Interesting! So Uncle Abati Finally Tiptoed Into Uyo to Eat Pepper Soup!
By Substance Udo-Nature
When you perform like Governor Umo Eno is performing, you have enough reasons and surplus boldness to host big events of any name as often as you choose, inviting choristers and hardliners. That’s the inherent and shared benefit of good governance.
-By Substance Udo-Nature
Sometime in June 2023, Dr. Reuben Abati gave Nigerians something to gossip and laugh about in offices, beer parlours, markets, and on every street corner with his invention and donation to Nigeria’s sociopolitical shoptalk: a mischievous, strange expression. While live on the popular “Good Morning Show” of Arise TV, Dr Abati had mischievously but humorously described the then newly elected Governor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom State as “Pepper Soup Governor”.
It was his swipe at the governor for having promised earlier on March 15, 2023, during the governorship election campaigns and later actually introducing what he called “Happy Hour”—an extravaganza where residents in the state would, at designated locations including the Hilltop Mansion, indulge in free-for-all revelry on certain Fridays of the month.
While Umo Eno was being cheered in Uyo for the avant-garde jamboree, Abati and Co. in Lagos were gleefully poking fun at him on international television. I consider that if it were in recent days, His Excellency would give measure for measure to busybody critics of his idiosyncrasy, like he did to Kenneth Okonkwo for his “Transgenderic” lampoon; Abati, likely, would have been roasted in the cauldron of his theatrical parody.
To proceed, let me first tender a plea: this teething toddler is in no way looking for the trademark trouble of a man the lace of whose customised Italian shoes I cannot dare to untie, even if I were a fashionista in the employ of Fendi, Gucci or Prada. Rather, as I squat under the shadow of this Iroko, my mission is simply mnemonic, a cursory reference to how the past can affect the present in the economics of social commentaries. So, if you consider this essay long, please blame Dr. Abati. For the secret mentee I am – I read, follow, and idolise him, and heaven never once accuses me of idolatry!
Except for Gen Zs who do not read newspapers or ordinarily would want to miss a split second of “Big Brother Naija” or Nollywood to watch real-time educative television programmes, I wouldn’t waste time or space introducing Dr. Abati. A brief highlight, however, is that he is a journalist of note and of notes, a polymath, writer, author, lawyer, and public affairs analyst who knows how to cut people to size with the sharp tongue of fluid elocution and slice through any subject like a hot knife through butter.
With an inexhaustible, befuddling idiolect, sometimes he does it with deep humour and euphemism; sometimes he dares and pours down like acid on polythene. But it’s always a matter of circumstance; perhaps his dominant mood on air or the subject on the table, like when he reduced the Minister of FCT, Nyesom Wike, a man of “structures”, to a mere abstract for challenging his intellectual wealth. “Octopus Wike and the PDP” was the title of his column (Thisday, May 27, 2025). He furiously soaked the hapless victim in condensed metaphors. Dr Abati knows where to drop a cannonball, and even bullets, especially if he knows where the corpses were buried in a boiling subject.
On Thursday, 7th August 2025, Dr. Abati was in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital. Maybe he thought I would not know, so that he may not be reminded of his “pepper soup” badmouth or be asked “to land”, given his net worth, which Forbes speciously keeps sitting on in conspiratorial courtesy to celebrity.
Dr. Abati was his distinct self on a protocol of special invitees to the Public Presentation of the Socio-Economic Impact of the ARISE Agenda in Two Years, which had the theme “Measuring Progress, Deepening Impact”, held at the Banquet Hall of the Akwa Ibom Government House, Wellington Bassey Way End, Uyo. I’m not sure if other stations were engaged to beam the event live, but the programme’s promo significantly promoted TVC. A gossiper might be quick to connect the special favour to Pastor Umo Eno’s recent metamorphosis.
So the venerable Abati, who has been former this and that with fantastic distinctions but presently the no-nonsense cerebral principal anchor of “The Morning Show”, was there, sweating in glittering recognitions and appreciation for his undeniable dues to the literati, the commentariat, and analytics. His romance with Gov Eno could easily have reminded mischief-makers of someone returning to the very bush track he had earlier defecated. So Abati needs CAUTION as much as I may not!
It must be noted, of course, that Governor Umo Eno and events like that Thursday are no strange bedfellows. On July 27, 2023, he unveiled the ARISE Agenda with competitive momentum and complementary consonance to the present. Dr. Abati wasn’t there. Maybe he was forgotten by a governor who then had nothing on the ground to show but mere bullet-point promises on giant projectors.
Especially with a dynamic media tycoon and strategist like Hon. Aniekan Umana, a former federal lawmaker and a serial Commissioner for Information who has served no fewer than three governors of the State, we can expect anything entirely fresh at any time or a cloning of old ideas for a make-belief freshness by expert simulation. For the record, Umana was the chief architect of the cantata of the Uncommon Era of the Uncommon Transformer, former governor Godswill Akpabio.
In all modesty, there’s certainly something for Pastor Eno to boast about. It is my earnest opinion that, by the staring evidence on the ground across all sectors, His Excellency deserves to show up without being accused of showmanship. Except for what remains to be seen in the next two years, we have seen all there was to be seen in the past two years. No objective commentator with a breathing conscience would fumble on the statistics to deny the facts.
Coincidentally, or surprisingly, that same Thursday, Ekemini Simon, an award-winning investigative Journalist who has been the thorn in the flesh of government, published an article with a felicitous heading: “A’Ibom Government Achieves 99.9 Per cent Funding Target for 2025 Budget”. This doesn’t come so often from the Ekeminic stable. It naturally follows that, if you cannot pause a time to commend the good, you automatically lose the moral license to condemn the bad.
So Abati was conspicuously in town. As I looked at the pictures, especially the moment the governor presented the book, “And It Came to Pass”, written by Anietie Usen, to him, Abati was chuffed to bits. I have not seen him this happy in other States he had visited, at least not in pictures. I don’t know if that particular picture was taken after or before some smoky plates of royal pepper soup had gone down. Just that he was dramatically happy!
Dr. Abati’s official invitation and his reciprocal courtesy to show up in person at the event spoke volumes. First, it shows that there is a valley between professional duty and relationships. Which simply means he pampers no sentiments nor harbours any grudge when he is analysing matters on television.
But Abati must know that his revered presence at that event has sparked a wave of conspiracy theories. Trust Nigerians. Some have said “it was a surprise” – that a “whole Abati” is in coded romance with a man he actively scarified with salty ridicule. Some are saying it is “a tactical buyout” – that Governor Eno is strategising “to win over bad-mouth people in the national space”; he doesn’t want Abati’s headache, as we proceed.
I had reasons to instantly and constructively oppose those opinions, and I did so without any sentiment. For Abati, it simply shows that when you are good at your job, you become indispensable to those who value quality. Molly Ivins tells us that, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful”.
On the other hand, Umo Eno’s invitation of Abati was a textbook proof of the rare kind of inclusion that he has brought into Nigeria’s leadership discourse. Conversely, the pastor-politician has become a magnetic field for the good, the bad, the ugly – thus providing a paragonic counterpoise of diplomacy between power and the Fourth Estate of the Realm. Eno, which putatively means grace or gift in Ibibio, has done this without pretensions across borders.
Nor should Abati himself feel or boast that his invitation to the event was a justification for his “Lagos Syndrome” hypothesis. In his column of September 5, 2017, titled “Akwa Ibom Churches as Vehicles for Opportunism”, he inferred that there was a tradition of inability amongst Akwa Ibom governors to do anything worthwhile without some Lagos connection.
“The problem with many of the governors across Nigeria is the Lagos Syndrome. They have lived in Lagos and worked all their lives in Lagos; when they go back home to become governors or whatever, Lagos never leaves their system. ….They take Lagos ideas to the hinterland, and struggle to connect the future of their states to Lagos; in the process, they create contradictions”, Abati wrote.
Abati practically lives in Lagos. He came to the event from Lagos. Was that any proof that no governor of the host State can do without Lagos’ ideas? When the former spokesperson to former President Jonathan visited the governor of Anambra State, Prof. Charles Soludo, earlier in March 2025 on invitation to a media chat, he had in his following week’s column, “Breakfast With The Soludos (Thisday, March 25, 2025), diagonally shifted the focus from the purpose.
I should believe that Abati peppered his lips with enough pepper soup in Uyo and even went back with takeaway in his portfolio, although it wasn’t a “Happy Hour” Friday. If his next column carries the title, “Uyo and My Dinner With the Pepper Soup Governor”, I shall not be surprised.
© 11/7/2025. Nature, complementarily a Writer and Journalist, does his things in Uyo (080 6878 6775).
