Aguocha’s Parting Gifts: Thank You, Negotiation, Or Contempt? – By Otunba Chimag

Suddenly, without warning and without pattern, Hon. Obi Aguocha has begun handing out small tokens to a carefully selected few across Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South. Not a policy. Not a project.

Not a structure that will outlive the news cycle. Just envelopes, bags of 5kg rice which is shared by about 7 people (what an insult), and handshakes, dispensed like seeds to a chosen few while the majority of his constituents watch from outside the gate. The question every thinking person in this federal constituency must ask is simple: what exactly is this for, and why now, barely months before another election cycle begins to take shape?

Is this a thank you for 2023? If so, it is three years and some months late and criminally small.

A man who was carried into Abuja on the backs of market women, okada riders, civil servants, and struggling farmers does not wait until the eve of another contest to remember their sacrifice. Gratitude that arrives only when a politician needs something in return is not gratitude at all. It is strategy dressed up as sentiment, and our people are wise enough to see the difference.

Or is this the opening move of a negotiation, a down payment on another four years of the same silence, the same absenteeism, and the same unaccounted constituency funds we have documented again and again? If Aguocha believes that a paltry gift to a privileged few can purchase the collective mandate of an entire federal constituency, then he has fundamentally misjudged the people he claims to represent. Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South are not a marketplace where votes are bartered for handouts. They are communities of memory, and memory does not forget three years and some months of rice promises that faded into rhetoric and land allocation controversies that were never resolved.

There is a third possibility, and it is the most insulting of all: that this gesture is simply the latest chapter in a long standing view, held quietly but consistently, that the people of this federal constituency are collective fools who can be managed with small gifts rather than served with real representation. That view has been the operating philosophy of this administration in Abuja from day one, promise loudly, deliver rarely, and when the criticism grows too loud, distract with a gesture calculated to look generous on camera but change nothing on the ground.

Let us look closely at the arithmetic of this so called generosity. A single bag of 5kg rice, shared among about 7 people, is not a gift, it is a mockery dressed up in the language of goodwill. It cannot feed a household for a week, let alone stand as compensation for three years and some months of silence, absenteeism, and unaccounted funds. When a representative reduces the dignity of his people to a handful of rice grains divided seven ways, he is not thanking them, he is testing how low their expectations have sunk, and how easily they can be pacified with crumbs while the real resources meant for their development remain unaccounted for.

Whatever the true motive, one thing is certain. A leader who governed with integrity would not need to time his generosity to coincide with an election season. He would not need to select a privileged few while ignoring the many who elected him.

Real representation is not measured in gift bags. It is measured in roads built, funds accounted for, and promises kept. Aguocha has shown us only excuses, and now, apparently, small parting gifts to ease his exit.

NO ABUJA FOR AGUOCHA AGAIN.