By Jude Atupulazi
Soludo is a proud man and rightly so. Not many governors in Nigeria are professors. But even at that, not all professors are as known or as accomplished as Soludo who hit national and international consciousness during his time as the Governor of the nation’s Central Bank (CBN).
Today, he is the Governor of difficult Anambra State and is marking two years in the saddle as Governor. Soludo cannot afford to fail as Governor and this is because proud people abhor failure as it hurts their pride. I have never doubted Soludo’s capacity to succeed. As a student, he blazed the trail all the way, coming out tops each time.
As the CBN Governor, he proved to be the best ever and took daring decisions that changed the country’s banking narrative. Thus, as the Governor of a state today, one can say that it is a given that he will also succeed, just like Chris Ngige and Peter Obi before him did.
But what Soludo has in what I will call academic intellect, he seems to lack in what I call street wisdom or what others can describe as tact or diplomacy. If Soludo were a boxer, he would be a very direct puncher indeed.
He would have little or no time for feints. He would be a Mike Tyson in his prime: taking all opposition head-on and punching away in brutal fashion. And there lies what many see as his likely hubris, that kind of pride that leads to a person’s downfall; a tragic flaw; a chink in the armour.
A sample of his lack of tact was his famous Part One letter to Peter Obi during the latter’s presidential aspiration. It was a letter that was totally unprovoked, unnecessary and vindictive; so much so that it left many in shock. Soludo had promised to write a second part of that letter which, however (and thankfully so) never came, probably because of the public outcry and condemnation that trailed the first.
What irked many was the fact that the man against whom he wrote the letter had never directly referred to him or provoked him. It also came at a time most Nigerians lined behind Obi across party lines. Even over 80% of members of Soludo’s party, the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, voted for Obi for the simple reasons that it was the turn of the South East and that Obi was the best of the major candidates at the time.
So how Soludo came up with the idea that Obi was not good enough still beats me. For how could anyone indeed see an Obi and go for either Tinubu or Atiku? I don’t want to talk about Kwankwaso.
Many wondered if Soludo listened to his advisers before writing that letter. Really, till now, I’m yet to fathom what drove Soludo to write that vitriolic missive. Could it have been pride?
Today, Soludo has, like a punch drunk boxer, walked into hard punches he should have easily avoided. Recall his spats with traditional rulers and the Catholic Church. In the first one, he suspended a traditional ruler for conferring a chieftaincy title on a political opponent.
Although he would come out to say that rules were breached in the conferment, not a few read between the lines as to the real motive behind the suspension, especially as such conferment of titles had been going on for long, even before he came on board as Governor.
The consensus was that he should have let sleeping dogs lie. As a leader, it is not everyone who casts a stone at you that you pursue, otherwise you suffer unwanted distractions. All the brouhaha raised by that suspension would not have happened had Soludo ignored the conferment.
I said and still insist that had the Igwe of Neni conferred a chieftaincy title on a personality like Chief Emeka Anyaoku or on the APGA National Chairman without informing Soludo, Soludo would not have suspended the Igwe. That is for sure.
The second spat which was with the Catholic Church was his untactful berating of the family of Rev Fr Emmanuel Obimma of the Ebube Muonso fame during the funeral of one of their parents.
Right in front of the Catholic Archbishop of Onitsha, Soludo took the microphone and berated the family for not cutting costs for the funeral. An angry Archbishop Valerian Okeke had fired back and wondered why he should leave all the pressing issues in the state to be delving into who spent what or not in a funeral.
See, I’ve always been against ostentatious funerals and have welcomed any move to stop such and will continue to do so. But a more tactful Soludo would have pulled his punches and quietly approached the bereaved family afterwards to make his point. Again, this spat was avoidable because the Igbo say that ”na okwu na aso anya”.
It means that one should not say certain things before certain people out of respect. But Soludo went into the fray in brutal fashion and disturbed the hornets’ nest and the hornets came after him by way of the Archbishop’s response and the uproar from the citizenry after that.
Away from these spats, Soludo has been able to attract other controversies as bees are attracted to honey and chief of these are his handling of the menace of agberos (touts) and street traders.
When he came on board, Soludo had made it clear that he was going to fight touts and put a halt to their activities. I’m sure not one person opposed this as these touts had been giving citizens hell. But today, despite Soludo’s efforts at, and claims of, dealing with the touts, they seem to have even become more menacing. It was for this reason that he formed the Special Anti-Touting Squad, otherwise known as SASA.
This squad has been doing a good job generally. But within the week they committed a howler when they released a viral video of where they were mauling a man (Mgbilimgba) accused of engaging in touting. They were beating him with a pestle and seemed intent on breaking all his bones as he bled from the wounds.
This had caused a general outcry, even among those who hate touts. The chief argument was that such a dehumanizing treatment of the man should not have been made to go viral as it was brutish and did not speak well of a state, governed by a professor.
Although the man was later understood by people, as one of the brains behind the touting menace in Onitsha, the manner of his handling remained abhorrent. It was a good thing that the Commissioner for Homeland Affairs, Mr Chikodi Anarah, had weighed in on the matter and promised to identify and punish the SASA officials behind the horror show as seen in the viral video. Indeed, what the SASA officials did was what one should expect from a mob, rather than a government agency.
Away from that, we have seen traders, especially women, crying and cursing the government because their wares were not only scattered but in one instant burnt. That was savage.
That kind of thing should not be happening in any civilized clime. The crime of those traders was only that they operated on the roadsides. In this period of crippling economic hardship, the government officials should have applied more civilized means in handling that matter. Even now, about a month later, they don’t seem to have learned any lesson, for just two Fridays ago, I saw a team of those officials storm Aroma Junction in Awka around 7.30 pm and carted away, the food items of women. Given the notoriety of such officials, there was every indication that those food items they carted away would be eaten by them which made the motive for storming there at that late hour all the more obvious.
Traders’ shanties are also being destroyed across the state, with the government later disclosing that it would build some shops to accommodate those who were dislodged. But what happens in the space between the completion of the shops and the time the traders will wait?
The government would have shown it had the milk of human kindness, if it had first built the shops and allocated them to the traders before embarking on wholesale destruction of their goods or wares. Perhaps government does not know that that business done by these traders mean the world to them. It means survival or dying. There are many families today who cannot feed more than twice a day.
The other day a young man walked up to where I parked and told me he wanted money to buy food and that his father had retired from the civil service. He didn’t know I needed help myself. He said he was an apprentice but that they did not work that day. Now, assuming his mother is among those selling by the roadside, whose goods were destroyed, it is anyone’s guess how they will be faring now.
Thus, although the government’s intentions of dislodging the traders are genuine, government is adopting the wrong approach. You cannot beautify the environment at the expense of lives. So, a better planning would have ensured that government’s plans are achieved without much suffering by the people.
All these actions make the public see Soludo as a hard man, a wicked man. The other day a woman whose wares were destroyed was seen crying and raining curses on the governor and praying that it would never be well with him and his family.
Well, I’m not sure Soludo is either bad or wicked but because of the activities of his appointees, some people are now having negative perceptions of him. And for these things to have gone on up till now without much changes, many will believe those people are doing the bidding of the one who pays them.
This is therefore, a call to the governor to rein in his boys, have them properly educated on how to deal with people and always be ready to promptly discipline those who go off the rail. The Commissioner’s promise to deal with those behind the viral video of the beating of the man called Mgbirimgba is a step in the right direction, as continued display of what we call ”I don’t care attitude” will cause the government more harm than good.
In all, however, I remain convinced that Soludo will succeed in transforming Anambra. But he has to go about it in better ways. Good luck to him.
