Obi Aguocha’s Grand Deception: The Local Government Lie That Exposes His Treachery – By Otunba Chimag

Among the many falsehoods Honourable Obi Aguocha has peddled before the good people of Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South, none is more brazen, none more insulting to the intelligence of his constituents, than his repeated promise to create two new local government areas, Ikwuano North and Ikwuano South, as though such a thing lies within his personal gift to bestow.

This is not political ambition, this is a fat lie dressed up as a campaign promise, deliberately engineered to dazzle a people hungry for development while its author full well knows, or ought to know if he has spent any time studying the very constitution he swore to uphold, that no single federal legislator possesses the power to conjure a local government area into existence.

The process is not a matter of one man’s will or influence, it is a constitutional mountain, not a campaign talking point.

It requires two thirds assent of the National Assembly, a threshold that demands broad consensus far beyond the reach of any one backbencher from Abia State. It requires, in addition, the concurrence of a majority of the thirty six state houses of assembly across the federation, not merely the Abia State House of Assembly, meaning lawmakers in Kano, in Lagos, in Sokoto, in Rivers, and everywhere in between would need to sit and deliberate and approve a local government creation that means nothing to their own constituents.

And finally, it requires the assent of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria himself. This is the machinery Aguocha would need to move, single handedly, to deliver on a promise he tosses about as casually as a market trader haggling over the price of garri.

Let it be said without equivocation, it would be an easier feat for President Bola Tinubu to release Nnamdi Kanu from custody and personally travel to Umuahia to issue a public apology to him on live television than it would be for Obi Aguocha, a single member of the House of Representatives with neither the numbers nor the national influence to move such a process, to deliver two new local government areas out of Ikwuano. Weigh that comparison carefully, because it is not hyperbole, it is measured political reality. One scenario, however improbable, involves the exercise of executive discretion by a sitting president.

The other requires the coordinated will of the entire federal legislature and the overwhelming majority of subnational legislatures in Nigeria, an undertaking so vast that seasoned governors and powerful national figures have tried and failed for decades. That Aguocha presents this to his people as though it were within arm’s reach is not optimism, it is treachery dressed in the language of hope.

This is the deliberate manufacturing of false hope in a constituency already starved of genuine achievement, a man who cannot point to a single completed road or functioning hospital now asking his people to believe he can rewrite the federal structure of Nigeria itself. It is a diversion, a shiny object dangled before the eyes of a people so that they look away from the more uncomfortable questions, questions about unaccounted constituency project funds, about legislative silence, about years spent in the Green Chamber with little to show for them.

The people of Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South deserve representatives who tell them the truth about what is achievable and then work tirelessly to achieve it, not a man who trades in fantasy because the reality of his record cannot withstand honest scrutiny. When a leader must lie about the scale of his own power to appear relevant, it is not confidence the people are witnessing, it is the unmistakable sound of a political career built on sand, and sand, as every child raised on the banks of Imo River knows, cannot hold the weight of a single honest storm.