The outing of Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom state into the pulic glare shortly after a security meeting the governors had with President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa on Thursday last week was like one shooting self in the chest.
In deed, it was like a good footballer, who after dribbling all the opponents and instead of shooting into the opponents’ net, turned, ran amoc back into his eighten and scored self-goal deliberately.
A few minutes after the Thursday’s meeting, chairman of Greenbarge Media and Communications Limited, a veteran Journalist himself, phoned me to express his disappointment on the fact that Governors from the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) shunned such a very imprtant security meeting as some online media featured it.
“You can see how the APC plays politics even with security matter that should have been the preoccupation of every Nigerian, irrespective of political or religious affiliation,” he raved on.
When I told him that Governor Akpabio had briefed newsmen to say that the APC governors were not invited; that it was a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) affair, the chairman changed his anger: “why would PDP arrogate to itself the matter that ought to cut across party lines?” He dismissed the excuse given by governor Akpabio to the effect that the President had scheduled an enlarged security meeting with all the 36 governors of the federation as an after-thought.
Even though, a press statement issued by Dr. Reuben Abati, the President’s special adviser on media and publicity the previous day had clearly stated that all the (36) governors were scheduled to hold the meeting with the President, the attempt by governor Akpabio to show that APC governors were deliberately excluded was a direct indictment on the PDP and technically exonerated APC governors from any blame.
In any case, it would have made a lot of sense if, assuming Governor Akpabio was right, the APC were actually made part of that Thursday’s meeting which was at the period the Nyanya bomb blast and abduction of dozens of female students in Borno state were still fresh and burning across the country. This is saying that it did not make any security and political sense for PDP to make the Thursday meeting more of a party affair, using it as a springboard for an all-inclusive governors’ meeting at the date the freshness of the circumstances that called for such meeting would have frozen into the air.
Undoubtedly, governor Akpabio, as usual, had intended to injure the APC by implying that it’s governors’ presence at such meeting had no value-added to the solution to the security challenges: that PDP had all it takes to face the challenges, but what he had simply succeeded in doing was to belittle the magnitude of the situation at hand and above all, resorted to politicking in a matter as universally dangerous to the corporate existence of this country and collective happiness of all, I mean, all the citizenry.
The governor had successfully played into the hand of APC, which simply cuncur later, when the heat was on, that it’s governors were actually not invited to the meeting with the President.
You can see what talking too much, and wanting at all times to undo the ‘enemies’ can cause even to one self?
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