Beautiful Shoprite Experience Vs Ugly Fate As Acid Test By Austin Isikhuemen

Politics is an interesting game. In Edo State, it has been doubly so. Politics brings out the hidden contours of the real character of the players. It is not politics that is a dirty game as some folks wrongly assert. It is the players’ dirty ugliness that gets unraveled and is mistaken for politics. Silhouettes that were hitherto subject to misinterpretation were seen in vivid colors when subjected to political contestation in the Nigerian style.

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A gubernatorial candidate campaigned with a plan to bring Shoprite (actually a shopping mall with the ShopRite franchise as a shop among several others) in 2007. To convince the people of Edo State that this shopping experience was only available in Lagos and Port Harcourt as at then, was coming home to Edo, a swampy parcel of land was designated for its construction.

A huge Billboard with the candidate’s portrait was installed at the site. No one driving to the Niger Delta from Benin City or returning to the City could miss this landmark that promised a tantalizing shopping experience.

That candidate, who later spent eight full years as Governor, completed his second tenure in 2016. He left the project that the Edo people were promised undone. The only progress made was the erection of that massive subterfuge of a Billboard by Dumez Road junction on Sapele Road.

There is no better monument to deception and affront to a people’s sensibility and memory. That swamp is still there today. The only beneficiaries are the winners who used that deceit stratagem and the massive toads that croak eerily there at night.

Mr. Godwin Obaseki (now His Excellency) never promised to build a “ShopRite” in 2016. He has built a beautiful Benin City Mall, inclusive of an impressive digital library, along the same Sapele Road at a location easily accessible to all opposite. The Mall has since opened for business.

It is a beautiful edifice to behold. Aesthetically finished and laid out with functionality and shopper experience as a key consideration, the parking lot and general ambiance are a shoppers’ paradise in Benin City. It adds to the general environmental uplift of the former Sapele Road rusty look with the Obaseki touch that starts from the former Central Hospital all the way down to the Murtala Mohammed Way roundabout. 

Senator Adams Oshiomhole, a former Governor of Edo State, former national Labour Leader, and current seating ‘distinguished’ Senator of the Federal Republic representing Edo State in the national legislative upper house. 

His own “ShopRite” legacy is the Billboard on Sapele Road. He is the one threatening to kill Shoprite should it dare to move into their paid-for and legally allocated section of the Benin City Mall. It is this sort of unilateral contract breach that just led to the embarrassing seizure of three Nigerian Presidential aircraft, including one bought without appropriation, in a foreign land. 

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The man issuing this threat is not the one running to be the next Governor at whose campaign this threat was issued.  The one running didn’t say so himself, at least to our hearing. His megaphone did. This threat is unsettling for several reasons:

1. All governments, both federal and subnational, are desperately craving and taking actions to woo foreign investors, and Edo State under the current government has attracted so many in the power sector, Agric space, petroleum refining, tech, hospitality, and commerce exemplified by the coming of the Shoprite franchise and the Radisson brand. Why scare them now? In whose interest?
2. The young and old, especially the youth of Edo State have welcomed this massive mall. This is in addition to a few others like Market Square and others springing up on Irhirhi Road, Ikpoba Slope, Ugbowo, Ikpoba Hill, and other areas. The lifestyle changes the mall shopping represents may be unacceptable to some leaders who want to be the only ones entitled to experience them in their government estacode-funded globetrotting. The rest of us are citizens too.
3. Such a typical mall employs a huge number of people. Managers, shop assistants, monitors, security staff, caterers, CCTV operators, computer experts, maintenance technicians, cleaners, and several others. Could the Distinguished Senator be unaware that the last nationwide protest was about hunger brought about by unemployment and unbearable inflation? This may well be so because, in a TV show where he was featured, he argued truculently that the protest was about regime change and had nothing to do with hunger.
4. Could it be a sign of the times that a former national labor leader, who Governor Obaseki built and named a massive Labour House in his honor recently in April 2024 has lost touch with the need for employment for the masses? This Mall has already employed hundreds of mostly young people and many more in the pipeline should be closed to assuage the ego of someone who failed to build one where Obaseki succeeded. Should those young people be thrown into unemployment to increase the idle hands that can be lured into the devil’s workshop? Haba Oshio!
5. One of the candidates in the scheduled 21 September 2024 gubernatorial election, Dr. (Barrister) Asue Ighodalo, has made employment and attraction of investors a key part of his manifesto. Even in his forays to foreign lands to meet with Edos in the Diaspora, he has promised that he will provide a conducive environment for private businesses to thrive. He appeals to them to come home and invest to provide jobs and make good returns on their investment. This is being countered vehemently by the “spokesmouth” of one of the candidates with a threat to evict even those already here!

Is distinguished Oshiobaba aware at all that he is not on the ballot and, like in 2020, he is becoming an albatross again? Can Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu please remind him that this scaremongering did not work then and will not work now? 

It is the height of disrespect to think that Edo voters will accept any proposition, no matter how outlandish, preposterous, and self-serving and choose the leader who so proposes as their next governor.

I can posit that had Senator Oshiomole promised us that he would leave the old state library leaking, walls cracked and pillars giving way, flooded, and without books, we would not have elected him.

If he had told us he would kill Edo Line that had been there since the first republic as Midwest line, that he would leave the Ministry of Education burnt during the era of his primary school certificate disputation like a dirty ghost town, kill Uromi Cassavita and Ehor Fruit juice factory and the employment these would have provided, perhaps he would not have become the Executioner Governor (sorry executive governor) of Edo State.

No one knew he would not step foot into the premises of Edo Broadcasting Service, fix the place, or make a single broadcast from that station in eight years.  The dilapidated structures, built by Prof. Ambrose Alli in a single tenure and arguably the best offices of that era, have now been revamped and brought up to the standard of Obaseki-era projects.

With digital broadcast equipment installation ongoing, broadband access provided, and premises driveway paving being addressed, that station would be back as the star station to watch and listen to. What of the colleges of Agriculture and Education? What of Benin Technical College and the former ADP on Airport Road now turned into Agriculture Hub?

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Has Governor Obaseki not turned the dilapidated structures and yard of the killed Edo line into the public service transportation technology hub called MegaConnect serving Edo State and saving millions of naira today? 

The technology-driven civil and public service of Edo State and its peers in the South-South have been rated as a marvel and have come to understudy and may well be reverted from the current paperless state to a recidivist and archaic paper-full era.

This is to accommodate a leadership that knows a lot about computer sales but not its use. Did Jarrett Tenebe, APC State leader, not imply so publicly at a press conference?

Oshiomhole alone, his verbiage and baggage, even garbage, is enough to make Edo citizens and even members of APC bet on a safe horse (Asue Ighodalo) in this race. You only need to watch the former Labour leader on AriseTV as he almost violently tried to keep the presenters and analyst trio from asking him questions.

Such an unbefitting spectacle. Go watch it on YouTube. It was as if his very existence depended on winning this election! That programme, appropriately should have been attended by the candidate of his party who should speak for himself. But a combined surrogate and godfather has usurped that role and has now become the issue in the coming election. Interesting times indeed.

Interestingly, both the PDP (represented by the intellectual and logic-driven facts-loving scion of a respected political dynasty, Oseyili Anenih) and APC (represented by the irrepressible Gadaffi–Prince Emmanuel Odigie) have responded appropriately to that AriseTV diatribe.

While all these are going on, Asue is presenting his manifesto and defending it across the state and among our people in the diaspora.

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Bros Oshio is busy personally throwing a few scanty face caps from atop an open van in a market while the candidate stands helplessly by.  Edo cannot be railroaded back to this crude level. Asue does not throw caps. At his every stop, he elucidates the pathway to prosperity for all.

Meanwhile, the former governor abuses and tells lies about an Asue that helped him to succeed. Asue has never, and at no time will he ever, call Distinguished Senator Oshiomhole names.

He would not even refer to the contradiction of an importer of a foreign spouse bent on scaring away foreign investors. Asue is not like that. Think about it. Vote wisely.

Austin Isikhuemen, Lagos, Nigeria, 16th August 2024

Want to learn more about storytelling? Start by downloading the first chapter of The Storytelling Mastery.