There is something fundamentally upside-down about Emeka Omeihe’s commentary on the Orashi Bridge. He seems more outraged by the councillors’ decision to publicly dramatise the people’s anger than by the monumental failure that produced that anger in the first place. That is not analysis; it is an astonishing displacement of responsibility. If former Governor Rochas Okorocha failed to arrest the devastating erosion and properly fix a strategic bridge in his own local government when he had the power, resources and responsibility to do so, the councillors did not need to seek permission from anybody before condemning him. Their protest may have been unconventional, but the grievance behind it was painfully conventional: a government saw a disaster coming and failed to stop it.
The Orashi Bridge was not a decorative piece of infrastructure constructed for political photographs. It was a critical economic and social artery connecting communities in Ideato North and South and linking them to the state capital and neighbouring areas. Its collapse did not merely inconvenience commuters; it disrupted commerce, destroyed livelihoods, swallowed properties and subjected entire communities to years of avoidable suffering. So when Omeihe lectures the councillors about where they should have held their sitting, one is tempted to ask: where was this outrage when the people were trapped by the collapsed road? Where was the indignation when erosion ravaged the area? Why is the location of the protest more offensive than the failure that made the protest necessary? Sometimes, public anger must be taken to the very spot where government failure became most visible.
And yes, Okorocha deserves the political embarrassment. He was governor for eight years. This was his home constituency. He occupied the highest political office in the state and controlled the machinery and resources of government. With the enormous public resources that accrued to his administration during those eight years, what credible explanation is there for allowing a devastating gully erosion threatening a strategic bridge to become an existential disaster? This was not an ambush from outer space. The erosion developed progressively. The danger was visible. The consequences were predictable. If a governor had the opportunity, authority and resources to intervene and failed to do so, the people have every right to remember that failure. Politics cannot be a washing machine for dirty records, and former office holders cannot demand amnesia simply because they have left office.
As for the councillors’ endorsement of Hope Uzodimma for the Senate, Omeihe appears to be manufacturing a controversy where none exists. The councillors are politicians. Uzodimma is a politician. They belong to the same political party and, like every other politician, they have the right to choose whom they support. Their endorsement is neither a court judgment nor an electoral result; it is a political position. The same applies to their endorsement of President Bola Tinubu. If Omeihe finds the political endorsements distasteful, that is his prerogative. But he cannot use them to invalidate the councillors’ legitimate anger over the bridge. The fact that people may have political motives does not magically erase a genuine grievance. Indeed, the attempt to use the councillors’ political affiliations to discredit their protest is precisely the kind of diversion that allows politicians to escape accountability.
The real theatrics, therefore, may not have been the councillors sitting beneath canopies on the bridge; they may lie in the attempt to make the stage more important than the tragedy that unfolded on it. Omeihe has subjected the councillors’ method to forensic scrutiny while treating the substantive failure that triggered their anger almost as an inconvenient footnote. That is misplaced indignation. The bridge has now been rebuilt, but no concrete can rebuild the years of hardship suffered by the people. No fresh layer of asphalt can restore the businesses lost, the properties destroyed or the opportunities denied. If the councillors chose to remind the people and the political class of that history, they did not commit the greater offence. The greater offence was allowing a vital public artery to collapse when those entrusted with power had the means to prevent it. The bridge may be new, but the record is not. And no amount of clever commentary can pave over it.
