Why, pray, should any citizen of upright conscience, who professes adherence to the laws of our land, be driven to such desperate lengths as to serve under a governor branded as “lawless”? This, indeed, is the twisted irony of Philip Shaibu’s dwindling political fate – the first Deputy Governor to be impeached in Edo State.
Here stands a man, torn asunder by the contradictions of his own creation. On the one hand, he dons the cloak of a law-abiding citizen, righteous and unwavering; on the other, he laments his plight under the yoke of a governor he himself hath dubbed “lawless.” This dissonance, this conflict of character, was laid bare for all to witness during his recent appearance on Politics Today with Seun Okinbaloye on Channels TV.
Shaibu’s chief grievance, voiced with trembling lip and furrowed brow, was that Governor Obaseki – once his bosom ally and Boss – had transgressed the sacred tenets of law by disregarding a court’s decree that reinstated him to his erstwhile position. But alas, when Okinbaloye, like a prosecutor sharpening his blade, pressed Shaibu on his own dalliance with lawlessness – most notably in the exclusion of 14 elected members from the Edo State House of Assembly – Shaibu’s voice wavered, his resolve crumbled. Here was the man, railing against the very lawlessness he once championed, now exposed as the progenitor of the very chaos he decries.
Trust Okinbaloye to expose the selective amnesia of this man. When quizzed on his role in the case of the 14 lawmakers – a dark chapter in Edo State’s recent annals – Shaibu faltered. These legislators, chosen by the people, were denied their rightful place, their constituents stripped of representation. And who, pray, played a part in this travesty? None other than Shaibu, who, when confronted with his hand in the deed, stumbled over his words, unable to reconcile his past misdeeds with his present rhetoric of righteousness. What a tangled web he weaves, where memory fails and truth falters!
The irony deepens when one recalls Shaibu’s audacious claim that he “made” Obaseki the governor – a boast laid bare in the harsh light of Okinbaloye’s scrutiny. For when Okinbaloye, with a wry but determined smile inquired how this mighty ‘kingmaker’, this architect of destiny, failed to carve out the throne for himself, Shaibu was rendered mute just as the mute candidate he now supports, a man bereft of words, his contradiction laid bare for all to see.
Shaibu’s assertion, weak as it was, now crumbles under the weight of its own hubris. If indeed he wielded the power to make a governor, why then does he now struggle to assert himself against the very creation of his own hand? Why does he flounder in the shadow of the lawless figure he claims to have raised to power? This, dear reader, is the quandary that leaves many questioning whether Shaibu’s influence was ever as grand as he would have us believe or whether his current plight is the tragic result of a man who has overplayed his hand – a man caught in the snare of his own making.
Thus, from Shaibu’s recent display on Politics Today, two truths emerge, stark and unyielding. First, his public struggle against the very governor he accuses of lawlessness reveals a deep, perhaps insurmountable, internal conflict – a failure to grasp the ephemerality of power and governance that he so arrogantly thought he had mastered. Second, his boast of creating a governor, set against his own failure to grasp the crown for himself, casts a long shadow of doubt upon his narrative, exposing him as a man who may have overestimated his own influence, now left to wander in the wilderness of his contradictions.
And so, we are left with a portrait of Philip Shaibu: a man embroiled in the irony of his own existence, beset by accusations of lawlessness even as he dons the mantle of the law’s champion. This spectacle does not merely portray him as a man of unstable character but tells of a deeper duplicity, a man of contradictions, at war with himself – a tragic figure in a play of his own making. The self-claimed righteous man who desperately wants to serve under a ‘lawless’ governor!