Rekpene Bassey
Power rarely presents clean choices. It more often confronts leaders with competing liabilities dressed as options. That is the frame within which Bassey Edet Otu must be understood in his quiet navigation of the 2027 senatorial permutations in Cross River North.
Caught between Ben Ayade, a former ally whose incumbency once lent weight to Otu’s own rise, yet whose tenure left a contested legacy, and Jarigbe Agom Jarigbe, a more recent convert to the ruling fold, politically nimble and increasingly aligned with national power centers, the governor stood at a familiar crossroads in political philosophy: the tension between loyalty and legitimacy.
Ayade represents the paradox of power without enduring goodwill.
He is, by all accounts, a seasoned tactician, but one whose time in office appears to have strained the social contract with the people.
Memory, in politics, is not merely archival; it is moral. It accumulates judgment. And where governance falters, history does not whisper. It hardens.
Jarigbe, on the other hand, embodies the pragmatics of contemporary politics: adaptive, networked, and attuned to the gravitational pull of Abuja.
His alignment with figures such as Godswill Akpabio and Bola Ahmed Tinubu signals not just personal ambition, but strategic positioning within the architecture of national influence.
For Otu, the dilemma was not simply who to support. It was how to choose without inheriting the full cost of that choice. In such moments, the skilled politician does not confront the storm head-on; he redirects its winds.
The reported recourse to presidential mediation, whether tactical or instinctive, reflects a deeper understanding: that in politics, distance can be as powerful as a decision.
However, even within that maneuver lies an implicit judgment. If, as reason suggests, Otu leaned toward Jarigbe, it may not have been merely out of political convenience, but out of an awareness of public sentiment; of a state still negotiating the aftertaste of a difficult past.
Leadership, after all, is not only about alliances; it is about reading the moral temperature of the governed.
There is, beneath the strategy, a quieter lesson.
A public office is not a private possession but a borrowed trust. It is tested not in the moment of acquisition, but in the memory it leaves behind.
Ambition may be resilient, but reputation is decisive. And time has a way of revisiting every ledger.
In the end, politics returns to philosophy: that power exercised without prudence diminishes its own future, and that history, though patient, is never indifferent.
Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics &
Former Cross River State Security Adviser.
