In Defence of Okey Ndibe on Andy Uba [A Response to Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu]

I read the rebuttals written by the duo of Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu on the Nigeriavillagesquare website and other electronic periodicals where socio-economic issues pertaining to Nigeria are discussed, purportedly written in defence of the wounded nay defanged pariah of Anambra State politics, “Dr” Andy Uba. It would be excessive to claim that I was frightened for Anambra State – let me restrict myself to admitting that I felt very repulsed. Repulsed, yes, but not in any unfamiliar manner. I was repulsed and chagrined by the acme of indecency, boorishness, uncouthness, rudeness and mindlessness exhibited by Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu and how some Nigerians like them can easily prostitute themselves because of gold and silver. The vitriol and delirium tremens indiscreetly emitted by these hired goons can, to say the least, almost make one to throw-up. But afterwards, I pulled myself together, thinking, well, why not? As they say in Nigeria, “Man go chop“!

No doubt, the chutzpah and zealotry of Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu – a Catholic knight for that matter! – plainly signify their desperation for filthy lucre. But rather than coming up with a cerebral refutation to Okey Ndibe’s accusation that their pay master and the incubus of Anambra State, “Dr” Andy Uba, is a fraudulent impostor and a FAKE PhD, this besotted duo went berserk and they were barking like angry, hungry Rottweiler whose bone has just been taken away from him! They unanimously declared to the whole world that they are shameless and unconscionable. But instead of dialectically advancing their polemic with intellection and ratiocination, these amateur writers descended into abyss of virulence and, in the process, inanely got themselves entangled in the labyrinth of obtuse argumentation.

I ask: What exactly did these factotums hope to accomplish by shamelessly dancing naked in the Villagesquare and stamping simpleton on their thick foreheads? Jerome Azubuko, especially, exemplified his remarkable mastery in idiocy by moronically calling Professor Okey Ndibe a failure and a daft! Going by the dictionary meaning, a failure is regarded as “a person with a record of failing; someone who loses consistently”. Given the way “Dr” Andy Uba gaudily lavished his “money” during the last (s)election in Anambra State, giving out cash, cars, Okadas, et al, to some lucky folks from Anambra who were fortunate to have had a taste of the National cake, and for Supreme Court to have ruthlessly BOOTED him out of office barely two weeks into office, who indeed is the failure? Who is the loser?

Again I ask: Between an erudite and accomplished University professor, Okey Ndibe, and a failed politician and villainous high-school drop-out, whose intellectual incapableness makes him to inferiorly but pretentiously don the accoutrement of a PhD, “Dr” Andy Uba, who is the failure? It figures! Or, to use Dr Martin Luther King’s succinct neology, it is self-evident!

In the English language figure of speech, such incongruity parroted by Jerome Azubuko is regarded as irony! I almost became unconscious with laughter when I read that asinine part of Jerome Azubuko’s gobbledegook. But what I have failed to come into terms with is whether Jerome Azubuko was merely being satirical with that silly comment or just deliberately being stupid or both.

Before we proceed, let us take a brief excursion into a recent report written by Lydia Polgreen, the West Africa bureau chief of The New York Times, on the development arising in Nigeria over the April general elections. Lydia Polgreen reports:

“…this year’s election was little different. The report contends that Mr. Uba arranged for his brother, Andy, a close adviser to Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president, to win the party’s primary as nominee for governor, using a feared street gang known as the Buccaneers to clear voters from polling stations while gang members marked the ballots”.

Lydia Polgreen’s aforementioned comment needs no special explanation or adornment; it literally mirrors its syntax: Yes, he, Andy Uba, used street gang – Buccaneers – to mark the ballots. Again, Lydia Polgreen, under the auspices of the findings of Human Rights Watch on Nigeria’s general elections, writes how these Uba-hired Buccaneers unscrupulously orchestrated their brigandage: “In the primaries we carried axes and machetes and chased away any voters that came near while we were voting,” one member of the Buccaneers told Human Rights Watch, according to the report”.

Not only that, even Lydia Polgreen, an oyinbo woman based in Dakar Senegal, is aware of that Andy Uba’s ignominious heist of ferrying $170,000 with Obasanjo’s presidential plane to the United States a few years ago! Just hear from the horse’s mouth, straight from the world’s most reputable newspaper outlet – New York Times: Andy Uba, who was questioned by United States customs officials on suspicion of smuggling $170,000 into the United States aboard Mr. Obasanjo’s presidential plane in 2003, coasted to victory after the Independent National Electoral Commission disqualified his main opponents. A court later ruled that Mr. Obi had been deprived of his full four-year term and reinstated him…“The authors of Anambra’s worst abuses — including murder, illegal possession of weapons and the wholesale rigging of the 2007 electoral process in the state — continue to enjoy complete impunity for their crimes,” the report contends.”

Can you just imagine that? That is the shameless scoundrelly fugitive, Andy Uba, the whole world knows! Yet, in the balderdash scribbled by this irreparably jaded jughead, Jerome Azubuko, he claims that “Dr” Andy is desperate to reclaim his mandate! Who dash monkey banana? Who gave Andy Uba the mandate? Was Jerome Azubuko undergoing a mind-bending therapy or he suffered cretinism from infancy or he was being plainly stupid to be nauseatingly writing this hogwash or he was just mischievously toying with our emotions? On the day of this so-called “do-or-die” election in Anambra State, to use to use Chidi Anyaeche’s emotional expression, “Ikemba could not vote, the Obi of Onitsha could not vote, Governor Peter Obi could not vote, Senator Ben Obi could not vote, Okeke, Okafor, Okonkwo and Okoye could not vote, for there was no voting facility for them to exercise their mandate and yet INEC magically declared Andy Uba a winner...” (emphasis mine). Then, who voted for Andy Uba?

Every living soul in Nigeria nay the whole world, except the wretched, petrified souls like Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu, knows that what happened in Anambra on April 14^th can never be regarded as election! Never! But the shameless horde of hungry, wretched, begrimed scallywags like Jerome Azubuko, Chuka Nwosu and their ilk, who have sold their conscience for a mess of porridge, still impetuously beleaguer us by claiming that Andy Uba won election in Anambra State in a landslide!

But thank goodness, the Supreme Court spared Nigeria the agony of feebly grudging in the impuissance of watching Andy Uba occupy the seat of Anambra Governorship undeservedly! He was kicked out like David Beckham kicked away the ball when he played that infamous penalty kick against Portugal in Euro-2004 Nation’s cup! Legally and historically speaking, by the time the names of Governors of Anambra are chronicled for posterity, Uba’s name will not even be there! Because, as their learned Lordships of the Supreme Court immutably pronounced, the (s)election which Uba massively rigged, which he conspiratorially got his opponents disqualified at the behest and obsequiousness of one incurably accursed looney known as Maurice Iwu, is a nullity! This is worse than a nightmare for Andy Uba and his dimwitted goons like Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu! If you are looking for a pragmatic synonym for the word “loser”, don’t go farther; it is “Andy-Uba”!

What I found most repugnant in Jerome Azubuko’s bilious banality was this following fatuous comment: “…He lacks the courage to personally meet with Dr. Uba. He contents and consoles himself with sending devious emissaries. He dares not confront Dr. Uba one-on-one! What did immortal Julius Caesar say about people such as Okey Ndibe?…Why did Ndibe not catalogue himself as one of the state’s achievers? Uba is already listed. Okey Ndibe should, therefore, bow and worship and by so, pave the way for his own greatness. This is an Igbo proverb”.

Who the hell is Andy Uba that Professor Okey Ndibe must bow to and worship?! The sanity of Jerome Azubuko is undoubtedly questionable!

If tatterdemalion rapscallions like him, Chuka Nwosu and their ilk have resigned their fate that they can never succeed in their inauspicious lives again and, therefore, the only way to elevate their miserable existence from the nadir of poverty, squalor and abjectness to prosperity is to bow down and worship a notorious parvenu like Andy Uba, I say good for them. But I reject that for Professor Okey Ndibe! God forbid! Light and darkness no dey see each other for eye. In the elegant philosophical words of Dr Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, Truth cannot succumb to the taunts of political jobbery. Purity cannot be arraigned in the courts of unworthiness. Christ can never reply to a Pilate, compromised by his inordinate and avaricious love of power. A man of honour, Professor Okey Ndibe, can never even sit together with a contemptibly hated outlaw, Andy Uba. Doing what? What would they be doing or discussing?!

Then finally, henceforth, I forbid Okey Ndibe and other reasonable Nigerians to continue referring to Andy Uba as a man of “stupendous wealth”. Where is the wealth? The mere fact that his vast money is inversely proportional to his commonsense doesn’t mean he is wealthy! True Wealth can only come by sweating and working hard! When talking about wealth, you talk about moral capital, you talk about dignity, you talk about honour, you talk about glory, you talk about integrity, you talk about credibility! All these, Andy Uba has none but he merely licentiously and avariciously amassed money whilst serving as a glorified houseboy to Obasanjo in Aso-Rock.

When will say, for instance, that Andy Uba is stupendously wealthy, we inadvertently give him a sadistic impetus to ostentatiously abuse our sensibilities and allow his disgustingly dishonorable charlatans like Jerome Azubuko and Chuka Nwosu to grandiosely thumb their dripping dirty noses at us. Stupendous wealth my foot! When talking about intellectual acumen, Andy Uba is a pauper. Talk about entrepreneurial and managerial skillfulness, he is zilch. Where was he in 1999 prior to Obasanjo’s government – the fetid, corrupt government that gave imprimatur to a thieving dunderhead like him to pilfer from the Nation’s wealth? He is just a wretched “money-miss-road” who only had unbridled access to gravy tap because his incompetent patriarch was, most unfortunately, Nigeria’s president for eight years! Talk about literacy, he is nada. Money can lose its value. But there is no way money can replace honor, good name, respect, dignity and wisdom that Okey Ndibe possesses in overflow of abundance, which he, Andy Uba, can NEVER have.

And the kind of money that Andy Uba has and the power he criminally wedges is what the Yorubas refer to as “ile ti a fi ito mo, iri ni o wo”. Translation: “The house built with spittle will be collapsed by the blowing wind”. And the Supreme Court’s wind-blowing historic verdict which collapsed the house he built with spittle on April 14 2007, where he mysteriously had more votes than the number of registered voters, is, ontologically speaking, just a harbinger of what will always become of his evil and devious machinations.