Rt. Hon. Victor Ochei
What Ossai Ovie Success has written for an argument, is nothing but balderdash. He stacks Bible verses, Churchill, Maxwell and rented proverbs in the hope that his noise will pass for the history he failed to investigate.
But can you blame him, after all, his task requires that he kills his conscience with a streak of dishonest elucidations aimed at turning Ifeanyi Okowa into a god, Victor Ochei into an ingrate, and Anioma memory upside down.
Delta North will not fall for a hungry and puerile attempt to baptise mediocrity and reward a record that still needs explaining.
The first lie in Ossai’s text is the oldest one in this contest: that Okowa made Ochei, and that Ochei has now “forgotten.” This is an attempt at reverse psychology, but truth will always reverse the tape and everyone who has been politically active and informed in Delta North for the last twenty years knows the order of the debt.
From 2008, Dr Ifeanyi Okowa faced a crushing season of irrelevance and thin political capital. It was Rt. Hon. (Engr.) Victor Ochei, Esq., FNSE who stepped in.
The gubernatorial campaigns of 2005–2007 under the identity ‘Equity Agenda’ were resounding because Ochei supported and financed them.
Even as an SSG existing in an administration considered hostile, with no clear path back to electoral life, Okowa ran to Ochei.
A brother took pity on a brother and helped revive a career that later was relaunched with a successful Senatorial aspiration, that eventually led to Government House.
Ochei is not Okowa’s political orphan, Okowa played no role in Ochei’s first, second or third electoral successes. Rather, Okowa is Ochei’s political beneficiary.
From irrelevance to Government House, Ochei made Okowa possible. To invert that story is not loyalty but needless propaganda with a short memory span that betrays the mood in the Okowa camp as desperate, which explains why Ossai’s panic about Ochei’s questions is so frantic.
A beneficiary can be praised but he cannot be placed beyond inquiry. Representation is not a private gift and if Okowa’s years in office were as luminous as this aide insists, they would not require a choir. They would survive inspection and introspection.
Instead, Ossai demands silence, then calls silence “gratitude”, as though Ochei didn’t almost spoon feed Okowa’s political career back to strength.
That is how weak records are protected: not with ledgers, but with hymns. And what is this “unassailable legacy” he wants worshipped?
Roads that truly connect communities and sustain commerce, or roads that wash away, fail, and leave Anioma stranded after eight years of power?
A road that cannot survive the next rainy season is not a miracle. It is an invoice. You cannot tell a farmer in Illah, whose produce cannot reach the market that he should be grateful for asphalt that has already surrendered.
You cannot tell a trader in Aniocha, a youth in Ndokwa, or a commuter in Oshimili that collapsing infrastructure is a “wonder” simply because a former media aide has found a verse for it. If the works were immortal, they would not need this much poetry.
Then Ossai crowns Okowa “a god in Delta North politics.”
Gods do not visit EFCC offices. They do not sit under an active investigation over alleged diversion of derivation funds in the region of ₦1.3 trillion nor have their brothers investigated for transactions amounting to over 90billion naira. Simply put, god’s aren’t usually caught up in accusationsnl of stealing and surely, they do not have their international passports become objects of negotiation with an anti-graft agency.
Okowa has not been convicted by any court, and no honest writer should invent a conviction. But neither should any honest writer sell a still-open file as a halo.
If this is the legacy Ossai wants Delta North to choose; a record still answering questions in Ikoyi and Port Harcourt, with a potential date at the Federal High Court at any moment, then he is not defending greatness. He is simply marketing unfinished business as destiny, and earning his pay as the devil’s advocate
The same man Ossai Ovie Success wants Anioma to revere is the man southern leaders once condemned for pawning the South’s presidential turn to wear a vice-presidential sash in 2023, and the man who later walked away from that ticket into the ruling party, rapping in his dialect that he knew his Vice-presidentialambition was never going to succeed.
That is not a statesmans, but a career politician that bends with the weather and then asks the people to call the bending “wisdom.”
If Ochei once praised Okowa in public, that is not a crime. It is evidence that support was once given, and that support ran first from Ochei to Okowa, not the other way. Gratitude does not require amnesia. A benefactor may help a man rise and still refuse to call failing roads a renaissance, or an unresolved probe a monument.
Ossai’s last trick is to tell Ochei to speak only of plans, while Okowa is wrapped in incense and declared beyond question. That is how mediocrity survives and has provided a ladder which Ossai has climbed to feel important.
A mediocrity that survives when aides confuse appointment with authority, and when a district is told that asking for roads that last and representation that is present is “ingratitude.”
Victor Ochei is not blowing out another man’s candle. He is pointing at the places where the candle never lit the road.
Delta North discern a benefactor from a beneficiary, a legacy from a press statement, and a rescued career from the man who did the rescuing.
From irrelevance to the National Assembly and Government House, Ochei made Okowa possible.
No amount of Ossai’s disappointment can unmake that fact.
By Ikechukwu Chukwudi-Abiandu (The Legacydreamz).