By Victor Ofure Osehobo
Na wah oh! I just finished reading my friend, Robinson Crusoe Osagie’s latest passage- for want of better label. The trash is less a defense of Edo South and more an unprovoked howl from the retarded guard of the Failed Godwin Obaseki communication machinery. Edo people cannot forget in a hurry how this machinery spent eight years polishing failure into propaganda while our people groaned under the weight of deception. His vague attempt to paint Governor Monday Okpebholo as some anti-Benin demolition squad collapses under the faintest scrutiny because the facts do not align with his badly-packaged outrage. Since when did Crusoe or his failed boss, Obaseki start claiming Benin or Edo South as origin?
The Pastor in Crusoe forgot the most important aspect of his boss wasted years : the investments he paints as Edo’s lifelines were, in reality, Obaseki-era pipelines to funnel State funds into the pockets of his friends, frontmen and favoured foreign consultants. Edo people know this. Civil servants know this. Industry players whispered it for years. All the so-called “transformational projects” now being canonised by Crusoe were opaque, selectively awarded, overpriced, and designed to enrich a tiny circle of Obaseki’s cronies, not Edo state.
The pattern of the handwriting was legible. Every “project” had the same cast of characters—Obaseki’s friends, business partners, and private beneficiaries fronting as investors. Even his stooge, the lawyer he was cleaning up to impose as his successor was a beneficiary. Public land, public funds, and public authority were routinely deployed for the private advancement of this man and other privileged few. And these, Crusoe calls “investors”; Edo people call them “Obaseki’s cartel”.
Pastor Crusoe is bad at what he does best not to talk what he does not know how to do, like his attempt to weaponize ethnicity in Edo politics. It is cynical. It is no secret that under Obaseki, the Edo South did not receive the genuine development Crusoe now pretends to defend. Instead, it received branding, billboards, PR documentaries, and carefully choreographed tours of project sites where very little was happening behind the camera.
Which brings me to MOWAA. This is a Grand Monument to Crony Capitalism. And I am not surprised that Crusoe is wailing over MOWAA as though it were a community-driven cultural vision. Experts have said that demolishing a Hospital and replacing it with a Museum is anti-people. Yet Edo people, however, remember the secrecy that shrouded this project. Donation of ₦4billion without appropriation of any sort. No open procurement.
No clarity on ownership structure.
No transparency on funding. Haba!
MOWAA was initiated by Edo State government, designed by non-Edo architects, built on Edo land with where a century old hospital-a monument in itself was located, with Edo influence, but the financial ecosystem around it was deliberately structured to benefit private entities tied to Obaseki’s inner circle. Many cultural stakeholders openly questioned why a supposedly public heritage project was designed in ways that ceded control and future earnings to connected private figures. This is what Crusoe now tries to rewrite? How? Edo people haven’t forgotten.
Is it the Ossiomo power plant of controversy? Crusoe also tries to canonise Ossiomo as a heroic private-sector revolution. He conveniently sidesteps the fact that the project operated under an arrangement that many energy-sector experts described as a sweetheart monopoly—one that was built with state funds and gave a private company sweeping control over state power distribution without the regulatory transparency expected in such a critical infrastructure.
Only Robinson Crusoe is unaware and probably too that several critics at the time warned that Edo state’s role was bent and crookedly too to serve the private interests of those tied to the Obaseki cartel. So Crusoe’s sudden outrage over regulatory correction beats me hollow.
Abi na the very fraudulent Benin City Mall aka ShopRite, or the Radisson Hotels, the Saro Farms? What of the land grabbing by the global land grabber himself: Don Obaseki. Throughout Obaseki’s tenure, land allocation was a controversial hotbed. Prime assets moved into his cartel possession – the hands of friends, foreign associates, proxies and corporations connected to him! Personally. PASTOR CRUSOE: When public land is handed to private interests without transparent public value, you cannot call that “investment”. You call it state capture. I hope you don’t want Edo people to mourn the review of these deals. Edo people are instead asking why those deals were signed in the first place, and under what terms.
Your story about Presco ignores key questions:
• Which lands were allocated?
• Under what terms?
• Were host communities consulted?
• Were environmental safeguards followed?
• Did Edo State government derive proportional public value?
These are conversations you would rather avoid because the records of your boss’s era show a consistent pattern of signing away vast tracts of Edo land without transparency. Even Edo South traditional institutions raised alarms at different points during the period. Yet you remember none of this.
Mr Crusoe what has emerged unmistakably from this your write-up is a desperate but failed attempt to polish Obaseki’s legacy by creating a phantom villain. But Edo people cannot fooled. We lived through those locust eight years. We saw the elite enrichment scheme. We saw the foreign consultants Obaseki turned into billionaires. We saw public institutions hollowed out for private benefit. And we know that the loudest defenders of that era were often its greatest beneficiaries like you, Pastor Crusoe. The records are there.
You may try to dress up the Obaseki years as an Eden of prosperity torn down by Okpebholo, but the truth remains. Your oga used Edo State’s funds and authority to empower his clique, not the masses. The “investments”you now mourn were never designed to enrich Edo people—only the individuals behind them. Your cry is not an appeal for Edo South. It is an appeal for the restoration of the Obaseki patronage system that has finally lost its grip on the state. And that is why I pity you. Posterity will judge.
