Opinion
Iwemdi Nwaham: Hatchet Man For Those Who Hate Ned Nwoko
By Frank Iroroh
In my last encounter with Iwemdi Nwaham, I advised him to resist the temptation of using Senator Ned Munir Nwoko (SNMN) to mend fences with his erstwhile political foes and to stop waging media war against SNMN to warm the hearts of his newfound love. As an aged man, I thought he would take my honest advice seriously, but he has continued to bring a hard-earned reputation of the Most Distinguished Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to public embarrassment.
In his latest article titled Ned Nwoko Has Crossed The Rubicon, Nwaham admitted that many ordinary people love him (Ned) genuinely. He however, went astray in the follow-up lines by adding. “His inability to be a boardroom player is his major undoing, …the flip side of it is that he (Ned) seems to have a personality construct that makes him, not a good follower, Nwaham claimed in his armchair theorisation.
The armchair hatchet man lost it here. He probably did not understand that Senator Nwoko is not an anyhow politician, the type that keeps mute in the face of injustice. He does not play boardroom politics to the detriment of his constituents, especially where the developmental needs of his people are at stake. Being a man of principle and good conscience, the Delta North Senator does not play boardroom politics where life-saving projects in his district are outrightly ignored.
Senator Nwoko is not disposed to being a follower of a system that denies the people needed infrastructure and real poverty alleviation projects. This is why Ned is genuinely loved by the people as Nwaham rightly admitted.
Again, Senator Nwoko cannot be tamed by the ‘system’ to turn his back on his people and ignore the pains, hardships, and slavery conditions his constituents are subjected to over the years, by successive governments of the party they have supported so long. He would not turn a blind eye to the dehumanizing condition of his people on the altar of party politics.
The Paris Club refunds hero’s global exposure and clear understanding of what operates in other climes make him uncomfortable to join a bandwagon of retrogressive boardroom politicians, Nwaham is recommending.
Before I dive into the miserable life of Iwemdi Nwaham, I want readers to get a deeper understanding of the reasons the PDP is very upset with the Delta North Senator.
1. PDP has been in power in Delta State since 1999. Within this period, Delta State was and still is an epicenter of oil bunkering activities in Nigeria. Elements within the party were rattled when Senator Nwoko sternly moved a motion on the floor of the Senate back in September 2023 calling for a crackdown on oil thieves in the country. Those benefiting from these criminal activities were quick to denounce the motion, saying that the Senator was not sent to the Senate for that purpose. Hence they started plotting to whittle down his influence in the party and the district in their plot to stop him from going back to the Senate in 2027.
2. Within the same period, Delta North under PDP had three senators and a governor, and because of Nwaham’s brand of boardroom politics, none of them was courageous enough to talk about gas flaring in Delta North, which has been unleashing devastating impacts on the environment and the livelihood of the people through pollution, degradation, acid rains and climate warming among other harmful effects. None cared about the pending Okpai power-step-down and the Ogwashi-Ukwu dam. They did not see these projects as essential infrastructure for power generation to supply uninterrupted electricity to the entire Delta North.
Today, a great part of Delta North communities are living in total darkness. SNMN understands that electricity is the life wire of every thriving economy and that making power available to the people is much more empowering than the occasional bread-and-butter empowerment introduced by the PDP. He understands that Nigerians demand good governance and not wheelbarrow empowerment, and he does not want to play party politics with the projects in his district.
Hence, he picks up the gauntlet to bring the Okpai Step down and Ogwashi Ukwu dam to state and national attention. SNMN went further to initiate steps to build a new dam at Aniofu. The combination of these three projects will ensure a constant electricity supply in Delta North in no distant time.
Nwaham and his associates are not happy with these giant steps taken by SNMN. They want to cage him, to tell him what he should do and what he should not do. They viewed his audacious actions as an affront to expose their failures and inadequacy. Take a good look at Okpai, a community that hosts one of the largest gas plants in Nigeria, a plant that supplies electricity to parts of the country, and yet the community is living in perpetual darkness, the PDP is comfortable with the situation but SNMN will not accept such a modern slavery policy in this 21st century. His position on the project is one of the reasons he is being crucified by PDP.
3. Asaba – Oko – Aballa – Utchi – Okapi -Aboh – Patani road. This road provides the shortest route to vast oil-producing communities along the River Niger bank and a short route for the evacuation of their farm produce and also for those traveling to and from the state capital, quite often residents in these communities had to travel across the River Niger to Onitsha before coming back to Asaba.
These communities have been crying to the PDP-led Delta State government to construct this road for decades, but all their complaints have fallen on deaf ears; the Delta State government did nothing about the road, not even when Anioma had a governor. Today, whilst the PDP-led government of Delta, which derived huge oil revenue from the area, ignored the plight of the people, succor has come to the communities as SNMN has ensured that the construction of the road is captured in the NDDC 2025 budget. NDDC is an intervention agency under the APC-led federal government.
4. Anioma State creation: This is a project so dear to the Anioma people. The struggle to create Anioma State dates back to over 50 years ago. The importance of statehood to a people is very obvious; hence, our forefathers embarked on the struggle to have the state created. His predecessor in the Red Chamber timidly avoided raising the issue even when the State creation issue came up during President GEJ’s 2014 National Constitutional Conference.
The pro-people Incumbent Senator saw an opportunity to have the state created, and he did not hesitate to grab it. This is another problem he is having with the PDP behemoths in Delta State. As explicitly pointed out by Nwaham in the article under reference, “All talk about the creation of the Anioma state today is all about Ned Nwoko, no one else…the horde of citizen journalists, have been recruited to saturate the media with favorable coverages about their principal”.
He went to state that “They have eulogized the man, Ned, to high heavens, cheered him on as the man that will liberate the Anioma people.” In the above lines, Nwaham captured a vivid picture of the minds of the leaders of the PDP in Delta North, it portrays the deep-rooted hatred and jealousy of a man whose only offense is to do what he was elected to do. They feel highly offended by the massive support SNMN is gathering in the struggle to have an Anioma state created. Nwaham and his college of leaders should learn to live with the pains of SNMN’s overwhelming support among the Anioma people, which come from his undiluted determination to see Anioma liberated from the shackles of ethnic and clannish leaders, who have held the development of Aniomaland aground for personal political aggrandizement. It should be noted that none of the projects Ned is fighting for is cited in his community, but as an elected senator, he takes every part of Delta North as his constituency, which is the hallmark of good leaders.
5. Legislative duties: Distinguished Senator Ned Nwoko was elected to the Senate primarily to initiate bills for the good governance of Nigeria. Any other thing is an oversight duty. In this core area, he has excelled, so far, in just under 17 months at the Senate, he has sponsored 25 bills and moved 19 motions, making him the senator with the highest volumes of bills and motions at the 10th Senate.
SNMN is rated as the most active senator in Nigeria; he is well respected among his peers; when he speaks, his colleagues give him maximum attention. He also commands a great deal of respect at the Presidency for his visionary inputs on national issues, and the Anioma people are so proud of him.
This icon of global repute is being targeted by the evil pen of a loser called Iwedi Nwaham. Nwaham, from what I gathered, hails from Umunede and was a spin doctor for the All Progressive Congress (APC) and viciously attacked the PDP before swimming in his vomit!
Nwaham is a man whose principles should be questioned as we ask him who told him that Ned’s future political career is tied to his new collaborators.
If Senator Nwoko decides to go back to the Senate in 2027, God and the Anioma people he is diligently serving will support him and there is nothing Nwaham and his college of leaders can do about it.
Iwedi Nwaham has chosen to act as Hitler’s Joseph Gobbel for Governor Oborevwori; he should focus on his new task and leave SNMN out of their ineptitude administration. Nwaham should understand that lies have a short lifespan.
*Frank Iroroh is the Coordinator of
NMN Volunteer Corps (The Nedites) For further information about the group, email us at neditevcorps@gmail.com
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