These are not the best of times for political opposition in Nigeria today. With the ship of state sailing at a fast pace to berth at the proposed 2007 harbour, there is a frenetic dissipation of energy to ensure that those who man the sentry of governance in Nigeria are replaced by sundry men strategically listed on the opposition’s preference list. Agreed, all over the world, these are indeed very tension-soaked times, when both people in government desirous of retaining their hold and those who thirst for a taste of the pie engage in struggles to gain the heart of the electorate, in a Third World like Nigeria, this battle is fought with a combination of blood, naked lies and wicked subversion of all ethics of civility. As such, all that is foul, in this business of ensuring a change of guards, is fair.

It is also a time of acute profiteering for the mercenaries of power. Mercenaries of power are the horde of otherwise talented young men and women – apology to the womenfolk, this battle of hate scarcely parades the female gender – most of whom have been yanked off ventures from where they scooped a livelihood. Among their rank are frustrated political harlots who, like scarlet women, have seen the nakedness of power as much times as a fisherman would see shrimps. For them, the 2007 mercenary business is viewed from the prism of commerce: how much accrues to their illicit purses after yet another romance with the bloody ambition of their newfound principal.

Among these political mercenaries, unfortunately, are those who are professional Judases who have made a business of stabbing their beneficiaries in the back. At every run to election year, they always evaluate the stand of their gluttony and do not think twice in jumping loyalty. That they built houses, bought cars, sent their children to school and retain fat chunks of good living on account of their association with their former principal does not count to the political mercenary. Such people would kill their father and frame their mother for the murder so far the price is right.

Give it to the political opposition: they are very negatively brilliant people. Having weighed the passion, the craving and weaknesses of the mass of the people, they came to an apt conclusion, just like Richard Joseph, Emory University scholar of Political Science who did a ground-breaking analysis of the Nigerian and came to the conclusion that Nigerians have very short memories. The opposition rifle through this weakness and begin to pummel the masses’ cognition with fabricated untruths, in the hope that all previous regards for the man in office would fall like badly placed cards. As such, if you do a content analysis of Nigerian newspapers today, mercenaries are trying to outdo one another in the business of mudslinging. These are the moments when ‘exposes’ jam one another for attention. The pattern of the mercenaries’ activities is easily discernible: search for the areas of strength of their target and pollute his rivers with a combination of lies and blackmail.

Perhaps because of the acephalous nature of the Igbo race and their republican political system, this mercenary job is done in Igboland, not only in a survival-of-the-fittest fashion, but in a dog eat dog shamelessness. And because of the massive takes involved, Enugu State is today at a center of a brackish mercenary politicking that is probably unprecedented in the history of opposition battles in a Third World country. I talk about the peculiarly massive takes involved for many reasons which I would presently now outline.

Like many emergent African societies, Enugu State, since its creation from the old Anambra State in August, 1991, had been under the vice hold of a cabal of some elderly Waawa people who, give it to them, fought acidulously for the realization of the ambition of the people of the area to have a state of their own. These people strategized day and night, networking ceaselessly, to have the then military government proclaim the state. And as such, when the state was pronounced, the reverence with which the people hold these fathers of the state became legendary. A few of them have proceeded from the ashes of these acclaims to the seat of government, raking unprecedented patrimony in lands and cash. Some of them raked in theirs in unbridled godfatherism that ensured that their fief hold on the throat of emerging political configurations in the state was both awesome and frightening. The latter also benefited financially by having their till filled to the brim by emerging political godsons who sought their blessings to fulfill their ambitions.

It was in the midst of this scenario that Chimaroke Ogbonia Nnamani came to the configuration at about 1996. The young man, armed with a successful medical career in the United States and desirous of helping the Waawa man’s hands that bent over backwards to make him what he was, mouthed a refrain of seeking power to do good. The cabal looked at him with astonishing contempt, wondering what impudence could make a man crave a food consecrated to the gods and their hirelings. They spat at him, mocked his innocence but the young man kept trudging forward until he secured the mandate to occupy the seat of governance styled the Lion Building. But the young man parted ways with them at an intersection where they demanded the soul, blood and flesh of the people he swore to defend with the last pint of their blood. How does anyone give regards to a geriatric leadership that seeks to collect rent and royalty from the state till simply because they fought for its realization?

And so, the founders cabal is seething angry at that ‘little brat’. They marvel at the temerity of a young man who would not agree to suffuse his cabinet with their half-baked children and coteries. Why would he say no when they demanded an Anambra-like surrender of the state monthly allocation for the anointed geriatrics to take their swallow and throw the crumbs to the suffering mass of the people? They could not understand the mindset of a ‘boy’ who, in their calculation, was an outsider among the political geriatrics of the state but whose impervious messiahnism was irritating to them. They cast their minds back to the time when the young man was a toddler in his diapers, at a time when most of them were perfecting the political irritancy of the First Republic. Where was the boy? Can he trace his political genealogy to the Zikism era?

Aware that the first step to take in the task of deflating a man is to paint him black in the eyes of those who love him, the power geriatrics thus embarked on a tar-brush evangelism. Capitalizing on the thirst of the people for the new hope churches and seeing a shining nugget in a religious stampede in the state capital in 2001, the geriatrics quickly recruited a theo-political Catholic Father whose reverence is as short as his height, to do the dirty campaign for them. Prosecuted with a cold-blooded finish, Nnamani had been parceled for the clinchers but for the eventual triumph of good over evil which the holy writ assured. Every scientific process of investigating the poisoned chalice of concoction fell flat on its face.

Yet the geriatric founders cabal would not let him be. Vanquished flatly at the 2003 elections, it was becoming clear to them that the little Agbani boy was prepared to make a mincemeat of a political career of theirs founded on generations of quicksand thirst for the actualization of self and self alone. Unfortunately for them again, the young man keeps on bonding with the people, prosecuting wondrous projects that were thought to be impossible in an emergent Third World country for a departing government that ought to spend its departing time on enriching a private treasury.

So they needed to fight a battle of their lives. It is either that little boy does them in or they incinerate him and his imprimatur. So they fed the meat to the dogs which came in the form of allegations that instantly began to assume the life of a foetus, breathing gradually. Geriatrics who added to their infamous credentials the title of professional petition writers began to dust their skills. Finding a ready tool in the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) that was thirsty to prove its mettle, they mailed this catalogue of wonky petitions to the Commission, backing it up with awesome attempts to capitalize on the media’s thirst for scoops to finish the “little boy”.

Their first recruit was another pseudo-reverend from whom blood of innocent souls, rather than the blood of Christ, trail his rascally local politicking. Pregnant with hate for an administration like the Governor’s that would demand probity and ensure that the wages of rascality are suspension from whatever you think you are using to intimidate the people, the ‘reverend’ became a willing recruit. Joined in the forge by a combination of hate-pregnant former beneficiaries of Nnamani’s benevolence and largesse, some former aides with ability to write but with souls as dark as a gold smithy, the stage was set for the fabrications, the cut-and-pasting. Funds also came from a national gavel that is pregnant with misgivings. Their major goal was to reduce the high-flying governor in the estimation of President Olusegun Obasanjo, who sees the young medical doctor as an example of loyalty and uses Enugu as a model of the success of his democratic intervention in the polity, in the estimation of the people, his friends and sundry allies.

But because in all these, they underplayed the role of God and the conquest of evil by good, not only have the EFCC operatives, after the initial playing to the klieg by the opposition, seen the constitution of the mud-slinging, they have come to strengthen the resolve of the Nnamani administration that good would always prevail over evil. In the process of the investigation by the EFCC, the organization had cause to visit the Enugu State University of Technology (ESUT’s) state-of-the-art multi gigantic structures, built from the scratch; the revolutionary infrastructural multiplication of the ESUT Teaching hospital that is one of the wonders of a Third World Nigeria, the first Underground Tunnel in Nigeria, the 18-Court room complex of the Judiciary Headquarters, the International Conference Centre and the several estates that the Enugu government has built with scarce collections from the revenue allocation.

As it has turned out, the geriatrics have, unwittingly, brought federal attention to Enugu State. Not only have they given their nemesis, Nnamani, an opportunity to showcase what he has done in the last seven years as a way of putting a lie to the cache of untruths being peddled by the professional mercenaries, their leading gavel in Abuja and the geriatric founders who are incensed by the stoppage of their agelong God-playing in Enugu politics, they have afforded the EFCC people an opportunity to sing along with the Ebeano family: to God be the glory.

*Aka is a management consultant and writer based in Aba, Abia State.