By Don Norman Obinna – Agu Ibeku – 


A father is the head of the family. Aside from prescribing norms of behaviour to members of his household, nature also vouchsafed him the obligation to provide for them. 


This responsibility is so inviolable that the holy book describes a defaulter as an infidel.


A good father endures and conceals impediments and vicissitudes to provide for his family. Most children will cry a river if they have an insight into their father's daily sacrifice to keep them alive. 


Cruelly, in all his travails, a father seldom takes glory. Instead, society blames him for the delinquencies and mistakes of his children despite young people's fickleness.


Such is the fate of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, who callow political enthusiasts subjected to dire opprobrium and extensive odium for dilatoriness.


They ascribed the buzzword ‘failure’ to him and dubbed his eight-year tenure wasted. 


Sadly, the accomplices and orchestrators of his so-called fiasco and their hangers-on are behind this hypocritical narrative.


Shamefully, they are the same folks who engaged Ikpeazu in the disruptive synchronised protracted litigations that ended on April 13, 2018 – a few months before electioneering -.


Shortly after the election tribunal upheld Governor Ikpeazu’s victory, an Appeal Court sitting in Owerri upturned it and pronounced Dr Alex Otti of APGA the winner on December 31, 2015. But the Supreme Court put the faceoff to bed on February 2, 2016.


Four months after the dust seemed to have settled, Justice Okon Abang of the Abuja Federal High Court sacked Dr Ikpeazu on June 27, 2016, on purported tax invasion and instructed the Abia State Chief Judge to swear in Uche Ogah as the substantive governor with immediate effect.


However, two months after, on August 18, 2016, the Appeal Court upturned the judgment, and on May 12, 2017, the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court's decision.


The litigations, however, rumbled on as another PDP gubernatorial aspirant, the late Barrister F.N. Nwosu, challenged the nomination of Ikpeazu as the PDP governorship candidate.


He wanted the court to declare him the duly nominated candidate of the PDP even though he came third in the primaries. Poignantly, he also joined Ogah in the case.


On April 13, 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed his application as frivolous and awarded a fine of N4 million against him. 


It was almost the same scenario in 2019, albeit only Dr Otti challenged Ikpeazu’s victory. It, however, ended on January 8, 2020, when the Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Appeal Court that had earlier dismissed the application brought before it by Dr Otti. 


These concatenations of events adumbrated the dilatoriness of the administration from the embryonic stage. Although it is hard to believe, the litigations took 54 out of 96 months of Governor Ikpeazu's administration.


Only a miracle worker can achieve or match Ikpeazu’s accomplishments in Abia State in 42 months he was allowed to concentrate on governance.


If juxtaposed, his achievements dwarfed those of his predecessors combined. He may have fallen short of our expectations, but that does not make him a failure.


To be continued.