Governor Samuel Ortom has been trending for two days. I consider him a failed governor, so I did not even want to listen to his trending speech on armed herdsmen and the FG’s complicity.
All I know is that most of the people sharing the speech (more like a rant) are southerners, and that these southerners are commending Ortom for being a courageous truth speaker to power, a sharp contrast to, and a model for, their own allegedly cowardly governors.
In Nigeria, it is quite easy to become a political hero. Like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, a politician can be wrong on a thousand things, fail to rise to the minimum expectation of his people, and cause their state’s fortunes to decline by decades, but if said governor opportunistically finds a winning issue and latches onto it, they becomes an instant hero.
This is the story of Samuel Ortom. Because Benue was and still is a site of massacres perpetrated by invading armed herdsmen tacitly tolerated if not goaded on by presidential aloofness, a politically embattled Ortom, who initially resisted the grassroots push for a ban on open grazing, seized on the issue and it won him reelection.
Today, herdsmen terrorism is a gift that keeps giving to Ortom politically. As the herdsmen terrorism issue refuses to go away, spreading and dominating headlines across the country, Ortom has become an avatar of resistance.
He has a keen sense of timing. He timed his earlier resistance to coincide with his re-election effort. He timed his present “activism” to coincide with the height of national anxiety about the violent menace of armed herdsmen. The political effect and the dividend to him personally have been remarkable.
In politics timing is everything. A governor who has failed woefully in all the indices of governance and performance found a winning issue and is milking it for all it’s worth, carefully timing his interventions to win himself maximum national and local sentimental plaudits.
Crafty opportunism and strategic timing have combined to rehabilitate a flailing governor.
But the governor would not be in this position if his state had not been decimated by rampaging armed herdsmen invaders enabled by a side-taking federal government. Nor would he be in this position if the Benue people haven’t had to contend with the existential threat posed to them by armed herdsmen and other imported Fulani militia.
Successful governor or not, the ultimate protection for a political leader is alignment with his/her people’s most consequential existential aspirations and anxieties. In the future, few people will remember the failures of Ortom if he keeps speaking out against marauding herdsmen militia and bandits and their rhetorical enablers in Aso Rock.
Ortom may be profiting from herdsmen terrorism but he didn’t create it, and the federal government did not help matters by taking sides and enabling the terrorists.
Ortom’s newfound heroism on the herdsmen issue is a nightmare for Aso Rock, but the undeserved heroism is a creation of Buhari’s parochial, divisive, and side-taking ethnic supremacist politics.