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By Chidi Obineche
the build up towards the last All Progressives Congress, APC National Executive Council, NEC meeting was both interesting and enervating. The chairman of the ruling party, Chief John Odigie Oyegun was up on a platter for slicing. Various groups within the nation’s ruling party had aggregated their interests around a value chain of mobilizing around a helmsman that would implant the highest bogey advancement in edge.
Permutations ran riot, jostling took dizzying heights, and embedded maneuvers assumed weight and centerpiece. The immediate past governor of his home state, Adams Oshiomhole was daintily positioned to snatch the pie. Tension mounted as anxiety swept through pores and veins. And the moment came without a blot, or whimper. He sallied back convincingly without a broken nail or neck. The organelles of the archetypal cat with nine lives. Flashback to 1992 when he straddled Edo State as governor and the photo finish of his surge to the present seat some three years back. Same pattern, same fate, same currents. And when the cat’s nine lives are investigated, out of the curiosity that killed it as it were, for three he plays, for another three he strays, and for the last three he stays. Oyegun stays. This is the striking difference between a cat and a lie.
The goons, the traducers and hawk predators are the lie. It is the perfect deification of a lifeline; the unmasking of the onion with seven skins. Oyegun carries a cat by the tail and gyrates on the scorched dreams of his detractors. Through time, and this, he lets in on the nuances of the people, what they have done and left undone, what they keep secret and silent, their pranks, lies and what shames them.
As Lilian Jackson Braun once observed, “Cats never strike a pose that isn’t photogenic.” Many in his party now go with Jules Renard that “The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.” They swam with the currents but will adjust the hard way to make swift compromise to the rare grace. Because no one looks at the sleeping cat and gets tense, the APC national chairman may only be interested in the blood that flows from his enemies at every flicking’ turn.
Oyegun may continue to stay serene and mum while the ‘dogs’ will take all the blame for the troubles in the party. In the orchards of ambition, the party hierarchs can join forces with him to travel the seven seas to 2019. Those who love cats may begin in frenzy to explain their worth and like Sigmund Freud, the Austrian philosopher, understand even belatedly that “Time spent with cats is never wasted.” And some know that there is sense in the paw some.
Some others claim he is hanging in on a straw, yet a few insist President Muhammadu Buhari is his lifeline. But who will stumble at a straw? Some may go down to their last straw several times but will never lie down and quit. Will he suck up the straw or mock the straw dogs who thought that by easing him out they will transform water into wine or straw into gold. He has come round the corner evidently shaking off the shackles and amassing the power to spin straw into gold and perhaps, make more bricks. One can hardly stop laughing, examining the straw vote that stayed his course, which only shows which way the hot air blows. They all had a straw somewhere on them. They have done no better than a blue bottle on air.
He was born on August 12, 1939 in Warri, Delta State. He assumed office as APC chairman on June 13, 2014. He attended St Patrick’s College Asaba and then proceeded to the University of Ibadan, UI where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. He then served in various capacities in the federal civil service and retired as a permanent secretary.
He was elected as Edo State governor during the aborted Third Republic and served from January 1992 to November 1993. He later became a leader of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP. He is married to Victoria with children.
