranged with a most vicious arsenal that finally sent him out of the council. Hon. Asogwa was permanently suspended on spurious charges and had his pay and allowances stopped to totally emasculate him. He finally won a legal battle that saw the council paying him millions of Naira in compensation.
Hon Asogwa was not only the victim of this scorched earth tactic against rising stars within. His camp never rested from the moment Professor Simon Ortuanya was appointed a Commissioner in the state cabinet until he was dropped. They had gone to work with intrigues, false allegations and blackmail. The day Ortuanya was dropped from the cabinet, he had doled out money to his sparse supporters in Ohodo, Ortuanya’s community, to celebrate when every other Nsukka man was mourning. However, to their greatest chagrin, Ortuanya, one of the brightest stars to come out of Nsukka almost immediately bounced back into much more reckoning.
His, Ortuanya’s, outing during the gubernatorial pre-primary aspirations more than showed his mettle. Up till the moment the consensus option was adopted and Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi was chosen, he was fully carried along. And while he was indeed a top consideration due to his staler qualities, the Speaker was never an option. While he enjoyed the candid and frankly consultations of the others, the later never did. And while he was in the know of what was going on, the later never did, hence the cry of an ambush!
Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi was chosen because he is a gentle man who laboured for his people and is a true representative. Like Professor Ortuanya, he is a philanthropist who has a bottomless heart for giving. He regularly meets with his people and constituents whom he keeps fully abreast of what is going on in open meetings where everyone is always free to say his mind. The Speaker represents me. I challenge him to mention one town hall meeting he has held in my town, Ohodo or any other in his constituency in all the near eight years he had been there for us. I challenge him to mention any project he has done as a constituency project or he had attracted. Let him also tell us how many people are on his scholarship, or mention how many women he has given grinder, wheel barrow or even wrapper.
You cannot be this insensitive and expect the endearment of your people. You cannot be so contemptuous of your own people, the very ones that elected you into office, and expect them to respect you when we know respect is reciprocal. You cannot be everything a leader should not be and expect to be anointed as one. How many people have Hon Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, in all of his might and status, run out of Udenu? How many times have Udenu Council Chairman gone to give account of their allocations to him?
These are the issues. Sullivan, as a responsible leader owes it to the good people of Enugu State to keep certain individuals at bay. It is a duty many believe he has executed very well by keeping some buccaneers and vampires out of the system. As for the cry of ‘ambush’, he who comes to equity should come with clean hands. Until then, they are wisely advised to keep quiet and retain what they still got, or…