Agba baller
How much is money (it’s nothing)
Balling, balling
Premium or nothing
Luxury or nothing
Money is talking
Now you know
Ebelebe ga-egbu
Fa ga-ekwete na o na-eme
Ayagaya, mbombom… (Abridged lyrics, by Flavour)
HOPE AND CHIOMA’S BIG PARTY: The party has continued to trend endlessly on social media. Let’s call it the grandma of all parties. Governor Hope and his wife, Chioma Uzodinma’s 10th anniversary wedding shindig on January 3 didn’t only kick off 2025, it will be the gig to beat in a long time. Party freaks like Cubana Chief Priest, Tony Elumelu and Dele Momodu would need to raise their game this year to match Uzodinma and Chioma’s achievement of staging a monumental revel.
FLAVOUR ON BANDSTAND: Like the cliché goes, it was a high-octane show by every measure. It had to be the rave of the moment, Flavour, who serenaded the couple, their children, and the epicurean horde that filled the expansive hall.
Everyone clout-chasing, two-bit politician abd popinjay was there and the dance floor was electric.
One had never seen people dance so raucously. It was as if they were experiencing rapture and ecstasy simultaneously. A man, a full grown, perhaps a grandpa was caught twisting and twerking like an expired gigolo. Even court jesters of yore never tried this much to catch the eye of emperors.
BILLION NAIRA SHOW: A casual audit would put the party at conservatively, billion naira. The tent alone would probably take about half a billion to set up and tush up. Chioma’s entire get-up alone has been estimated at a sundry million dollars.
In Nigeria, when tending to the personal delights of government officials, costs are not spared. When Presidents, governors or LGA chairmen defile the treasury, when they poke their iniquitous fingers, they are ‘impunituous’!
So on array were the best wines, spirits, cocktails and mocktails. Food ranged from the exotic to the outlandish. From the trending video clips, EXPRESSO saw giant lobsters marinated in what could have been barracuda sauce. There was also on parade, little cauldrons of exotic dishes still sizzling as waiters moved about with them. Nothing but the ‘very’ best from the first family.
“How much is money
Money is talking
Premium or nothing… ”
FIFTH ANNIVERSARY SHOW: About the same time the Governor’s matrimonial epoch was buzzing, the 5th anniversary of his ascension to power also kicked in on the 14th of January. EXPRESSO caught the Governor’s media chat on radio. But it was more of a media hangout than a chat.
Every question was preceded by a mile-long verbiage of praise-singing instead of a performance review. One heard something like, “We appreciate the bus you donated to us four years ago; we celebrate you, we love you, when will you have breakfast meeting with us, etc.”
Almost all the appointees had taken out pages in newspapers to congratulate the one they variously describe as “hero of our time; the greatest governor since Mbakwe; the Iroko of the southeast, “ etc.
It’s worse with the PDP decampees who are currently acting like decapitated sheep, thrashing about in the throes of life and death.
EXPRESSO is of a mind to name some of them but in their current political limbo, their suffering is full and complete as it is already.
A CAPTURED STATE: Imo is a captured state that has been consumed by a peculiar retrogressive inertia since Hope Uzodinma hijacked her on January 14, 2020. That was the day a panel of the Supreme Court lead by Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun (now CJN) gang-raped Lady Justice in broad daylight.
The panel pulled the most savage jurisprudential heist since Nigeria’s independence. The panel made a non-contender in the 2019 Imo guber election, the winner.
THE EASY PART: As Nigerians have experienced in recent years with presidents Buhari and Tinubu, finagling with the polls and stealing a mandate is usually the easy part. Running a government, administering a state and managing the complex art of statecraft is often the tough job. If you don’t have the acumen, discipline, capacity and vision to run the behemoth called a state, you simply don’t have it. Buhari didn’t have it. So is Tinubu, and so is Governor Hope Uzodinma.
This explains why for the last five years, Imo has bled profusely. Apart from a couple of roads, Imo has witnessed no progress or development. Uzodinma has been unable to set in motion any integrated development programme or initiate a broad based multi-sectorial approach to governance.
Even the insecurity that has dogged his administration from day one seems poised to stump him to a sorry end as he doesn’t seem to have any answer to the problem.
IMO FALLEN BEHIND AMONG SE STATES: No discerning Imolite needs a proof that the state has deteriorated vastly under Uzodinma. But should you need any evidence, development stats from the NBS show that Imo is today, the least state in the southeast in nearly all HD indicators. Abia currently tops in education indices. A position held by Imo State for many years.
For the sycophants hailing Uzodinma, we know they are speaking through their stomachs. We know that subservience and obsequiousness are all that work in Imo today and not duty or good sense. Uzodinma has so immiserated the state that poverty is now rife.
EXPRESSO had proffered ideas here a couple of times but it has become clear that you can’t give what you don’t have. Uzodinma is apparently doing his best, but his best is much below par, unfortunately. Just like Rochas Okorocha, this is another debacle, another 8 years lost and unaccounted for.
LIKE ROCHAS, LIKE HOPE: EXPRESSO wagers that no elected public official in ordered climes would throw such a wasteful party or exhibit such wanton bazaar called wedding anniversary! Imagine a US state governor exhibiting such show of reckless affluence.
EXPRESSO would rather prefer that Uzodinma’s model public schools and rural health centres were trending on social media as the best in Nigeria or Africa.
But as the pictures below show, most of the schools, rural hospitals and other social amenities in Imo State are neglected and in decrepit state under Uzodinma. Enlightened leaders the world over understand that education is the most important factor to the growth and development of any society. How come Hope doesn’t seem to know this basic fact? Just walk into any public school in Imo State and you would immediately know the quality of Governor Hope Uzodinma’s mind.
Like Rochas, this current iberiberism shall also pass… soon.
▪︎Osuji was editor with The Guardian, THISDAY and NewAge. He was also for nine years, Editorial Board member at The Nation Newspapers
Feedback: steve.osuji@gmail.com
▪︎OSUJISTEVE/17.01.25
