Peter Obi in his New Year message reminded Nigerians of the obvious: the worsening political, economic and security situation of our country. Food insecurity that has become our new national norm; our nation and its fortunes are in clear reverse, while Nigeria remains one of the poverty capitals of the world, with over 100 million people living in extreme poverty and more than 150 million in multidimensional poverty.
To change the narrative, Obi wants President Tinubu to cut down what he considers as his “wasteful foreign trips; travel around Nigeria by road to observe the condition of most of our collapsed highways; visit our national hospital, make both impromptu and planned visits to our tertiary institutions, visit various IDP camps and assure these Nigerians that they will soon return to their communities.
Finally, he wants the president to ensure “future elections are credible and truly reflect the will of the people”.
The president has already acknowledged some of these problems and the harsh effect of his economic policies. What he said was that to avoid mortgaging the future of our children the way PDP did by selling or sharing properties kept in their care for our children, we needed to make some sacrifices today.
In fact, the expectation of most Nigerians was that the president’s first act in office was going to be resettlement of those driven from their land to IDP camps back to their land. That is distributive justice.
Nigerians did not only expect the president to visit the hospitals, they had expected him to sponsor a bill stopping all political appointees and lawmakers from embarking on medical tourism. This is the only way to equip our teaching hospitals.
Obi is also allowed to make few exaggerations including his claim that Tinubu’s less than two years administration should be held responsible for the current figure of 100,000 Nigerians living in extreme poverty despite ARISE Television’s admission during the interview that the figure as at the time Buhari took over power 10 years ago (2015) stood at 70%. After all, government is a continuum.
Obi who claimed victory despite coming a distant third in the 2023 election and who is yet to congratulate the winner of the contest despite INEC’s verdict and the Supreme Court’s celebrated judgment also has the right to call on the president to guarantee the sanctity of the 2027 contest.
I think what Felix Morka decries is Obi “crossing the line of truth and peddling false narratives, arrogant unwillingness to acknowledge obvious markers of progress, mobilizing outrage and stoking tension against the government’ which he thinks are not exactly the most admirable hallmarks of leadership.”
He also frowns at the fact that Obi led a restless band of online mobs, who continue to attack, intimidate, bully and issue death threats to other citizens who dare disagree or criticize Obi or his opinions or position on any subject or matter of national conversation.
Even here Obi has not crossed any red line. The beauty of democracy is that no one has the last say especially in a world where the media is a captive of the dominant ruling class and where no newspaper or news platform can be said to be truly free. We have seen selective coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza by CNN and presentation of alternative reality by the Fox News which aided Trump’s triumph in his re-election bid despite his election denials and sponsoring of an insurrection against his own government.
This is why I also think ARISE television cannot be accused of crossing any red line for its decision to play the devil’s advocate following attempt by APC and its spokesman, to discredit Obi and his message. It was obvious whose battle was being waged when Felix Morka, the National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was confronted during an interview on its THIS WEEK program on Saturday, January 4, with a question such as – “You have actually hit back with a volley of attacks, calling Peter Obi a prophet of doom. Some of you have said he is always embarking on voodoo economics that are not in line with current realities. Don’t you think that is a slingshot that has gone beyond normal politicking?
Morka’s: “No, he is the one throwing darts. Mr. Obi is shooting from the hip… Obi has crossed the line so many times. And, I think that, at this point, he has coming to him whatever he gets. He should manage it” would have been sufficient answer for those not engaged in politics of mischief and subterfuge. But for ARISE reporters “it is a threat to free speech”; for Obi it is an indication of impending crackdown by an intolerant federal government while for former VP Atiku Abubakar, “an alarming disdain for democratic principles.”
I sympathize with Morka who, as a result of “Peter Obi’s allegations has received about 400 documented threats, about 200 of which are explicit death threats messages, individuals have detailed how they plan to harm me—threatening to shoot me, behead me, and carry out other gruesome acts”. But even in spite of the above, I still don’t think anyone has crossed the red line. Free speech is another name for democracy.
The beauty of democracy is that it is not without its democratic ethos which for instance celebrates character. In this regard, the messenger is often the message. Probing the character of purveyors of messages is as important as free speech.
Unfortunately, the common denominator between Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar is opportunism. Atiku Abubakar has moved from PDP, through ACN to PDP, back to APC from where he went back to PDP where he first served as vice president in 1999. Upon his return, he waged war against those who kept the party together while he was shopping for presidential tickets from other parties. And tragically his breach of PDP’s constitution was to put the party in disarray in the run up to the 2023 election.
Peter Obi is tarred with the same brush. He first rode on the back of Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s APGA party to power. After publicly declaring he would never abandon APGA, he jumped boat after his second term to join PDP. He rose rapidly and became Atiku’s running mate in the 2015 but following Atiku Abubakar’s breach of PDP constitution which would have allowed Obi to emerge as PDP candidate in the 2023 election, Obi decided to pull down the edifice on the heads of everyone.
Obi decided to play identity and religion politics by exploiting the sentiments of his Igbo people that had since 1999 supported PDP to victory. Close to 70% of his six million votes in the 2023 election came from Southeast and South-south populated by his Igbo brethren,
For Atiku and Obi’s infidelity and opportunism, Tinubu’s eight million votes would have been no match for PDP and Labour’s close to 14m votes. Their loss was Tinubu’s gain. Sadly despite being deficit in character, both men still pretend to be part of solution to Nigerian crisis of nation building.
Peter Obi, the Obidients’ best candidate to govern Nigeria, displayed no special skill as governor of Anambra, a state he left as a jungle. As a business man once described as ‘a container economist’ by President Tinubu, all he has told us publicly is that he was a wine importer. And for Atiku Abubakar, Obasanjo’s testimonial on him was damning.
I think we must start to interrogate how we got to this sorry path while remembering with nostalgia, the role of Nigerian youths in the evolution of the Nigerian state. While the nation is today being haunted by a mob ready to fight and kill for a man who believes in nothing, we easily recollect how it was that 20 Nigerian law students who in 1920 first proposed the idea of a Nigerian federation patterned after Switzerland to the colonial masters.
While we today have in Lagos some youths who do not behave much differently from the Almajiris of the north, visiting violence and destruction on government and private properties, what we had in the forties in Lagos were youths who organized debates and strategized on how to get rid of the colonial masters.
It is on record that Chief Anthony Enahoro who went on to become one of the best parliamentarians Nigeria has ever produced was an editor of a national newspaper at 22, and that Bode Thomas, the deputy chairman of Action Group who died at 33, was the author of ‘regionalism’ despite his principals’ preference for federalism. Even military boys who did not have advantage of education but joined the military to be able to climb the social lather ended up ruling our country in their twenties and thirties.
