By Kennedy Ogenna
Like the 1976 American presidential election between two born-again politicians: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the Imo State November governorship election is supposed to be between faithful politicians but only one, Senator Samuel Anyanwu (Samdaddy), is willing to run as one.
Samdaddy may not be a political pontiff much like Carter who taught Sunday school in the Baptist Church and did mission work and Ford whose relationship with Evangelist Billy Graham shaped his spiritual faith and made him lead America more like a pastor than a politician, but the decency of his character is the ideal remedy for the deception of politics.
At a time when the cast of election candidates is starting to act like Hollywood stars, the candidature of Samdaddy, the Imo State PDP candidate in the November governorship polls, is a refreshing contrast. There is a lot of strutting and vogueing for the cameras but Samdaddy is carefully grabbing the pathfinder to snake through the narrow minefield of idealistic politics.
Many Imolites believe that Samdaddy is the solution to the many leadership ills of the state and that the current APC administration is just an annoyance that still lacks political algorithm. Most independent political observers who sift through the performance record of the ruling government appear to agree that the government lack pre-eminent reckoning and there is a sort of skepticism towards it.
Voters are also scrutinising the government's major planks from antitrust concerns to governance. And pollsters are looking at whether the government has abused its opportunities in the last four years of its existence.
Now lifted by populism, unpredictable guts and a delight in daring, Samdaddy is soaring to political heights once unimaginable, coming to represent all that the voters finds most important about Imo's lost exceptionalism; the care for peoples' lives, not their debasement, which is the first and only objective of a legitimate government.
To see an entreched history as about to repeat itself or dismissing Samdaddy's ticket as one that will end as "also ran" without making any mark is to miss how deeply things have changed. Beyond trial and error, today's Samdaddy is selling tested and validated campaign thrust that is already generating electoral style and substance, rather than just saying one day he might.
The palpable political nosebleed and electoral shivering of the current administration stems in large part from the sheer scale of this reality of Samdaddy's public valuation.
For Samdaddy, it is impossible to be a pessimist when you have just escaped the Armageddon. You can tell him that he can't fly, but be sure that he will never hear you over the roar of the engine of faith.
He seems to be propelled by the timeless words of former American president, Donald Trump: " The more people tell you it is not possible, that it can't be done, the more you should be absolutely determined to prove them wrong. Treat the word impossible as nothing more than motivation."
Booms and busts, however, are part of the history of electoral politics. But the Samdaddy surge over his competing contemporaries is here to stay. It has become the nexus of social contract and the upside of democracy in a state desperately in need of the two, and it will remain so.
If you ask me to distil Samdaddy's campaign message into one word, I would say "Faith."
