“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
“The evil that men do lives after them;
“The good is oft interred with their bones.”
The last two lines of the preceding quote by Mark Antony in his funeral oration for Julius Caesar after he was killed with 23 stab wounds by the Roman senators, including his confidant Brutus have provoked my imagination extremely in the last 48 hours.
Perhaps human nature does not change much, otherwise, how can Mark Antony’s words remain the indisputable truth over 425 years after they were spoken?
All I hear from the exclusive club of politicians with access to power who have been on the tip of my pen for the last one week are the ‘evil’ that Governor Godwin Obaseki has done to their access to our collective patrimony.
These few bigwigs, as they call themselves, with no clear sources of wealth that finance their elaborate estates have since sent their minions to try to assail the Primacy of Truth. Unfortunately, they have not been able to summon the intelligence necessary to debate at this level.
In this third part of the series, after a lesson from the wise words of Antony, I want to place more truths on record that they may not be interred by the deluge of obnoxious lies frequently heralded by these enemies of the masses.
Seldom spoken of is the truth that Governor Obaseki has cleared all the pension liabilities dating back over 30 years along with the first pension harmonisation in the last 22 years.
My 80-year-old father, Mr. Matthew Osagie, like many other pensioners, is a beneficiary.
What about the capturing of all state pensioners in the Edo State Health Insurance Scheme (EdoHIS), ensuring that they have access to quality healthcare till they leave this world? Is this an act of wickedness?
Is it callous of Obaseki to have recruited over 5000 (five thousand) people into the State’s civil and public service in the last seven and a half years, paying their salaries promptly on the 26th of every month or earlier, when other States have been letting go of their employees?
Will Obaseki be considered hard-hearted for migrating workers in the State into the Contributory Pension Scheme, ensuring that these workers are well-catered for after their active years in service?
Obaseki has cleared the pension arrears owed Local Government pensioners from 1984 till date after nearly 40 years of neglect! Is this an act of wickedness too?
He has now established the Local Government Pensions Bureau, which caters to the needs of retirees from the State’s 18 local governments, ensuring that their entitlements are promptly sorted as and when due.
Will these senior citizens and retirees along with their children and grandchildren for whose benefits Obaseki contended with the powers that be rise in his defense?
The jury is out and the battleground is the gubernatorial election on September 21, 2024.
Sadly, not many will read this. Our people are inundated by a deluge of tall tales and they can hardly find space to accommodate the Primacy of Truth.
Watch out for Part 4.
Osagie, a journalist, is the Special Adviser to Governor Godwin Obaseki on Media Projects