Onaivi Cephas
In significance, the ‘Good Friday’ nomenclature, which has been assigned to the day of Christ’s crucifixion, is an attestation to the spiritually and socially redemptive sacrifice undertaken by God the Son to free humankind from self-imposed bondage on account of sinfulness and its bedamning effects.
For Christians, Good Friday is an important day of the year because it marks a most momentous weekend for the religion. Well, it is also a good holiday for schoolchildren, workers and other such people as would have been otherwise occupied.
The name Good Friday is entirely appropriate because the suffering and death of Jesus, terrible as it was, marked the dramatic culmination of God’s plan to save his people from their sins.
Coming on the heels of the commemoration of Good Friday this year, the victory of God-Win (notice the pun?) Obaseki at the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal would seem a coincidence. However, a scrutiny of the circumstances around it, especially within the context of the affairs of the larger Edo society, reveals an aura of divinity in the ‘coincidence’ as not a few parallels could be readily identified between it and the Good Friday of the Christian faith.
It would be recalled that on the country’s return of democracy in 1999, Edo State was particularly unlucky as the only distinguishing features between the new civilian administration birthed in the state and the preceding military regime were the attires worn by the actors. The corrupting influence of civilians whose images loomed large in the protracted military era had metamorphosed into the scourge of godfatherism, which was transmitted to the compromised democracy being ushered in. Against these glaring democratic negatives, people were promised that it was not going to be business as usual.
However, in Edo State, given the odious governance of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) that immediately took the stage, it soon became a question of whether people actually understood the not-business-as-usual promise.
For eight years, it was a narrative of a state ruled and misruled by a caucus of political Goliaths, who institutionalised godfatherism at the expense of genuine people-based democratic processes of choosing mandate holders. The side effect was a gradual drift into a non-viable state status. It was at that point that Adams Oshiomhole emerged, who, like the Biblical David, scorned the self-aggrandising threats and schemes of the ruinous Goliaths, on whom the people had quite given up.
It was reminiscent of the despondency into which Goliath’s rhodomontade had thrown the Israelites. But Oshiomhole weathered the storm against the behemoths and won the trophy for the long-traumatised Edo people.
Nevertheless, despite the defeat and unlike the Biblical Goliath who died in that encounter and his soldiers dispersed, the Edo political goliaths went into a short recess and soon reappeared on the frontiers.
Battered with humiliation, they mounted an ego-driven propaganda of the prospect to take back Edo State. At the expense of common sense and reliance on antecedence and track record, they asserted their hopes on the puerile assumption that Edo State is a PDP State. However, towards the end of Oshiomhole’s tenure, the evil forces reared their heads again, complete with horns, steaming nose and bared fangs, without a progressive manifesto, but with the unsympathetic slogan that the “South-South is PDP and PDP is South-South”.
Added to it was the “Simple Agenda” which was a euphemism for non-existent quick fix solutions to the fallouts of their misrule at the national level. All that has petered into insignificance today in the face of the Tribunal’s verdict, which has once more affirmed the victory of God-Win (yes, the pun remains valid) Obaseki over the evil forces that held humanity captive in Edo State. Obaseki will take the redemptive work started by the Comrade Governor to a new level. The Good Friday component of the verdict is a stamp of divine approval of the mandate.
Comrade Onaivi Cephas sent in this piece from Zamfara
