After making short work of many valiant men during the campaigns, supporters of Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the February 25 election, have trained their guns on Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka. They congratulate themselves on becoming the terror of Nigerian politics, a people held in dread by those who do not even fear God. Vicious, irreverent, iconoclastic and uncouth, they will turn on anyone, friend or foe, who as much as gesture suspiciously at their god’s Achilles heel. They were not supposed to be the centerpiece of the February/March elections, but by their sheer reprobateness, they have contrived to be the main talking point in the elections and beyond, far weightier than the shifty Mr Obi himself. Together with the LP candidate, they have also managed by their herd mentality and pugnacity to expose the insularity and shallowness of many otherwise respectable intellectuals and authors.
Weeks ago, former Ekiti State governor Ayo Fayose argued that President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu would have to grapple with the Obi factor in the years ahead, mostly because of the forces and tendencies that coalesced around him, or which he represented, in the last polls. This column disagreed vehemently with Mr Fayose’s postulations. Mr Obi, it reasoned, did not represent any force or ideology; he was instead a product of the chimerical pursuit of a band of unruly and unconscionable social media bandits and ethnic warriors. He would fade away as quickly as he manifested on the scene, this column argued, because of the impermanence that shrouded his being and politics. Without depth and ideology, it was impossible for Mr Obi to concretise anything any president or system should grapple with.
Despite unwisely but deliberately lending her authorial weight to Mr Obi’s specious style and politics, Chimamanda Adichie will still be hard put to give substance, structure or permanence to the LP candidate. He may have waved his talisman at the face of his south-eastern supporters, and bamboozled the church, and played the pied piper to angry and superficial Lagosians, but there is little anyone can do to elevate Mr Obi’s politics, not to talk of sustaining him till the next election cycle. His inflamed supporters will still register some presence on the social media, but their activities will taper off after the historic conjuncture of Obi, church, and Igbo presidential aspiration has been exploded as a myth. What indeed will remain for the president-elect to pay attention to in the opening years of his presidency will be the consequences of the actions of Mr Obi’s supporters and the nuanced forces and apparitions they gave vent. The LP candidate had initially scorned the need for a manifesto until the subject could not be waved away. He also accentuated the polarisation of the country by strategically wooing the church and the Igbo for his presidential ambition, and in the process disregarding the feelings of other religions and people. He was uncomfortable with proposing or embracing any ideology, and was so casual about important and tested ideas that he merely poll parroted jaded views on production and consumption as economic panaceas. And despite his grandiloquence and affectations, he told plain lies and scorned principles whenever he was cornered. Mr Obi will not be a political factor in the years ahead; he has run his last race and, as his leaked phone conversation showed, told the least lies to warrant any serious attention in the future.
The LP candidate came third in the presidential poll, but has disparaged the country, its institutions and the electoral process as if he was the first runner-up. Despite his capriciousness, he will, however, be unable to contribute significantly to national discourse, for he has attracted so much public image disproportionate to his real political size, competence and ideology. The first-runner-up in the presidential election, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, is steadily mummifying before the eyes of Nigerians, destitute of ideology, character and electoral savvy. He will also not contribute significantly to national discourse. That leaves the Obi crowd. Even they too can only contribute indirectly to national discourse, not so much by what they do or say – and they have offered nothing serious for anyone to pay attention to – but by the ghosts they have indirectly exhumed and inflicted upon the country. One of those ghosts is how to find a constitutional arrangement to help stabilise the country’s more than 250 language groups and get them working seamlessly together for a common purpose, devoid of suspicion and hate.
Other intangibles the president-elect will have to contend with are how to create a stabilising and forward-looking culture of leadership succession; heal the religious divides so mercilessly exploited and exacerbated by mindless politicians and scheming clerics; forge a national ideology cum national identity; produce a new governance paradigm that takes cognisance of Nigeria’s ethnic mosaic; and design a new constitutional arrangement capable of mediating ethnic conflicts that have ossified over decades. Resolving these intangibles will imbue Nigeria and Nigerians a national identity capable of soothing, if not curing, centuries of colonially-induced fissiparousness. The fault lines exposed by the last elections have been evident for decades and manifest in virtually every election cycle. Those fractures have not been rationally and realistically dealt with, hence their recrudescence. President Muhammadu Buhari had the goodwill and national mobilisation anchored on the coalition that produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) to do something about the malaise, but he chose to fritter away the gains of his stupendous election victory, leading to stasis and retrogression.
President-elect Tinubu will be inheriting a deeply divided country shorn of any rational and catalysing national rubric. Worse, he will be inheriting a national trust deficit worsened by the aggressive and poisonous falsehoods propagated by Mr Obi’s fanatics who incredulously imagined that they won the presidential election and needed to intimidate the judiciary to regain what they petulantly described as their ‘stolen mandate’. They may in fact have the backing of the increasingly insular ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and a few elder statesmen, some of whom are inciting insurrection; but contending with and resolving these abnormalities, falsehoods, and destructive propaganda will take years of careful rebuilding of the national edifice, culturally, structurally and economically. The task will not be easy, especially in the face of a crisis of expectations bound to confront the Tinubu administration. He has been sold to the country as the first bold, prepared and intellectually equipped president to take the mantle of leadership. But because the damage of decades has been overwhelming, it will require a plethora of rejigging, if not gigantic reset of national foundations, to make a dent on the rot. Contending with foundational issues at a time when the country is also desperate for philosophical realignments can be quite enervating. The president-elect will, in other words, have to work magic in the face of recalcitrant opposition inflamed by Chief Obasanjo, Mr Obi, et al.
The task of rebuilding will also be difficult in the face of the existential crisis Lagos has become enmeshed. The Southeast seems unnaturally obsessed with Lagos, with every social and cultural infraction and electoral mishap in the state triggering scathing criticisms. Ballot boxes were snatched in many states, and more election-related deaths occurred in other states than in Lagos; but it was Lagos that dominated the news. Mr Obi’s presidential poll victory in Lagos tantalised many south-easterners whose idea of liberalism and multiculturalism was limited only to the ‘seizure’ of Lagos, especially with the collusion of a section of the Lagos elite. This led to the projection of the emotionally deficient and untested Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour as a plausible winner of the governorship poll. The candidate himself framed his campaign along the debilitating lines of ‘freeing’ the state from the vice grip of the ‘prehensile’ APC. The campaign was ultimately doomed, but not before it polluted national discourse about the constitutional rights of Nigerians to live anywhere and stand for election anywhere. This anomalous and poisonous understanding of national politics will have to be reviewed in the first term of the new administration if worse conflicts are not to be engendered.
This review will have to study the constitutions and political arrangements of Nigeria’s Independence Constitution; Belgium and its balancing acts between the French, Dutch, and German entities; Yugoslavia and the reasons for state dissolution; the Uyghur question in China; the Russo-Ukrainian War; the Jewish Question as a factor in German domestic and global hegemonic policies in World War II; the federal constitutions of the United States and Canada; Myanmar and the Rohingya question; and even the relationship between Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. It is counterproductive not to settle Nigeria’s national question while attempting to proceed idealistically into multiculturalism. Western notions of liberalism and multiculturalism may not necessarily work in Nigeria, let alone in Lagos, or any part of Africa.
President-elect Tinubu will have to proceed from the realistic perspective that the British cynically welded many nations together to form Nigeria, and that these nations have retained their cultures, different stages of civilisation, religions, and even general worldviews. Little has changed. So, whatever restructuring is needed will have to take into consideration those intrinsic civilisational achievements. Waiting for the Yoruba to be apologetic about retaining Lagos, including deploying ‘unwholesome’ tactics to achieve that retention within the ambits of their heritage and worldview, is unlikely. For instance, religion plays very little role in Southwest politics. But in the past two decades or so, and as a result of the unhealthy projection of militant religion in other parts of Nigeria as well as the growth of Pentecostal fervour, religion has crept insidiously into Southwest politics. The region is resisting this strange anomaly, but the disease managed to infect and distort campaigns and relationships in the last elections in Lagos. In addition, the Southwest elite, regardless of differences, has retained powerful influence on the region leading them to leash self-determination movements in a way other regional elites have been unable to control IPOB and unknown gunmen, and banditry and Boko Haram. Proposed constitutional arrangements must factor these differences.
Obi, Oyedepo: of phone calls and religious wars
For much of last week, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, contended with the fallout of a humiliating phone conversation he allegedly had with founder of the Living Faith church, Bishop David Oyedepo. The two men were reported by the Peoples Gazette, an online medium, to have plotted on phone how to persuade Southwest, Kwara, Kogi and Niger States’ Christian voters to join the LP’s saints triumphant column in the February 25 presidential poll. In the conversation, apart from other unflattering statements, the two men also reportedly likened the presidential contest to a religious war needing the militant intervention of unhappy and politicised Christians.
The phone conversation itself was alleged to have taken place shortly before the presidential poll, but reportedly leaked to the public two Saturdays ago. After being briefly tongue-tied, LP’s and Mr Obi’s spokesmen, Kenneth Okonkwo and Valentine Obienyem, finally found their voices and argued that the phone conversation was taken out of context, with some of the statements garbled and manipulated to insinuate religious war. Mr Obienyem even suggested the Obi camp knew who leaked the phone conversation. But the public was sceptical. Last Sunday, newspapers reported Dr Oyedepo’s response as evasive and unconvincing. He said he had never campaigned for any politician. Not only was that untrue, said commentators, and a far cry from the observable reality around the bishop, they also concluded that his response failed to answer the more crucial question as to whether the alleged phone conversation took place.
By last week, nearly everyone but the so-called hardened ‘Obidients’ believed the leaked phone call to be true. Dr Oyedepo did not deny that the phone call took place, he only affirmed his political neutrality. Might Mr Obi have a different version of what took place? Yes, it seems. The phone call never happened, he swore. What was leaked, he said glibly and threateningly, was a fake phone call. He had instructed his lawyers to take action against the Peoples Gazette, he deadpanned. Does anyone believe him? Perhaps only hardened ‘Obidients’. If Mr Obi left his spokesmen to contend with the scandal of leaked phone call for about a week before he found his wits, it speaks volumes of his organisational ability, if not his ethical standing. LP activists as well as Mr Obi himself ,and quite a number of party leaders and spokesmen, have been consistently dubbed as ‘liars’ for their fecundity in militantly conjuring alternative truths and universes. Their fame in creating distorted realities seems to have been earned, and will probably follow them for as long as the party exists under its present franchise. They will not recant anything; they lack the needed remorse and humility to accept wrongdoing.
In his statement debunking the leaked phone conversation, Mr Obi as usual engaged in a lot of waffling and dissemination of homilies. Then, he lied. In the third paragraph of his rebuttal, the LP candidate insisted he had never made recourse to ethnic or religious politics. Said he: “I repeatedly stated that no one should vote for me based on tribe or religion, but rather on the assessment of my character, competence, capacity, credibility, and compassion that can be trusted to create a New Nigeria!” Except he treats everything he said, which became controversial, as fake news, he was caught on video instigating the church to rise up and take back their country. Moreover, a central part of his campaigns was directed at churches, which he visited copiously and where he spoke glowingly about what God was about to do in Nigeria. He ended up being adopted by preachers who serenaded him with prophetic utterances decreeing his victory. Indeed, as the alleged phone conversation indicated, a desperate Mr Obi received, in response to his disingenuous solicitations, Bishop Oyedepo’s assurances that victory was imminent.
And just as he dragged the church into his campaigns, he also made the Igbo, his ethnic group, the locus of his presidential pitch. In Lagos and elsewhere outside the Southeast, Mr Obi visited Igbo settlements and business concentrations to pitch his ambition. He was enthusiastically embraced and adopted. The recourse to ethnicity and religion may be inadvisable and even harmful to national integration, but it fetched him tons of support that transformed his campaign, dynamited the presidential ambition of the PDP candidate Atiku Abubakar out of orbit, and eventually fetched him 11 states plus the Federal Capital City (FCT), Abuja. His achievement was unprecedented, and had he not made those deliberate pitches, it is doubtful whether he would have gone so far, let alone stake a dubious and increasingly futile but militant claim to victory. Unfortunately too, his ultimately doomed campaign has desecrated the image of the church and compounded the national mistrust for the Igbo still entertained in some quarters nationally. That mistrust is amplified by the overweening number of Igbo intellectuals, gullible writers and impressionable political leaders within and outside the country susceptible to his talisman.
Mr Obi has done incalculable damage to the Igbo brand and political fortune by his obdurate stance on an election he stood no chance of winning due to the limiting effects of his unusual campaign. The leaked phone conversation is merely emblematic of Mr Obi’s shortsightedness and desperation, perhaps even signposting his utter unwillingness to concede defeat and guarantee a plausible and perhaps successful future run for the presidency. He should have let bad enough alone; but he is now unwisely litigating an election where he could never conceivably secure 25 percent in 20 states (he met that percentage in only 15 states). The suit will miscarry, even as his running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, continues to flail wildly on the political scene, exposing the unsightly leitmotif of his brittle character and politics. Mr Obi has also signaled his readiness to litigate the Peoples Gazette story on the leaked phone call. How on earth he expects the suit to benefit his politics and standing, and not expose in ugly details his proclivity for telling tall stories and adding stretchers, is hard to fathom.