Ime Akpan
Keep your mouth shut
Keep your mouth shut
You’re too leaky, leaky
Keep your mouth shut
Keep your mouth shut
You’re too leaky, leaky
You’d better keep your mouth shut
You’d better keep your eyes open wide
Mind what you do, mind what you say
Look into your life
Because your one big mouth
And your two big eyes
Bound to bound
Bound to get you into trouble, beware
The above lines are taken from a song entitled ‘Keep your mouth shut’ recorded in the 1970s by a Jamaican reggae group, The Pioneers.
Written by George Dekker for the group, the song underscores the importance of weighing one’s words, not talking carelessly because death and life, according to Proverbs 18:21, are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.
The one who has knowledge uses words with restraint, and whoever has understanding is even-tempered. Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.
Talking about unruly tongue, Nigerian politicians have oral diarrhea that has afflicted them for so long. And there seems not to be any cure for it, whether remedial or permanent. They hurl insults at their perceived enemies with reckless abandon.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) senator representing Edo North, Mr Adams Aliu Eric Oshiomhole falls into the category of politicians who speak before they think.
He has been in the storm centre after he launched into a long diatribe against Mrs Betsy Obaseki, wife of the Edo State governor.
Betsy had, at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) campaign which held at Ubiaja township stadium in Esan south-east local government area introduced Ifeyinwa Ighodalo, wife of Asue Ighodalo, PDP governorship candidate.
She claimed that Ighodalo was the only governorship candidate in the September 21 off-cycle governorship in the state who has a wife.
Therefore, she urged women to vote for a candidate who has a wife, adding that it would translate to women empowerment.
“Let us vote for the best candidate in this coming election, and I want to introduce the wife. Incidentally, among all the candidates, only one has a wife, and it’s our own party’s candidate, Asue Ighodalo. Only he has a wife. This is the wife, Mrs Ifeyinwa Ighodalo.
“Edo women, know that only one candidate has a wife. Better things come to women when there’s a woman in the Government House. All women in Edo, regardless of party, should see the candidate who has a wife. They will take us higher,” Betsy stated.
Though she did not specifically mention any candidate as being unmarried, Oshiomhole, according to Tunde Odesola “decided to run the errand meant for media aides and party roughnecks, all for his political son, Monday Okpebholo, the APC governorship candidate.” He reasoned that Obaseki’s wife was making an innuendo about Okpebholo and responded with the vilest language imaginable.
Speaking in a TVC interview, Oshiomhole said: “I was shock yesterday to see Mrs Obaseki, the First Lady, saying that our candidate has no wife; I’m sorry that she has to say that because here’s a woman who has no child. Between him and Obaseki, they have no child, they’re childless. They are even not ready to adopt. I mean, I don’t blame anybody shouldn’t have a child but people who have love for children, go to motherless home(s) and adopt children, they have not adopted, they are both in their 60s.
“So, you married, I don’t know whether it’s a contract one, but whatever it is, but they have no child. Now, our candidate not only has children, he has invested in the education of those children, such that you watch them on live television, covered by your media stations where the first that spoke is a lawyer, the second one is a medical doctor, and they addressed the crowd in Edo-South, in Edo-Central, in Edo-North, and their mother was there.” Sic
Responding, Mrs Obaseki said she is not barren saying being fruitful is not limited to childbearing stressing that it is about impacting lives and creating positive change in society.
“There is no point in feeling bad. Women can fulfill God’s purpose in many ways beyond motherhood,” she said.
She said her contributions to society had gone beyond the biological aspect of motherhood.
Mrs Obaseki who addressed over 200 women via zoom reminded them that everyone was created by God for a purpose.
“My words of comfort to you, like myself, who have conceived and experienced miscarriages, painful stillbirths and evacuations of babies, who died in our wombs and, as a result, have no children to show for the pain we have endured, is that you are not barren.
“I dare to call you fruitful. You and I are potential and proud mothers of children that will come in God’s time. Enjoy the life God has given you. Take your mind off your challenge, and before you know it, children will start coming,” she said
Oshiomhole has been slammed for his unsavoury attack on Obaseki, what with a prominent Lagos-based gender advocacy group, Women for Equality and Empowerment (WEE) describing the senator’s remarks as “disgraceful”, “insensitive”, and “appalling.”
For women groups in Edo State under the aegis of ‘Edo Women’, it is a taboo, a sacrilege and a desecration of Edo land to mock a woman or a couple for not bearing a child. It described Oshiomhole’s conduct as “shameful” and called on all women and couples who have gone through the pain of not bearing a child on time or not having a child at all to “curse this man.”
Oshiomhole is no stranger to careless talk. Rewind the tape to 2019. In January 2019 while campaigning for President Muhammadu Buhari in Edo State, Oshiomhole who was then national chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, urged members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to join the APC so that their sins could be forgiven.
While speaking at the APC rally in Benin, Edo State, where some members of the PDP defected, Oshiomhole declared:
“Mr President, I am told that there are a lot of senior people from PDP who have decided to join forces with President Buhari to take the broom to sweep away PDP to continue to ensure that APC continues to preside over Nigeria.
“The defectors today include my own brother and friend, Henry Tenebe; Iluobe….Iluobe means I have done something wrong. Yes, once you join the APC, your sins are forgiven.”
Back in 2016, the present governor of Edo State, Mr Godwin Obaseki, who is now of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was the candidate of the APC while Mr Osagie Ize-Iyamu was the governorship candidate of the PDP.
Oshiomhole was serving out his eight-year tenure and having for Obaseki as his successor, he told Edo people that Ize-Iyamu could not be trusted.
Despite that Ize-Iyamu was the director general of his re-election 2012 campaign, Oshiomhole used his vile tongue to deal with him throughout the period of campaigns, calling him a fake pastor and a cultist who, during his undergraduate days at the University of Benin, bathed his fellow student with acid and caused him a permanent disability.
He alleged that his former campaign director general was rusticated for two years from the university and “his (Ize-Iyamu’s) father begged and the school allowed him to do ‘patch-patch’ examination, but could not beg them in Lagos to admit him to the Nigerian Law School.
“That’s why, although he read law, he is not a barrister. It is true we found ourselves in the region of politics working together, but I never gave him government job; I never gave him government job, but other people that I trusted.
“I kept him busy holding meetings which he is used to. It is not a mistake. He begged me to make him the director-general of my campaign.
“Now, ask him, since he was the DG, why didn’t I appoint him to government? Cunning man dies, cunning man bury am. I didn’t want to spend my time watching his files; so, I kept him busy; let him be holding midnight meetings where he can tell lies, as many lies as he can; while he is telling lies, I am busy running government,” he said.
Ize-Iyamu was secretary to state government under Lucky Igbinedion, but Oshiomhole alleged that he sabotaged the administration, and that was why he refused to make him part of his government.
“Because, if I did not do that, he could have done to me what he did to Lucky. But when he came to me, we kept him away, no access to public funds and that is how we were able to channel our resources the way that we have done, that today Edo, whether you like it or not, it can’t be like before; it can only get better.
“Look at the road to his house. In our books, was a dual-carriage way. They took the money, they constructed the road near his house; they stopped.
“Can you imagine that? Just to the foot of his gate, the road stopped. Is that the kind of man who wants to lead Edo State?”
By the time he was done, Ize-Iyamu was the most unworthy fellow that even his (Ize-Iyamu’s) family and church members shunned him at the poll and voted for Obaseki.
Four years later when he returned to the APC as its governorship standard bearer, Ize-Iyamu was unelectable as he and his supporters could not undo the negative effects that Oshiomhole’s comments about him in 2016.
He made unsuccessful attempt to convince the Edo people that Oshiomhole’s comments about him were all politics and did not well up from his heart but the first cut had pierced deeper.
“When you look at the context in which he said those things, you will understand that he was just playing politics and he needed to de-market me so that his candidate would have an advantage.
“The truth is that he was only trying to de-market me so that Edo people would not vote for me, not that it was from his heart. And after the election, that was the end of it,” Ize-Iyamu said.
Nevertheless, Ize-Iyamu did not have a dog’s chance of winning even his ward at the poll because as Nigerians would say Oshiomhole finished him in 2016.
In July 2015, Oshiomhole who was on the entourage of President Muhammadu Buhari to the United States announced on their return from the trip that an official in the White House confided in the president that a minister who served in President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration $6 billion (more than N1.2 trillion) as of that time.
“We have moved away from a president that doesn’t seem to know his powers to one that understands that he is a president of the country in the continent.
“PDP destroyed the country- I mean from the lips of American officials; senior officials of the state department. They said one minister under PDP cornered as much as $6 billion, and the man said even by Washington standard that is earth-quaking,” he said, but did not give the name of the minister.
He added: “We are a very patient people. If we were not a patient people, anybody wearing the tag of PDP ought to feel very unsafe because you are all victims- all of us here.”
He did not provide any proof to back his allegation.
During the period also, Oshiomhole who was in his second term as governor of the state announced that former minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, illegally withdrew $1 billion from the federation account to prosecute the re-election bid of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Back in late 2013, Oshiomhole yelled at a woman, Mrs Joy Ifijeh, who was selling her goods along a major road in Benin. He was outraged that the woman hindered the flow of traffic by displaying her wares on the kerbside. He accused the woman of breaching Edo State’s laws against street trading.
Ifijeh was so shaken by Oshiomhole’s anger that she went down on her knees to plead for leniency. Oshiomhole snubbed her pleas. When the poor woman told the governor that she was a widow who deserved to be pitied, Oshiomhole, in a fit of anger, hollered at her: “You are a widow. Go and die!”
From the time he was governor of Edo State, national chairman of the APC and now senator, Oshiomhole has come off as an ultracrepidarian politician.
