Hon. Dennis Agbo’s ‘3rd term’ ticket: Another view
By Felix Oguejiofor Abugu
Enugu State APC’s grant of automatic ‘3rd term’ ticket to Hon. Dennis Nnamdi Agbo, the Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency Rep in the 10th House, is as unsettling as it is politically unwise – in my view. Early this month, Enugu’s ruling party released a list of its candidates for next year’s general election, with Hon. Agbo who is serving a second term in the House on it, in a constituency with a well-defined power-sharing formula.
Many in the federal constituency were surprised, indeed caught unawares, by the development. For one thing, many a constituent would agree that, in terms of development projects or, more fundamentally, the organization of politics for equity, fairness and justice in the federal constituency, there isn’t much to recommend Hon. Agbo for a 3rd term in the House for Igbo-Eze North/Udenu.
For another, there is the issue of Hon. Agbo’s seeming political inscuociance in the discharge of his responsibilities to the federal constituency. This “couldn’t-care-less” attitude to the political needs of a delicately-balanced federal constituency, has raised questions about Agbo’s commitment to the principles of democratic governance, driven by the dictates of local politics.
We were still contending with this rueful ambivalence about Hon. Agbo’s impact on our politics when the ruling APC literally ambushed us us with the Rep’s return ticket announcement.
Where had Hon. Agbo been?
While the party may have taken the wind off our sails by its endorsement of Hon. Agbo’s ‘3rd term’ ambition, the above is a pertinent question to ask in the face of such ambivalence about his impact as our Rep and as a means of doing a productive x-ray of the socio-political challenges facing Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency, Agbo’s role in addressing them and, therefore, whether or not he is deserving of a ticket for a 3rd term in the House.
Asked in either its literal or metaphorical sense, I think ‘Where had Hon. Dennis been?’ signals a lack of conviction on the part of his constituents that the Rep has so far represented them well enough to deserve an automatic ticket for a third time in the House of Representatives.
Thus, the question arises because, in reality, the federal legislator from Udah village, Enugu-Ezike, Igbo-Eze North LGA, is hardly “seen” in terms of delivery of infrastructure projects, youth/women empowerment programmes or in terms of his organization of the constituents for political participation for harmonious and peaceful co-existence, reconciliation and progress in the federal constituency.
One example of Hon. Agbo’s “distance” from home and the people can be seen in the state of his personal house in the village: the approach to the house, the foreground, is bushy, unkept. Add this to the fact that the federal legislator does not have a constituency office as required by law, which may also mean that he has no constituency staff, and you have a good picture of a Rep who may not have been encountered by many constituents, personally or by way of projects, in much of the 30-ward Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency.
However, although Hon. Agbo may not boast too many imprints on the sands of Igbo-Eze North/Udenu, what cannot be denied is that he is adept at power play and knows how to position himself and maneuver to grab power (witness how his ‘3rd term’ ticket took most stakeholders unawares!). Needless to add that he can be ruthless when dealing with perceived threats to his power and authority, however insignificant.
Agbo’s approach to the exercise of power and authority is evident in the style he brings to bear on his community engagements whenever he is home. It has been observed that each time the federal legislator, aka INTEGRITY, returns to the federal constituency for a meeting or two, he is almost always certain to ignite a fire among the political elite, in what has apparently become his own “strategic” way of stymieing a possible “gang-up” against him. Usually, he would raise hell over his ‘non-recognition’ as the political leader of the federal constituency, to whom all must pay heed.
When that is the case, he would be particularly antagonistic to the constituency’s council chairmen whom he seems loathe to consider worthy, even as their Councils’ Chief Security Officers, to preside over meetings in their LGAs.
It is claimed that the authorities in Igbo-Eze North and Udenu do not exactly look forward to Hon. Agbo’s infrequent visits. Because hard times await them on days of such visits, when Hon. Agbo would be heralded into the meeting venues by heedless young men and women whose apparent assignment is to possibly disrupt proceedings, while pushing and shoving to get “a proper protocol” established in favour of the “Leader”.
Which is to say that whenever MR. INTEGRITY is in town for a meeting or two, the major takeaway from such sessions would most likely be acrimony! To many in the Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency, therefore, it means that Hon. Dennis Nnamdi Agbo isn’t exactly the “People’s Rep.”, the beloved whose development strides and compassionate exercise of power endear them to the grassroots.
On the contrary, he is generally perceived as an aloof, unfriendly and quarrelsome lawmaker, lacking in team spirit and remorselessly given to divisive political exertions. It is instructive that each time Hon. Agbo is at loggerheads with a Council Chairman, say in Igbo-Eze North, that Chairman is certain to come from the opposite political bloc. In other words, too often his fights are dictated not by principle but by group sentiments.
Hon. Dennis Agbo is one Igbo-Eze North political leader whose uncompromising attitude to politics, power-sharing and inter-community relations, among others, has exacerbated political divisions in the LGA. His barely concealed divide-and-rule tactics in the exercise of his power and authority, especially his obvious anti-Ozzi sentiments expressed in subtle destabilization ploys, are at the root of the distrust and seeming enmity that have defined the relationship between Umunano and Umu-Ozzi (two political blocs from the same progenitor) since the ascension to power in the past 12 years by tendencies represented by the lawmaker.
Not a few hold these divisive tendencies against Hon. Agbo. Beneficiary of a power-sharing structure that delivers clear minority-rights guarantees, Agbo has been widely accused of kicking away the ladder by which he climbed up the power rungs. A native of Ezzodo, a one-village community in sprawling four multi-village communities that make up Enugu-Ezike (which, with Ette, constitutes Igbo-Eze North LGA), Agbo is unlikely to have been elected to represent a 30-ward federal constituency but for the benevolence of the bigger communities manifest in the minority-friendly Igbo-Eze North power-sharing formula. Incredibly, it is this same widely acclaimed formula that Chief Agbo would appear to have cast aside in his obvious pursuit of limitless terms in the House of Representatives, a political self-glorification design.
All politics, they say, is local. But it is amazing how political parties in these parts fail to take this popular aphorism into consideration when, for example, choosing candidates to fly such parties’ flags in elections. Were parties to still choose candidates based on their electoral values, it would take some doing for a ruling party to impose a candidate on Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency, against the run of local politics. Politicians may be incurable self-adorers, but I believe that even Dennis Agbo would be asking himself if the ruling APC didn’t hand him a pyrrhic victory by this ‘3rs term’ ticket.
The implication of Agbo’s return ticket is that, were all things to be equal and he ran this election and won, the Rep would be serving 12 years in the House. When added to Hon. (Engr.) Simon Atigwe’s four years, that would amount to 16 years of Umunano (10 wards), 12 years of Udenu (10 wards) and only 4 years of Ozzi (10 wards and by far bigger than Umunano and Udenu combined), in the House of Representatives for the Igbo-Eze North/ Udenu Federal Constituency since 1999. I dare say that this does not serve the cause of fairness, justice and equity in the federal constituency.
Or is history merely repeating itself? For readers who might not know, about this time in 2023, leaders of
the then ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency thought that they had everything and everyone wrapped around their fingers. So, they turned a deaf ear to complaints about wrongs, real or imagined, in the party in the run-up to that year’s general election. They believed that ( wrongly , with the benefit of hindsight), as they say in Imo State, “nothing mega”.
How wrong they were! For, as it came to pass, the party paid dearly for such complacency: PDP lost Igbo-Eze North/Udenu to the Labour Party.
Are we on the cusp of a similar history? Perhaps.
And yet the thing about history is that human beings tend to believe that its wheels will always grind in their favour, only against others. That’s why it keeps repeating itself, often catching its victims unawares.
APC cannot afford to repeat PDP’s 2023 costly mistake in Igbo-Eze North/Udenu Federal Constituency. Or can it?
