Politics-Nigeria - For a while now, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, the National Chairman of the All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP) has had a field-day in the media, celebrating his customary political style. He has been propagating lame-duck opposition parties as formidable force in Ebonyi State. He blackmails the Martin Elechi-led P.D.P. government of the state, accusing the Governor of banning the ANPP from holding its campaign rallies at Abakaliki. Onu wrote to the President of the Federal Republic, complaining of Elechi's so-called excesses, and pleading with the President to redeem his promise to provide a level playing ground for all political parties in order to ensure free and fair elections in April 2011.

In his response, the President advised Governor Martin Elechi to allow the rally to hold, but with a high security alert and vigilance. During the ANPP presidential rally, which eventually held at Abakaliki one week behind schedule, Dr. Onu did not disappoint his supporters by pouring abuses on the Governor of his state. One speaker after another followed in his footsteps by threatening fire and brimstone on Governor Martin Elechi.

The point of emphasis is that Onu's political style is both conspiratorial and foxial. He and his cohorts perceive elections as battles and politics as warfare. Their design is not to win Ebonyi at the polls through the ballot, but to take it by force with bullets.

The name of the game by the Ebonyi Chapter of the ANPP is civil strife, which aims at making Ebonyi State ungovernable, so that 2011 elections would be nullified and a state of emergency imposed on the state. This plot is a platform for hoodlums, or for men and women who want to get rich quick and die fast.

There is nothing democratic in Onu's feudalistic concept of party politics as a contest of guts between stakeholders in the process. The rule is zero-sum, whereby the winner takes all. For Onu, God always forgives the winner but forgets the loser. So, even if you forgive your enemies you do not forget their names. For Onu also, the concepts of "opposition politics", "level-playing ground", "or free and fair elections", are a decoy and embroidery for satanic political forces, a refuge for rogues.

Onu's media blitz and propaganda against his state of origin have been so total that the press, both print and electronic, has been talking about how Governor Martin Elechi muzzles the opposition, especially the lack-luster ANPP.

But a man who is already down does not fear another fall again. The media has literarily converted political monsters in Ebonyi into martyrs.

Even the presenter of an FM radio phone-in program in Abuja went the extra mile of casting aspersions on Governor Elechi as an old man who must step down if he is afraid of the future, rather than blocking the opposition led by saints like Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, Frank Ogbuewu and Julius Ucha. But an intimate biographical profile on these men and what they have stood for in Ebonyi politics for decades reveal that a monster is essentially a monster and cannot be beautified even by plastic surgery.

Despite the heat and pressure in the air-waves against Elechi, his party and Government, authentic majority opinion holds that the so-called opposition parties complain rather than campaign, hoping, by so doing, to attract the sympathy and votes of the population. That is exactly the opposition stuff Dr. Onu is made of.

Although a high-brow academic doctor of Chemical Engineering Onu takes this path of least resistance because he has little or no skill in political party organization and grassroots mobilization. Since his days as lecturer, it was not in his character to visit home regularly to communicate with his natives except during electoral periods when he would rush home to join or hijack political parties as a professional gubernatorial aspirant, year-in-year out.

Check his records: Onu has always been there up-north, looking for godfathers to sponsor his gubernatorial ambition. Back home in Ebonyi, he has always failed. But this time, (around 2011), his gambling with the Northern conservative political elite paid off. He was rewarded, cumulatively, with the Chairmanship of the ANPP- a mouth piece of the Northern political class.

Onu equates his ANPP Chairmanship with Federal Presidential power at Aso-Rock. Accordingly, he hallucinates as President, making nationwide radio broadcasts and addressing his listeners like successful coup plotters as fellow country men and women.

For all this, Onu's ANPP does not exist on land, sea or airspace, in and around Ebonyi State. This explains why he took a shortcut to storm Ebonyi with political personnel and forces mobilized from outside to instigate crises. Historically, this has been Dr. Onu's political style in Ebonyi, especially in his gubernatorial contest with Sam Egwu in 1999 and also with Elechi in 2007. So, when Onu spoke of beginning the ANPP Presidential campaign from Abakaliki, Elechi knew what the man meant.

As a more experienced politician, Martin Elechi is in a better position than Onu to know that politics has become a blood curling adventure because of the explosive materials it is made to carry onboard by the men of evil character who now use knives, machetes and Dane-guns as strategic weapons for capturing political power in Ebonyi 2011.

The Onu's philosophy of politics is not a game for the neighbor next door. Players, who are associated with a higher moral plane, cannot make it. In politics, good guys finish last. It is a drama in which all the actors are soaked in blood, sweat and tears. In purely Machiavellian terms, politics is a con-game, where actors play as lions or as foxes, whereas lions are violent and bloody, foxes are ticklish, cunning and pretentious. In political behavior, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu is a combination of the lion and fox.

What is constant about his political style is that he is always neither here nor there, for him politics is a con-game: words do not mean what they say; promises are kept more in the breach than in observance. For us therefore, Dr. Onu must not be judged by what he says but by what he does.

Onwe wrote in from Abakaliki.

James Onwe

Daily Champion/13/04/2011