Dr. Ojougboh: Reflections
By Tiko Okoye
Dr. Cairo Ojougboh, a medical doctor-turned-politician was one of the four Nigerians who reportedly passed away while watching the suspense-filled 2023 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) semi-final clash between Nigeria’s Super Eagles and the Bafana Bafana of South Africa in the northern Ivorian town of Bouake. The incident, in all four reported cases, happened when a penalty was awarded against Nigeria at the 90th minute.
Those who know him very well attest to the fact that Dr. Ojougboh’s love for Nigeria was profound and unassailable, and that he was a shining example of patriotic fervour. It should then be hardly surprising that a man like Dr. Ojougboh, whose dedication to the country of his birth was unwavering, would shout in shock at the pivotal moment that a penalty was awarded against Nigeria at the very last minute of regular match time, and slumped due to massive heart attack when South Africa scored from the penalty spot to snatch possibility from the jaws of foregone defeat.
Being a medical doctor of note, one would’ve expected Dr. Ojougboh to be well acquainted with the silent threat called cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack and stroke, and be better fortified. Be that as it may, it isn’t too far-fetched to say that, just like Sam Okwaraji of the Green Eagles fame, the good doctor-cum-politician lived and died for Nigeria. I don’t intend to touch that hot potato topic of whether or not Nigeria is worth dying for – not even with a 10-foot long pole!
Not that it really mattered in the case of Dr. Ojougboh because Nigeria was equally good to him. Despite his lean frame, his height at well over six feet plus a rolling gait and outspokenness effectively combined to make Dr. Ojougboh a charismatic figure who stood far from the maddening crowd. Soon after entering the shark-infested waters constituting Nigeria’s political arena, Dr. Ojougboh easily won the seat to represent the Ika federal constituency of Delta State in the House of Representatives on the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Despite being a one-term (2003-2007) member of the House of Reps, Dr. Ojougboh charmed his way to the relatively powerful portfolio of PDP national vice-chairman (South-South).
Dr. Ojougboh parted ways with the PDP after the shellacking it suffered in the hands of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 state-wide and national elections. He immediately defected to the APC, conveying the impression of a politician who simply wanted to be part and parcel of the winning team on a 24/7 basis. The press conference he held to announce his defection caused me to write a piece titled “Dr. Ojougboh, et tu Brute?” Although the piece was written in June 2015 for immediate publication, I never submitted it to the editor for publishing.
Dr. Ojougboh immediately pole-vaulted to the top echelons of the APC without breaking a sweat, and was handed the plum post of Executive Director (Finance) of the gravy train known as the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). I stumbled on this article about nine years later as I rummaged through the contents of my archives and decided to publish it at the time of his demise. The African culture admonishes us not to speak ill of the dead and uploading the piece to the public domain at this point in time isn’t intended to tarnish in any way, shape or form the legacies of the flamboyant Agbor-born politician. Now read on:
On seeing those he thought were his friends screaming “Long live the incoming king” even before the curtains had finally fallen on his administration, it suddenly dawned on a petulant President Goodluck Jonathan that not all smiling faces harbour smiling minds and that the typical Nigerian politician is deeply entrenched in the politics of “chop and clean mouth.” What galls me the most about our obtuse political elite is that even as they are “chopping and cleaning mouth,” majority of them are very ruthless and, as a matter of expediency, have no scruples using the same mouth to savage the hands that fed them!
It is understandable that the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) made Jonathan feel the full rigour of their acerbic criticisms during his tenure, but to be equally subjected to jibes and name-calling by senior members of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), must have hit Jonathan where it hurts the most. He must indeed be feeling like that cripple in an Igbo proverb who lamented that his wife sleeping with another man in his presence doesn’t bother him as much as the bad words they are saying about him.
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“When a dog bites a man,” as the saying goes, “that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” So, it is big news when a fellow South-Southerner and top party colleague in the person of Dr. Cairo Ojougboh unabashedly hangs Jonathan’s dirty linen in the market-place for Nigerians to behold and pinch their nostrils. Speaking recently in Abuja, the PDP National Vice-Chairman (South-South) unsparingly held Jonathan solely responsible for the party’s humiliating defeat in the immediate-past presidential election.
Hear him: “The reason the North decided to vote President Muhammadu Buhari is because Jonathan failed to honour a gentleman’s agreement…to serve a single term…Jonathan himself said he would do only four years. Emirs, leaders and stakeholders in the country accepted that Jonathan will do only four years so that power can shift to the North. When time came, a lot of ‘Macapa’ dances started. People started putting pressure here and there and people started encouraging Jonathan to contest.”
He then proceeded to deliver an upper-cut to Jonathan’s already-bruised psyche: “Unfortunately, Jonathan didn’t have the nerves to say ‘No, I will keep my agreement’…The North didn’t take kindly to that and they said ‘No’…Even the Christian North that used to be very friendly, especially the North Central, said ‘We had an agreement’ and five governors left because of that.”
Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Dr. Ojougboh is correct. Why do this now? “A truth,” averred English engraver and poet William Blake, “that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” For crying out loud, Dr. Ojougboh was a very prominent member of the Chief E.K. Clarke-led Delta Elders Forum and a topmost member of the Southern Peoples Assembly. Their members consistently maintained that the ‘agreement’ was a mirage conjured up by those who believed that governance was their birthright.
They even contended that since the nation’s constitution had precedence over that of the party, all talk of agreement and zoning simply amounted to a mere academic exercise. Virtually everyone in the South-South, South-East and a large swathe of the North-Central concurred. This was of course when Dr. Ojougboh was a familiar face at Aso Rock Villa where he was always given a red carpet reception. He was even appointed chairman of a federal government parastatal reputed to be a high-yielding cash cow.
So, what has changed between then, when Dr. Ojougboh’s groups unleashed a stream of invectives on former Niger State Governor Babangida Aliyu and former President Olusegun Obasanjo for having the ‘animal boldness’ to publicly insist on a phantom agreement, and now, that he has chosen to deploy such wicked mandibular ‘koboko’ on a ‘kinsman’ already spread-eagled on the muddy ground of Otuoke in the backwaters of Bayelsa State?
The correct answer is that Jonathan lost and Buhari won. An adage says that when a man climbs a tree full of thorns, he is not doing it out of courage but because he wants to survive. It was touch-and-go for a while when, after the defeat they neither expected nor prepared for, strident voices arose from the South-East, South-South and sections of the South-West calling for the disbandment of the party’s national working committee.
Unless Jonathan’s motives were transcendental, I strongly believe his refusal to accept the post of the chairman of the party’s Board of Trustees exclusively offered him was wrong-headed. His refusal, and attendant lack of influence in the system, made his loyalists vulnerable and provided a life line to the ‘other side’ of the PDP to rally and regain the upper hand. Evidence abounds that Jonathan’s electoral defeat has radically altered the combinations and permutations of PDP politics and not everybody now wants to mimic the “We have no regrets for supporting Jonathan” monologue of South-easterners.
“Pure truth,” posited English clergyman and writer Charles Caleb Colton, “like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation, because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.” This is sadly the case with Dr. Ojougboh. He claimed five governors defected from the “Christian North-Central” and tried to use this ‘fact’ to explain why the North turned its back on the PDP’s presidential candidate.
On the contrary, out of the five governors that defected to the APC, only one is a Christian from the South-South and the only one from the North-Central is a Muslim. When all is said and done, Jonathan must be disbelievingly wondering like Julius Caesar did on a similar occasion: Et tu Brute?
