Charles Chukwuma Soludo‘s letter to Peter Obi is the latest construction of awareness in Nigeria’s heated political space. The Anambra State governor spared no scruples in his 4,025-word missive to the Labour Party presidential candidate.
Titled, History beckons and I will not be silent (1), the letter resonates as an expose and caution against the rage and aggression of Obi’s social media mob.
The latter had characteristically attacked Soludo for his utterances concerning Obi while interviewing with Channels TV. Soludo, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the incumbent governor of Anambra State, had barely finished his interview with Channels Television when Obi’s supporters and media apologists launched ugly attacks against him.
With peculiar mob aggression, they flayed Soludo; they could not bear his indictment of their hero’s decision “to save” by investing state funds in beer producer, Intafact Beverages Limited, while Anambra lacked critical infrastructure, and the citizenry grappled with starvation, insecurity and substandard healthcare.
The controversial investment in Intafact Beverages Limited shares had seen Obi plow millions of dollars of Anambra’s funds into a business in which Obi is a part-owner. While Obi’s apologists insisted that he invested 20 million dollars, the Anambra State Commissioner of Finance, Ifeatu Onejeme, in a bid to set the records straight, issued a statement clarifying that the true equity investment was $12 million dollars.
The shares were worth approximately $5.3 billion dollars, valued at CBN’s I&E exchange rate of N415.75/US$1.00 on June 20, 2022, (and at N604/$1.00 parallel market rate, only US$3,709,051.24)” by the same date, according to Ifeatu Onejeme, Anambra’s commissioner of finance.
But rather than mull over the manifest distortion, Obi’s supporters resorted to personal attacks, abusing and threatening Anambra’s finance commissioner as they have done to Governor Soludo for speaking up. Yet Onejeme had it easier; while the mob issued unprintable threats against Soludo, the Ohaeneze Ndigbo Worldwide, an Igbo sociocultural association, has “dragged Soludo to Igbo deities over his comment on Obi.”
Reacting in a statement issued on Tuesday, Okechukwu Isiguzoro, secretary-general of the association, said the group has taken Soludo before “two famous divinities and deities” over his comment.
“Governor Soludo transgressed in choosing to revolt against the Labour Party Presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, who is his brother and predecessor.
“Ndigbo has dragged Governor Chukwuma Soludo to the two famous divinities and deities (Chokoleze in Mbaise and ubiniukpabi in Arochuku) for his unreasonable public behavior,” he said.
Under severe attack by Obi’s supporters, however, Soludo sought consolation in an acquaintance’s counsel to him. “Someone reminded me that a mob has no head and hence cannot reason,” he said.
Thus he resorts to leading the mob on the path of reason by deploying history and unsparing critique of Obi. Referring to the latter’s controversial investments, Soludo said, “Of course, there is room for legitimate debate about the logic or quality of the investments. For example, people might differ as to the propriety of using taxpayers’ money to promote a company in which one is a shareholder in the name of ‘investment,’ or even whether so-called ‘savings’ are warranted when there were dozens of schools without roofs or classrooms, or local governments without access roads or hospitals without doctors/nurses.
“A Bishop recently publicly advised that I should please try to construct the “Ngige type of quality roads,” stating that the ones done by his successor (Peter Obi) had washed off, while Ngige’s remained. I promised and we are delivering quality roads that Anambra has not seen before.”
Soludo probably understood that describing Obi in glowing terms in fulfillment of his presumed tribal obligation to a fellow Igbo, is akin to turning the foul mons of the proverbial whore of Babylon into a Holy Grail.
Reacting to accusations that he is anti-Igbo, he said, “When Bola Ahmed Tinubu defied the political wind of the time and stood out as the ‘only man standing’ in AD and later AC (before ACN) against a sitting president of Yoruba descent, no one accused him of being ‘anti-Yoruba.’ Indeed, everyone recalls that both Tinubu and President Obasanjo disagreed politically, and probably still disagree—but none is being accused of being ‘anti-Yoruba.’ Under Tinubu, the South West strategically organised under a different political party, the ACN, and went into a formidable alliance that kicked out a sitting president (in Africa?), and that alliance is not broken yet. Igbos, in their frenzied Nzogbu nzogbu politics, have sadly found themselves in a political cul de sac. Tragic indeed! When will my people smell the morning coffee?”
Read Also; Soludo v Obi: Truth is bitter
Soludo’s missive resounds a prickly polemic, a candid stream of thought soothing one divide of the political class and riling up others. Among other things, it strips the LP candidate of his messianic cloak.
Quoting the National Bureau of Statistics, he reiterated that “poverty in Anambra actually grew (from less than 25% in 2005) to about 53% under Peter Obi in 2010/2011 but fell under Willie Obiano to 14.78% in 2020. Yes, poverty more than doubled under Peter Obi and more than 50% of Ndi Anambra were in poverty under him. Go and verify!
“I am Governor, and sitting on privileged information which I will not want to use against a political opponent. But on matters of facts, I will always state the same as is. As the saying goes, you can fool some people some of the time but never all the people all the time. Enough said for now!”
In response, Obi claimed that, aside from his investment in the brewery, his administration saved $50 million each in Access, defunct Diamond and Fidelity banks with an interest rate of at least 6.5 percent.
Speaking at the 2022 Lagos Business School Alumni Conference in Lagos on Tuesday, he said, “If you calculate (all of them) today, the money (invested) would have been about N60 billion.”
Obi said he exited office as governor of Anambra leaving behind savings of about N75 billion in the state treasury and that he was not owing any contractor and supplier who had executed their jobs.
The LP candidate also said that “For other things which I didn’t succeed, God has given him (Soludo) opportunity to do it and succeed…I have done my little own (sic) as a trader, now the professor is there. He will do his own as a professor. The schools I didn’t roof, he will roof them. That’s how government goes,” the LP candidate added.
Yet Soludo worries that the “Ndigbo as Nigeria’s foremost itinerant tribe and with the greatest stake in the Nigerian project does not yet have a strategy to engage Nigeria—politically! Every four years, we resurface with emotive Nzogbu Nzogbu political dance (“it is our turn dance” but without organisation or strategy) and fizzle out afterward while others work 24/7 strategising and organising…When will Ndigbo understand and learn politics, especially of Nigeria?” he said.
The Anambra governor, in his letter, further highlights the hollowness of the ‘Obidient’ political movement and the fragility of Obi’s dreams of victory at next year’s presidential election, stressing that, “Let’s be clear: Peter Obi knows that he can’t and won’t win. He knows the game he is playing, and we know too; he knows that we know.
“The game he is playing is the main reason he didn’t return to APGA. The brutal truth (and some will say, God forbid) is that there are two persons/parties seriously contesting for president: the rest is exciting drama!”
At the moment, Obi’s presidential dream looms as a great beached whale, marooned on the desert shores of ambition and the fringes of realisation. His fantasy of victory clearly conflicts with political reality but Obi is held hostage to the fiction by his own supporters – many of whom are nursing a thicket of unrealistic fantasies around him.
The LP candidate’s supporters expect him to stage a remarkable upset, beating front-runners, All Progressives Congress (APC)’s Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and People’s Democratic Party )PDP)’s Atiku Abubakar to the presidential seat.
“Analysts tell him you don’t need ‘structure’ to win. Fantasy! Of course, LP won governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun on social media and via phantom polls, while getting barely 2,000 votes on ground,” said Soludo with wry sarcasm.
Creating a credible third force for a presidential election in Nigeria requires a totally different strategy and extremely hard work, noted Soludo adding that “The current fleeting frenzy, if not checked, will cost Ndigbo dearly for years.”
The Anambra governor based his summation on the South East’s unimpressive outing in previous elections stressing that, “the South East has the lowest number of votes of any region…During the 2019 presidential election, the five South East States were united for PDP but contributed merely 1.6 million votes to PDP which was about the votes that Kano state gave to Buhari. The emotions might run to the heavens but politics-power is about cold calculations, organisation, and building alliances for power. In a democracy, it is a game of numbers. So far, I don’t see any of these–and 2023 might again be a wasted opportunity for Ndigbo! What is our Plan B when Peter Obi loses in February 2023?”
Perhaps Soludo’s epistle would do for the Igbo what painting and sculpture did for the Italian Renaissance. By his intuitive grasp and presentation of the hard, bitter truths, he puts the possibility of Igbo political rebirth in a better perspective.
Yet hordes of Obi’s supporters, riding on spunk and acerbic posturing online, continually urge Obi towards illusive glory at the February 2023 polls. Their passion is woefully belaboured and contrived. And efforts, like Soludo’s, to nudge them towards a more realistic goal are fiercely resisted.
Marching in virtual lockstep to innate rage and discontent with the political class, they embrace Obi as their placebo aspirant. Like the fictional child character of James Barrie’s 2015 fantasy film, “Pan,” their passion is borne of illusion, cunning, pixie dust, and an unrealistic belief in mass culture.
Mass culture, like Chris Hedges rightly notes, is a Peter Pan culture that posits that if a mob like the Obidients, for instance, visualise and have faith in what they want, if they believe in miracles, they would live to see Obi emerge victorious at the 2023 polls against all odds.
Such mob retreat into illusion is a form of magical thinking. It presages the debauched revels of the South East’s troubled political culture. By sticking to an unrealistic theory of Obi’s victory at the 2023 polls, they are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Ultimately, an ominous divide looms between those who chase after Obi’s manufactured illusions of victory, and realists like Soludo, who are able to puncture the illusion with the sharp lance of realism.
