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When Larry Page, 35, and co-founder of Google, the Internet most popular and fastest search engine came up with the motto: DON’T BE EVIL, he and his co-founders were actually talking about the faith in the possibility of an omniscient, the all-knowing superhighway.

Although this is an attribute that belongs to God, and not humankind, the Google whiskids were making an audacious mission statement of a puritanical flavour which they wanted to bring into information revolution. And they have made a name for themselves.

Ever since they launched Google into space with such quickness and nimbleness to get every info you need about any conceivable subject, their motto has been extended into the political arena to search for the reason(s) why some people, by their character or behaviour, do what seems in the eyes of the public, nothing short of evil.

Put differently, it raises one vital question: why do some people have the tendency to do evil, or is there any thing primitive that lurks in the limbic system of some people that drives them to betray close confidants? You might say the answer is simple, after all, didn’t Judas Iscariot betray Jesus Christ for lucre, or didn’t Satan provoke King David to conduct a needless census of the Israelites. But they all paid for the consequences of their errors, or didn’t they? Politics is all stoked with stories of betrayals of people whose common motto should have been: ‘We swim together, or we sink together.’

The inability of politicians to see things that way, and instead, see relationships as mere ‘marriage of convenience’ has brought unedifying moments in the polity. The result is that alliances are broken at will and Governors quarrel at the blink of an eye with their deputies, and in some wrenching instances, deputies betray their bosses. Nigerians have painfully come to live with this in the last ten years or more. It is all because our politics and the behaviour of our politicians heave with hysteria.

Democracy works when you have politicians who know how to play the game of politics for the sake of getting things done. But it hurts terribly when you have politicians who are in the game, not for the sake of public good but for selfish aggrandisement. A nation burns, a state is run aground, and the people suffer when politics becomes a passport to betrayal and an easy ticket to advance matters more pecuniary than anything else. Few states have experienced political betrayals as Oyo and Anambra, where in 2006, two deputy governors – Chief Alao Akala and Dame Virgy Etiaba, respectively, by no fault of theirs, replaced their boss, after they were impeached by the state legislatures. But it was their incendiary comments and conduct on ascending the higher office that rankles.

Akala, for instance, had boasted upon taking over the mantle of his former boss, Chief Rasheed Ladoja that there couldn’t be “two kings in one palace.” Yes, after all, there is a common saying that nothing of value is given up voluntarily. But shouldn’t there be honour in politics in our land? If the conduct of Akala even till now can be likened to what you see in the Baba Sala soap opera, that of Dame Virgy Etiaba, Governor Peter Obi’s deputy, troubles the soul to no end. Everybody has his or her exit point, you know.

When Peter Obi was impeached at dawn on Thursday, November 2, 2006, the behaviour of his deputy who was sworn in the next day by the then State Chief Judge, Chuka Okoli will remain a poster of absolute disloyalty and betrayal. There is a comic ring to it as well. A day before Obi was impeached by a faction of the House led by the then Speaker, Mike Balonwu, Dame Etiaba was seen in the embrace of the Governor at the Government House, Awka. She pledged her loyalty before the klieg-lights not to leave her boss in the lurch, during his travails. She said, “Obi is my boss and he will remain my boss, come what may.”

Both rode in the same car to Enugu to see Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu at his residence. There, she repeated her pledge, to keep the faith. Less than 24 hours after, she did exactly the opposite. She reversed herself and distanced herself from her boss. What made Etiaba change her mind? Was it betrayal at its best, or sheer political opportunism? Where is Justice Okoli? Where is Mike Balonwu?

Their careers ended in tears. Okoli lost his job on the recommendation of the National Judicial Council (NJC), the young Balonwu is today in political wilderness and is avoided everywhere he goes like a leper. But Etiaba is the luckiest of them all. Peter Obi left her as his deputy. Few governors would have tolerated her trysts and that of her son, Emeka whose volley of attacks against Obi is public record. How do you solve the problem Virgy Etiaba? She is too ripe for plucking. Drop her before she and her son hurt you further.

But last week, the governor’s office came out with one of the most-anticipated news ahead of the February 6, governorship election. That news laid to rest whether Etiaba will remain the governor’s running mate. Obi said never again. He has chosen an unknown politician, one Emeka Sibudu. He is known to be a grassroot politician. But that is not as important as the fact that Dame Etiaba is going… going…

How will history judge her five-month period as governor of Anambra state? Her story, I believe, is still being written. So history can wait for now. But historians won’t be fair to her on account of her conduct while in office. Etiaba is by all account, a mediocre politician but has wonderful, smart and vocal children who took after their father, a renowned lawyer in Nnewi. On her own merit, she couldn’t have gone farther than a councillorship position, but by either providence or default, nobody can deny her place as the first woman in Nigeria to become a civilian governor in a democratic setting.

There is nothing small in being first, but being first is not enough to be as twice as good, or be rated below average. She is simply a fortunate woman who saw herself in a place of power where she might not have had the vision or talent to see herself. From a realistic point of view, Dame Etiaba’s greatest accomplishment is her unfailing ability to seize with two hands when opportunity came knocking. She grabbed it and used it, in the words of her critics, to leverage a lot of things for herself and her children.

The power she exercised, those close to the office maintain, was not hers, but someone behind the scene was pulling the strings. But even the “power behind the scene” could do nothing to prove the point that what “a man can do, a women can do, perhaps even better. Within this period she was in charge, she galloped from disappointment to near disaster.

The family name became a mere footnote in the governance of Anambra state. Allegations of sundry scandals, not proved, swirled around the corridors of power of how funds were either mismanaged or misapplied. In a mundane sense, this is not altogether strange. That is the advantage of having “bright and clever kids.” But the scent of power is very alluring. It’s like the attraction of honey to bees.

The likes of Akala and Etiaba are part of the huge blanket of suspicion that has made politics in our land such a torment and hubris that ends in self-defeat. No wonder Thomas Jefferson cautioned, “I will advise everyone 1 love not to mix with politics.” But politics can in spite of all that, be used for good. It needs men and women with strength of character, clarity of purpose, measure of trustworthiness, not opportunists, to achieve its desired goal for society.
Goodbye mummy…

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