OPINION PIECE:Uche Ogah And The Flip side Of Ambition
By Godwin Adindu
We all are witnesses to this fact: our teachers, right from
kindergarten, advise us to be ambitious. They consistently hand
out that counsel as a mantra of life, with less talk on the flip-side
of ambition – the inordinate ambition. We grow to set goals, to
dream, to aspire and to work earnestly towards the realization of
ambition. Our teachers offer little or no education on the nature
of ambition as they do with the nature of truth. We are left to the
vagaries of our minds and the compelling pressures of vogue in
our pursuit of ambition.
But, there is the flipside of ambition. The persuasion to achieve
could be a very terrible thing, a very dangerous inner drive and
outer resentment. Ambition not guided by law, norm, justice and
divine creed is a potential missile of mass destruction and the
purveyor of such drive is a horrible danger for mankind. There is
no doubt that Uche Ogah, the main protagonist in the failed Abia
civilian coup heeded his teachers’ counsel. He is a very ambitious
man.
His pedigree in business presents a man who set out very early
to ride on high dreams. But, while he can beat his chest and
mention his conglomerates and his wealth profile, twelve criminal
cases in Lagos law courts are hovering over him like the sword
of Damocles. And since the Edinburgh Professor of Ethics,
William Barclay, argues that Right Plus Wrong(R+W=W) can never
be right, his purported acts of philanthropy have availed little to
cleanse a battered image of the flip-side of ambition, what
ingloriously is subsumed under the name: business.
Yet, the truth remains immortal: ambition is a two-edged sword.
There is the positive and the negative, all fixed into one generic
name. It is ambition that drives a thief, a prostitute, an assassin,
a terrorist, a tyrant and a coupist. It is also ambition that drives
the inventor, the scientists, the humanitarian and all well-meaning
people of the world. Driven by the ambition to balance the
economic disparity in the livelihood of his fellow Americans, Robin
Hood, the moral thief, orchestrated the most historic robberies
America has ever witnessed and returned the loot to the poor.
Driven by the ambition to rid the world of his perceived danger
and menace posed by Jewish blood, Hitler drove the Third Reich
to execute the world’s most horrible genocide in the guillotines of
the Holocaust. He was being kind, in his imagination and
ambition, to a world that was helpless in the face of the
“menace” of the Jews.
Indeed, Uche Ogah, was playing with the flip-side of ambition
when he attempted to jump into the Abia State Government
House on that fateful Thursday through the window. From the
well-rehearsed Abuja High Court drama wherein Justice Okon
Abang declared his death sentence against Governor Okezie
Ikpeazu with the caveat – ‘with immediate Effect” – to the INEC’s
haste in handing a certificate of returns and the desperation to
swear in Ogah, what came to play is a macabre dance of shame
which will stand as a historical sarcasm on power play in Nigeria
and the desperation of one man lamentably living on the flip-side
of ambition. In the high-wire power play, he becomes the burden
bearer of a conscience so seared that ambition, for him,
becomes an end itself and not a means to an end.
Yet, history is replete with records of men who lived on the other
side of ambition. The picture is gory and often nightmarish. The
flipside of ambition is selfish, anti-social and antithetical to human
progress . It is a dangerous hallucination of the mind which alters
the normal cognitive reasoning and places self above the world. It
naturally contravenes social order, social justice and even
conflicts with the cosmic order of cause and effect. The danger
is that it is a ready recipe for violence and anarchy. History has
shown the bestial nature of man in the men and women who
exhibited the flipside of ambition, from our own Sanni Abacha,
Frank Nero, Stalin, Osama Bin Ladin, Jezebel, Idia-Amin, to our
own local students who sliced the throat of their fellow students
in the name of campus cultism.
In the failed coup to unseat Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia
State, what was afoot was the flipside of ambition that ignored
the grave implications to law and order and the concomitant
anarchy and bloodshed. The masterminds obviously must have
anticipated a possible resistance. Surly, on that fateful Thursday,
Abia youths, in their thousands, milled at the gate of the
Government House in Umuahia ready to defend their elected
Governor with their lives and their souls. They stayed put all day
and kept vigil all night until they were convinced the coup has
failed flat. What would have been the peace and happiness of
Ogah if he had sat as governor over the blood of numberless
youths of Abia State? With which conscience could he have ruled
over a state that would have been thrown into anarchy and war?
By his plot, Uche Ogah and his cohorts wanted to hold back the
hand of the clock. They wanted to drag Abia backward. They
wanted to cut short a youthful energy that found expression in 65
road construction works in one year. They wanted to cast a spell
over a new dawn of hope characterized by the dynamism which
Governor Okezie represents in governance and which is vindicated
by an excellent scorecard of one year stride. Nigeria would have
helplessly watched as Ogah traversed the dangerous landmine of
the flipside of ambition with reckless courage and drag and
otherwise peaceful state into an ethnic fratricide.
Thank God for the good people of Abia State that rose to the
occasion and tamed the Shrew and halted a dangerous drift into
the cesspit of pandemonium. And kudos to the Abia Elders who
couldn’t sit back at home while the little goat strangles itself on
the string.
Indeed, there is good ambition. There is an ambition that
amounts to a day-dream, a kind of wish-wash fantasy. There is
also a terrible and precarious ambition. Abia almost, nearly
witnessed the mischief of a terrible ambition. Abia would have
opened a dark page for Nigeria on the results of one man’s
flipside ambition. Uche Ogah, in his hackneyed ambition, would
have distorted the lives and history of our people. Thank God I
am only discussing it in a mere prose.
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