Christian and Islamic historians each identify one oppressive and power-drunk leader whose iron-fisted style destroyed many lives and in so doing, facilitated their descent into the lands of the vile.
We remember Rehoboam, the young King whose famous statement that while his father chastised the people of Israel with whips, he would chastise them with scorpions led to the split of the kingdom of Israel into two.
As recorded in 1 Kings 14, Rehoboam committed the crime of conceit, refusing the counsel of the wise and treating the people as if their opinion did not matter. In the end, there was a rebellion by 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, who left to form their kingdom, leaving the wicked king to rule over the smaller and eventually less prosperous two kingdoms.
The story of Rehoboam is not too dissimilar from that of Aurangzeb, a young prince in India. The fifth son of a renowned king, Aurangzeb is recorded to have had no interest in sustaining the prosperity and religious purity his father brought to the kingdom, but instead impatiently schemed and waited to take over the throne.
When the emperor, his father, became seriously ill, Aurangzeb is recorded to have begun “a two-year-long maneuvering for power”, which led him to eliminate all his brothers. Not done, he declared himself emperor and imprisoned his ailing father.
With the crown on his head, he immediately went against all his father’s legacies, revoking many of his policies, including those of religious tolerance and freedom, and in their place, imposed orthodox Islam on all of India. Although a hero to the Muslims, he was an oppressor to the Hindus.
Aurangzeb was the ruler king from his dynasty. He destroyed the legacy of his ancestors with his own hands.
While soul fusion has been the subject of legends and horror/science fiction, it is also believed in some circles that adherents of dark science possess the power to merge two or more souls into either one single soul or vessel, after which, the user’s soul becomes much stronger or potent. The idea is that having the strength of two or more souls depending on the fusion and potentially obtaining traits from the fused soul would make the user a dominant force in his or her environment.
Observers of the Peter Mbah style of leadership as the governor of Enugu State will easily see this soul fusion in action. In terms of giving a listening ear to wise counsel, the governor is looking every inch Rehoboamic. His matter is even more troubling in the sense that while the King who divided Israel and stubbornly chose to oppressively rule over just 16 percent of the kingdom rather than peacefully govern the whole stuck to divisive counsels from the young, it does not look like King Peter Mbah has anyone he is listening to. Not even Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, the man who went to the ends of the world and back to hand him the ticket of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party appears to have his ear.
Comparing him to Aurangzeb reveals more bewildering similarities in traits. While the Indian emperor exterminated all his brothers while patiently waiting for his time on the throne, Mbah has been busy disempowering almost all the people of the state, rich and poor to ensure that only he remains standing as the ruler of the land, the one who makes all things happen. Like both men in the history of the two dominant religions in the world, Mbah appears to also be intent on destroying every structure of governance to impose himself as the titular and undisputed sovereign.
He has taxed the people to near submission and the institutions that guarantee freedom such as the courts and the legislature appear to not meet his standards for demagogue rulership.
Since 29 May 2023, when he took the reins of governance in the state, Enugu people have been wistfully longing for the return of the whips of bad governance, beleaguered by the scorpions of Rehoboam proceeding from the governor’s multifarious pockets.
Even his more ardent followers have been unable to convincingly defend his strange policies of property demolition in many parts of the state, actions that have been undertaken with what looks like sadistic glee, broking every protestation and supposedly binding judicial restraining orders. When his bulldozers moved against a motherless babies’ home and the nearby polytechnic belonging to respected Catholic cleric, Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Ede in Enugu, a court order obtained by the priest was not enough to deter him. In Nsukka, where he crushed a market housing the economies of more than 10,000 traders, a motor park, and nearby private properties, he also went ahead with his plans in disobedience of a court order.
The family and heirs of this property (the children of the late Igwe James Mamah, founder and owner of the famous Ifesinachi Transport Limited) went to court to prevent the demolition of his property which their father duly acquired from a highly respected nationalist, the late Chief Charles Abangwu, but also failed to stop the rolling wheels of government bulldozers which in minutes, brought down everything on its path.
The story was that the market as well as the property belonging to Ifesinachi were in breach of the state master plan and therefore had to go. There was also talk about urban renewal, an emergency that was considered more important than the livelihoods of thousands of traders who were evicted without due notice and with no plans for alternative accommodation. The option given to the traders was a market along the Aku Road side of Nsukka, the size of which was so inadequate it could not take 10 percent of the desperate displaced traders. Bad fate even played its part when the so-called alternative was eventually ravaged by floods that destroyed whatever the displaced traders were able to salvage from the rubble Mbah’s bulldozers left of their former place of trade at the Ogige Market.
So far, according to sources, about 15 traders have died from the frustrations force-fed them by an insensitive government whose mission in what was sold to the people as a democracy has remained frighteningly nebulous.
While the people of the state waited for the commencement of the ultra-modern motor park project which Mbah said was more important than the shops and businesses of the people, disturbing developments indicated that a petrol station was being founded on the very grounds where 10,000 traders were recently displaced. As proof of this, photos of welders spiritedly constructing huge petrol storage tanks have been seen on the site here Ogige Market and Premier Hotel (the property acquired by Ifesinachi from Abangwu), while high-pressure pipes stacked in the foreground ahead of future installation.
It draws tears of blood to realise that the government may have evicted the poor people who traded at this site with the intention to hand it over to a private citizen, who most likely would be Mbah himself.
Mbah owns an oil and gas business. At the peak of the electoral battle in the courts between him and Chijioke Edeoga, reconstruction work was going on in some of the petrol stations owned by the governor. One of them, located between Berliet and Cele Bus stops along the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway in Lagos, had been completed and converted to a mega station.
Could it be that the governor took the private properties of citizens and a communal market built by Nsukka people before the Nigerian civil war even started for the expansion of his private downstream petrol business? It is heart-wrenching to even contemplate this possibility as it is an abuse of both power and people at the same time.
Mbah is increasingly looking like the vassals of medieval Europe where rulers took lands from people either forcefully or in exchange for security. In the case of Enugu, neither food security, social security, infrastructure security, and life & property security are being provided for the people. Why would the people forfeit their properties to a vassal that gives them nothing in exchange?
The presence of those tanks and equipment has out a lie to the overriding public interest under which the government cloaked their forcefully took over those properties. Mbah is a lawyer as we were all told, and he should know that the Land Use Act under which he demolished those properties stipulates that properties so acquired must be for public use or benefit. There is no way a petrol station will ever be for public use or benefit, except he has become so generous as to allow Nsukka people to be fetching petrol from the station free of charge or at a pre-emilokan subsidised price.
Let us even look at the property of Igwe James Mamah which was demolished by the agents of Mbah’s government. Everybody who grew up in Nsukka in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s would know a famous hotel known as Premier Hotel. It was built and managed by a foremost Nsukka lawyer, first republic politician, and nationalist, Abangwu.
Abangwu fought for Nigerian independence side-by-side with the great Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. He was a member of the Eastern Regional House of Assembly at the time another great Nigerian, Chief Michael Okpara was the Premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria.
Abangwu’s law office was at that hotel. His immediate family lived there and that included his late younger brother.
Such a building should be treated with a lot more reverence. This may have been why Abangwu sold the property to another Nsukka man, an industrialist who blazed the trail in inter-city transportation in Nigeria, Igwe Mamah.
Although he relocated the Nsukka office of his Ifesinachi Transport to the premises of the hotel, Igwe Mamah respected the memory of Chief Abangwu by leaving all the structures at the hotel intact, neither demolishing nor remodelling any of them, even when he was entitled to as the new owner. He was apparently aware of the importance of that structure in the social and political development of Nsukka.
The death of Igwe Mamah did not change anything as his children, led by Chief Emeka Mamah sustained the honour their late father accorded to Abangwu by neither destroying nor remodelling the property. In Nsukka, before Mbah’s bulldozers moved in, that property was still mostly identified as Premier Hotel, even though it has been repurposed for other businesses: the building was just that dear to the people, it was like a sacred monument that nobody desired to violate its hallowed existence.
These were as things were until Mbah got the brain wave for a “world-class motor park”. There have been claims of public interest, but how does a petrol station project as suspected to be what would stand on that site be in the public interest?
Even if the disturbing fixtures of the fittings of a petrol station hadn’t emerged to counter the government’s claim of public interest, the letters of the Nigerian Law demand that owners of properly acquired and registered properties should be duly compensated before being dislocated for a project of public interest.
This, unfortunately, didn’t happen in this and other cases.
Government has also alluded to a certain master plan which Premier Hotel and other demolished properties violated.
This is also not true. Documents indicate that as far back as 2007, Igwe Mamah had the property duly registered with the Enugu State Ministry of Lands. One of the documents signed by a certain Hon. Dr. F.B.A. Uzoh as Commissioner for Lands and Housing, Enugu State which was dated 25th February 2008 indicates the allocation of the property to Igwe Mamah by the state government. On the Certificate of Occupancy proper, it was also clearly stated that the property had been allocated to Igwe Mamah with effect from 1 January 2007. Other evidences include duly signed treasury receipts of Enugu State, and survey plans duly approved by the government.
Nobody knows where the suspicious masterplan which the government alleged was violated by the building crawled from; was it possible that the Mbah administration had rolled out a masterplan Nsukka between 29 May 2024, and the time the building was demolished in May, a plan which unilaterally labelled a building that had been standing for more than 50 years illegal? If this is true, then what would make a mega petrol station rise to such a position of public importance as to displace and relegate someone’s duly acquired property to such peremptorily casual and callous destruction?
That Governor Mbah hasn’t given a hoot about the superfluous odium his actions have attracted can only suggest premeditated vindictiveness by a man who doesn’t care about the adverse consequences of his actions to both his person and the institution he represents. He does not care; the more rivers of tears flow from the persecuted people, the more he acquires the canoes on which to paddle through for more acquisitions of affliction.
It is Rehoboam all over again; his fathers chastised his people, Israel, with whips, but he came determined to chastise them with scorpions. The only question I ask is: What Did We Do Wrong?
Okuhu is a journalist, public relations professional, brand strategist and teacher. With a career that traversed print media; oil and gas; banking and entrepreneurship, Okuhu is the author of wave-making book, Pitch: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths, a dispassionate exposition of the dos and don’ts of successful engagement in the marketplace, especially the Nigerian marketplace. He is the founder/publisher of BRANDish, Nigeria’s first nationally circulating brands and marketing magazine. He has also handled the PR and reputation management consultancies for a number of brands, businesses and public figures
