Alex Otti, The Painter

By Godwin Adindu—

I love this portrayal of Governor Alex Otti as a painter. This frame is very creative, artistic and altruistic. Whoever that must have captured the man with this metarphor of colours and beauty must be a great creative and philosophical mind. Don’t mind that the word may have dropped as a jab or satire, such great copies emerge unconciously and carelessly. Otti as a painter is an accurate mental picture and mental construction of the man and his strides in Abia State.

Governor Otti has trully repainted Abia, giving it new images, new colours and new forms. He has created a new society out of the old. He has done a general overhauling of the system, creating new processes and new procedures. He has changed the face of infrastructure, reconstructed old roads and building new ones. The painter in Otti is very visible and he is indeed a master of his art.

The painter is a deep thinker, a creative personality and an inspirational custodian of his world. He daily criss-crosses the two common territories of the normal and the paranormal. He is an inventor and a creator who draws from the unseen to create a reality of purpose. The painter is a restorer of life who advances beyond the frontiers of life by capturing the transient motions of life and storing them into concrete details. He is a transformer, creating beauty out of the odd and the obscene and tells his stories not with words or oratory but with spell-binding evocation of feelings and meanings. He therefore speaks to our innerbeing, appealing to all our senses.

Those who profiled Governor Otti, in subtle sargasm as a painter, have inadvertently stamped a loud endorsement of the man’s transformative gestures. They unknowingly elevated him to the hall of legends of performers, using the imagery of a great painter.

The painter in Otti is indeed an apt and accurate metarphor that amplifies the efforts in rebuilding of a state into a modern nation; of setting up new structures and branding a new Abia.

Adindu writes from Umuahia