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The Special Assistant to
the honourable Commissioner of Commerce and Industry, Barr. Eugene Uzum has
been advised to be civil in his future discourse and be exemplary on political
matters.
The advice has been given
by Onyeche Ifeanyi (PhD), founder of Ikaworld.com in a telephone
conversation from his base in Sweden
with Ika Weekly. Reacting to a rejoinder of Barr Eugene Uzum published in
Ika Weekly newspaper in last week’s edition under the caption “Re-Ika Youths
Indicts Political Leaders”.
According to him,”the main reason I am commenting on
the rejoinder written by Barr Eugene Uzum, which was
published in Ika Weekly, is because we at Ikaworld.com who have had
interactions with Barr. Uzum expect better political discourse behaviour from
him. It is not exemplary that a young and informed politician is calling an Ika
youth organization faceless just because they aired their opinion in a
democracy. I am not sure if he is aware of it but he is supposed to represent
the face of young Ika men entering the Ika political scene with the expectation
of a better political behaviour. For this reason, he is supposed to show
example by displaying maturity and tolerance in his utterances. There was no
need to be condescending or embarking on name calling just because an Ika youth
group expressed a different opinion.
“What I am afraid of is
that the person in that rejoinder does not sound like the Barr. Eugene Uzum
that I had interaction with in Ikaworld.com. He does not sound like the
democrat he showed promise of becoming in those early days. By early days I
mean when he was in the UK. We at Ikaworld.com have kept close eyes on his
political evolution. While we are proud of the hard work he has put into
getting to where he is, we owe him a brotherly duty to redirect his attention
at times like this.
“What worried me is that not long ago, Barr. Uzum
stated that he was going to form Ikoro Ika group. We expect that any Ika youth
group should be able to stand up for the true position of things and stand up
to any politician. Now, with him calling another youth group “faceless” just
because they share a different opinion, one cannot but wonder what his
intentions might be with Ikoro Ika movement. Is that one of such attempts at
stifling and holding Ika youth’s opinions hostage? I want to believe that the
Uzum I interacted with online is far too honourable to build an Okowa or PDP youth
vanguard and surreptitiously baptise it Ikoro Ika.”
Speaking further Dr.
Onyeche said,”what I also found puzzling is that Barr Uzum signed the rejoinder
as a Public Affairs Analyst when he is an assistant to one of the politicians
who is being criticized. Again he was not presenting all the facts here. He
should have signed it as a ‘Personal Assistant to the Commissioner of Commerce
and Industry in Delta State’ so that we will know where he stands and why he is
taking it personal. By the way, this is a position he worked so hard to achieve.
So why would he prefer the title of “Public Affairs Analyst” to “Personal
Assistant to the Commissioner of Commerce and Industry”? Of course he might
argue that doing that might be interpreted as speaking officially for the
commissioner. I understand that. Still, no matter what his opinion is, he is
now a partisan politician who is entrenched in the system and group that was
being criticized by the Ika Youth group in question. It is impossible to create
a distance between himself and a system and group that pays his salary and
sustains his new life style. So, in all honesty, it almost looks like there is
only one person that is hiding his identity here. So perhaps he might want to
reconsider his hastiness in calling that Ika Youth group “faceless”.
“Finally, if one reads the trend right, because of his
ambition to form Ikoro Ika one would be tempted to think that our brother is
having the illusion that he has a patent for the use of the phrase “Ika Youth”.
I am hoping that our most
cherished Ika tradition of according respect to all will be observed hence
forth in Ika political discourse. Political violence that we have witnessed in
the past was bred by intolerance.”
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