Tag: Okpebholo

LAST Monday, a civil society organisation, the Leadership and Accountability Initiative (LAI), submitted a petition to the United States embassy in Nigeria pleading with the US to place a visa ban on Edo governor Monday Okpebholo and his family for allegedly threatening the life of former Anambra governor and Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the last election, Peter Obi. The petition alleged that the governor warned Mr Obi, leader of the volatile and irascible Obidient Movement, not to visit the state due to security challenges. The governor was further alleged to have said that should Mr Obi remain obdurate, ‘whatever he sees, he should take’. The governor’s threat, the civil society organisation wailed, threatened ‘democratic stability and political coexistence’. It is unclear whether the US would pay attention to LAI’s inane request.

LAI is one of the many civil society organisations informally and fanatically loyal to the spirit of the Obidient Movement and to Mr Obi in particular. The movement has been captured many times on record threatening, shaming, and bullying dissenters who denounce their nefarious methods and causes. The affiliated civil society organisations turn a blind eye to these constant and repeated cyberbullying by the Obidients. Now, after alleging that the Edo governor had ‘threatened’ their idol, they have begun to flex muscles. Mr Obi himself has said little about the governor’s travel advisory except insisting he would visit whenever he wanted to, but he is widely known to bask in the cultic following the Obidient Movement gives him, in addition to reveling in their aggressive posturing against his detractors. Clearly, trouble lies ahead. The Edo governor has of course doubled down on the travel advisory he issued to Mr Obi, insisting that the former LP candidate was no ordinary person and was too polarising not to be capable of provoking a breakdown of law and order. It may seem farfetched, but Mr Okpebholo seems to want to err on the side of caution.

The Edo governor may have been strident about the travel advisory to Mr Obi, but his action appears to reflect and react to the frothing political undertones of the state. It is well known that the Obidients are a little more energized and unscrupulous in Edo than in most other South-South states. They are uppity, more voter conscious than the natives, and hunt like a wolf-pack. Mr Okpebholo is not unmindful of the dangerous undercurrents he faces in the state, and may be desirous of defanging the fanaticism many Edolites observe in the Obidients in Edo. The very nature, political dynamics and ethnic pastiche of the state, which harked back to the civil war era, ensure that the tug of war between the political factions in the state will continue for a while. It will take deft politicking, particularly ensuring that Edo continues to experience three-horse election races in the state, to tame and pacify a group as relentless, immoderate, and seasonal as the Obidients.

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But much more than the hysteria displayed by the petitioning civil society group, LAI, is the more rankling decision to petition the US, yes the same US now presided over by probably the most anti-democratic and narcissistic president in US history, Donald J. Trump. In 2020, when Mr Trump lost his reelection bid, he encouraged his supporters to storm America’s democratic citadel, the Capitol. The assault was defeated, but not before substantial damage was done to American prestige. Who called for a travel or visa ban on Mr Trump and his supporters? In fact, as recent as a few weeks ago, the US president threatened his former ally, billionaire Elon Musk, not to lend support to the Democratic Party. That threat, on which Mr Trump has doubled down, is a hundred times more severe and frightening than any threat the Edo governor allegedly issued against Mr Obi. In the past few months, the US has ceased to be the chief promoter or custodian of democracy as the concept is known. But it is to a country repudiating democracy and belittling global leaders that the anachronistic Nigerian civil society group has appealed for help.

American embassy officials are not morons. They will of course take receipt of any petition by any group, whether the petition makes sense or not. But they will be secretly amused, if not appalled, by how foolish a group can be to elevate a travel advisory against their hero, even if questionable, to a global issue that portrays Nigeria in a bad light. The Americans will confirm what they had long suspected that many Nigerian groups and even public officials display inferiority complex by reporting themselves to the prefectural US. Even if the Americans sneer at the petition, and they will be justified to do so, they will still take secret delight in the fact that many Nigerians continue to manifest the worst forms of neocolonialism. They can’t of course do anything about the Nigerian malaise, nor should they take it as their responsibility to decolonise the minds of Nigerians. However, their job is to represent the US as best as they can, and reinforce actions that elevate the prefectural image of America globally.

Unfortunately, there is no law in Nigeria banning the self-deprecation many civil society organisations operating locally subject their country. They are too dimwitted to know the difference, too stuck in the past to know that even if Nigeria has its limitations and defects, the anomalies are best resolved internally. To that extent, there may not be an end, in the immediate future, to Nigerian groups and even political leaders reporting their country and leaders to Washington and London. There will sadly be no end, it seems, to some Nigerians making a spectacle of themselves before the whole world.