Edo polls and the famous product vendor, by Azu Ishiekwene

BY his admission, Senator Adams Oshiomhole is a lousy product vendor. In the real commercial world, his premises would have been closed and his products banned.

But in politics, crime multiples grace. Oshiomhole dragged Godwin Obaseki into the governorship race in 2016 when the odds were against him. Obaseki’s daytime job was minding his business at Afrinvest, a financial services company he founded. But he soon landed a side hustle as chairman of the Edo State Economic and Strategy Team in Osadebey House, Benin.

When Oshiomhole wanted to hand over the baton in 2016, after two terms as governor, Obaseki, the Lagos Boy, didn’t look like it. He was not sellable. Pius Odubu, the deputy governor, was in good stead and seemed favoured to get it by most accounts.

Tinubu-Fashola model

But Oshiomhole wanted to replicate the Tinubu-Fashola template in Lagos. He wanted to be the Tinubu of Edo and to make Obaseki, the technocrat and worldly-wise businessman, the Fashola. That was how Odubu, the local politician and village man, lost out.

A Lagos-based multibillionaire with a sprawling business empire also backed the plan, which finally earned Obaseki the ticket as a candidate for the All Progressives Congress, APC. Oshiomhole portrayed Obaseki as a genius, the special one that the Edo people had been waiting for while demonising his challenger in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Osagie Ize-Iyamu.

As I said in an article at the time, there was no name that Oshiomhole didn’t call Ize-Iyamu, except the name his parents gave him: Osagie. This man, he said, was a lousy product, undeserving of the vote of the Edo people.

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Short honeymoon

Genius Obaseki won, but the honeymoon didn’t last. It didn’t take one year before he fell out with his promoter, Oshiomhole. The disagreement was not about performance or party programmes. It was about whether or not Tony Anenih, Oshiomhole’s mortal enemy, should have been given a state burial and also about control of the state’s resources.

The off-season governorship poll in Edo made matters worse. Obaseki inherited a parliament installed in 2015 when Oshiomhole was governor, and the lawmakers’ reelection in 2019 came one year ahead of Obaseki’s. He managed to work with the lawmakers for the first three years of his tenure because they were all predominantly members of the same party.

When he switched to the PDP after he was denied the APC governorship ticket in 2020, a predominantly APC parliament fiercely loyal to Oshiomhole was in place. The House was a lion’s den, and Obaseki knew he would have had to plot his survival if he won reelection. Oshiomhole went around Edo State begging voters to forgive him for selling them a “bad product,” the same product he used his mouth to advertise as a genius deal in 2016.

This time, he offered them Osagie Ize-Iyamu, whom he had demonised and written off four years earlier as the rebranded new deal. Of course, voters rejected the offer. Obaseki, who had defected to the opposition PDP with his deputy, Philip Shaibu, won the election.

To survive, Obaseki governed with a hobbled parliament. Over half of the state lawmakers were camped in Oshiomhole’s house in Abuja because the governor refused to swear them in.

Vendor begs again

The vendor has been begging again for the sins he committed against the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, hoping that forgiveness might also pave the way for the APC’s candidate, Monday Okpebholo, in this weekend’s governorship election.

It won’t be long before we know what the voters think. The stage is set for a three-way race among Okpebholo (APC), Asue Ighodalo of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP’; and Olumide Akpata of the Labour Party, LP.

According to the election watchdog, Yiaga Africa, there are 17 parties with about 2.6 million registered voters. For nearly two-and-a-half decades, the political contest in Edo has been between two parties – until last year’s presidential election altered the landscape, producing a result that gave Labour 56.97 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election, a senator, and a member of the House of Representatives.

The battlegrounds

The battle this weekend will be fierce in two senatorial districts – Edo Central, where the two leading candidates, Okpebholo and Ighodalo, are from, and the South, which produced a senator and a federal House member from the Labour Party and is also the stronghold of Obaseki and his ally and former SSG, Osaradion Ogie.

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It was in the Central, formerly a PDP bastion, that Okpebholo defeated Clifford Ordia, a two-term senator. This weekend’s contest gives Okpebholo a chance to prove his victory was not a fluke in an election where the two leading candidates, both from this constituency with the least local governments (five) and lowest number of registered voters 440,514 (16.68 percent), have everything to play for.

Ogun Waterside: Path to political recovery

We are the makers of our own history, we have a statutory right to make a choice, it is however necessary to select the platform and purpose of which we make a choice today that becomes history tomorrow.

Firstly, let me apologize to APC leaders in Ogun Waterside, for making open this message which would have otherwise, be private and enclosed. But the ongoing events and our preparation for the forthcoming statewide local government election dictates my choice of bringing the message to public domain.

Ogun Waterside local government has ten electoral wards, eight of these wards are predominantly occupied by the indigenous owners, the Ijebus, while the remaining two wards accommodate the Ikale & Ilaje

Election is a game of number, In any election, majority dictate the space, this of course, has always been the case in all past elections held in the local government area. Past records of elections in Ogun waterside has always seen Ijebu, the rightful owners of the land producing chairman, while the position of vice chairman or SLG is ceded to Ikale & Ilaje for sense of belonging.
This political arrangement has always produced good result.
As the selection process for a candidate as the chairman of the local government commences, it is necessary to advise our political leaders in all the political parties in the waterside to promptly give consideration to the owners of the land.
The holy book, the Bible, says “love your neighbours as yourself”; we should ask ourselves what we stand to gain if we unconsciously commit our land and the administration of our valuable resources in the hands of co-inhabitants who migrated from Ondo State.
Ogun Waterside Local Government is blessed with great and mighty men and women. We cannot afford to trade off our tomorrow in exchange for a plate of porridge.
The number of residents and inhabitants of the two wards in Ikale & Ilaje areas, if put together, cannot match a ward in the areas occupied by the Ijebu.
As much as we recognize the constitutional and minority rights of our neighbours, the Ikale and Ilaje in Ogun Waterside, we should not also forget the indigenes’ rights of the owners, the Ijebu.
Therefore, it is morally justified if leaders of APC in the waterside urgently consider the danger of returning the local government to the opposition.
Giving the chairmanship ticket to a non-indigene of the local government is like imposing the co-inhabitants over the rightful owners. The consequence will be too grievous.

The people in the local government have made a choice, our leaders, the custodians of our cherished culture, our traditional rulers must do the right thing today that will justify our existence tomorrow.
The will of the masses must be respected.

Signed:

*Deacon Obatungashe I. Adebayo*
Waterside Vanguard.

Why only Nigerians call petrol PMS – Farooq Kperogi

I am taking a break from political commentary to everyday language usage this week. A few weeks ago, a British journalist who writes about oil and gas wrote to thank me for past articles I wrote that explained why Nigerians call “petrol” “Premium Motor Spirit.”

“While I have always assumed PMS meant petrol I never knew exactly why this term was so widespread in Nigeria!” he wrote. This email inspired me to republish parts of what I wrote about this.

There is a widespread misconception in Nigerian journalistic circles that “premium motor spirit” is the proper name for petrol, and this misconception appears to be percolating into wider popular usage.

Almost without exception, Nigerian newspapers refer to petrol as “premium motor spirit” or PMS. In fact, “petrol” is typically represented as the alias of “premium motor spirit.” In other words, Nigerian newspapers mislead their readers into thinking that everyone in the English-speaking world recognizes “premium motor spirit” as the real name for “petrol.”

Take, for instance, this 2017 lead from one of Nigeria’s best-edited online newspapers: “Premium Motor Spirit, otherwise known as petrol, is selling at N500 per litre in the black market in Kaduna State as government began enforcement of ban on sale of petroleum products in jerry cans.”

Almost all Nigerian newspapers feel the need to refer to petrol as “premium motor spirit” and to signal that the rest of us linguistically unwashed plebeians call it “petrol.” It never ceases to provoke loud hearty laughter in me each time I read it. It’s my go-to linguistic comic relief.

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Well, only Nigerian newspapers, and the people who are influenced by them, call petrol “premium motor spirit.” It’s an entirely meaningless phrase to native English speakers in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It also makes no sense to English speakers in India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Commonwealth countries where English is spoken as a second language.

In 2012, I asked several of my American friends, colleagues, and students what the phrase “premium motor spirit” evoked in them. They all said they had never encountered the phrase and had no clue what it meant.

I searched the 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to see if any American English speaker has ever used the term. I got no matching record. I also searched the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find out if any American ever used the expression between 1810 and 2009. Again, no luck.

I thought, perhaps, the phrase would be familiar to British English speakers, so I searched the British National Corpus to see if there is any record of its use in British English. I had no luck, either.

Finally, I searched the 1.9-billion-word Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which indexes English usage in 20 different English-speaking countries. I had some luck this time around. I got 53 matches. But of the 53 matches for “premium motor spirit” that turned up in the database, 49 came from Nigerian English users, 3 from Ghanaian English users, and 1 from a Kenyan newspaper.

When I followed the link to the Ghanaian sites that used “premium motor spirit,” I found that the writers were Nigerians who were based in Ghana. The fact that Kenya is the only other country where “premium motor spirit” was used, even if only once, as an alternative name for “petrol” alerted me to the fact that the word probably has British English roots.

Origins of “Motor Spirit”
My hunch was right. Although the term enjoys no currency in contemporary British English (as evidenced from its complete absence from the British National Corpus), it actually started life in Britain some 200 years ago.

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Carless, Capel & Leonard (now renamed Petrochem Carless Ltd), one of Britain’s first oil companies, was the first to use the term “petrol” in English, in 1870, to refer to refined petroleum products, which weren’t used to power cars at the time.

By the 1930s when petrol became the fuel used in internal combustion engines, Carless, Capel & Leonard applied to trademark “petrol” so that the company’s competitors (who frequently used the term “motor spirit” to refer to their product) won’t be able to call their product “petrol.”

But the application was denied because the use of “petrol” to refer to refined petroleum products, derived from the French petrole (ultimately from Medieval Latin petroleum, which literally means “rock oil,” from the Latin petra, which means rock or stone, and oleum, which means oil) had become widespread by the 1930s in Britain.

With the denial of Carless, Capel & Leonard’s application to trademark “petrol,” other British companies that had referred to their product as “motor spirit” freely adopted “petrol” as the name of choice for their product, and “motor spirit” fell into disuse.

“Premium” wasn’t an invariable lexical component of the name. The “premium” in the name refers to the grade of the product. There are three major grades of petrol in the UK: “ordinary unleaded,” “premium or super unleaded,” and “leaded four star.”

In the US, petrol, which is called gasoline (or gas for short), has the following grades: “Regular,” “Mid-grade or Plus,” and “Premium.”

Saudi Arabia has “premium” and “super premium” grades of petrol. Many other countries have several names for different grades of petrol.

So “premium” is one of at least three adjectives that could modify “motor spirit” when “motor spirit” enjoyed currency in Britain. There could conceivably have existed “ordinary unleaded motor spirit” or “leaded four star motor spirit”—or whatever names existed at the time for grades of motor spirit in Britain.

In other words, calling petrol “premium motor spirit” is the same thing as calling petrol “premium petrol” now, even though there are other grades of the product.

Interestingly, Nigeria is one of only a few countries in the world where petrol is ungraded. Maybe that is why our journalists assume that every petrol is of a premium grade and therefore call petrol “premium motor spirit” (never mind that “motor spirit” is obsolete).

Premium Motor Spirit a Scientific Name?
A few people have asked me if “premium motor spirit” is perhaps the scientific name for petrol since Nigerian oil industry experts, including academic researchers in petroleum studies, liberally use it. No, it’s not. There isn’t one specific scientific name for petrol.

As I said earlier, “motor spirit” is the archaic British English name for petrol, and “premium” indicates the grade of the “motor spirit.” Today, most British speakers have no idea what “motor spirit” means and would be even more puzzled by the permanent modification of the term with “premium.”

It’s mystifying that Nigerian journalists—and Nigerian academics— are about the only people who are still wedded to a phrase that died in Britain in the 1930s.

Note that different countries have different names for petrol. Most people know that Americans and Canadians call it gasoline. Germans and people who are influenced by German linguistic traditions call it “benzin,” which is derived from “benzene,” a constituent part of petrol. The French from whom the British borrowed “petrol,” now call it “essence.” Spanish-speaking people call it “gasolina.”

I also find it intriguing that Nigerians use the American English “kerosene” instead of the British English “paraffin” as the term of choice for lamp oil.

Maybe Nigeria should formally adopt “motor spirit” as its national name for petrol. After all, petrol is the “spirit” that moves “motors,” which is the alternative name for vehicles in British and Nigerian English.

Why only Nigerians call petrol PMS – Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned newspaper columnist and United States-based Professor of journalism.