Columnist Donu Kogbara last week delivered what is arguably one of the most memorable putdowns of the year on former Anambra governor and ex-Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi. Asked on Arise Television to react to the defection of some LP national lawmakers to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), she brushed the matter aside and instead launched into a tirade on Mr Obi. He was a ‘sparkling inspirational figure’, she said, ‘who created a movement almost overnight and galvansied the youths’, but is now ‘like a firework that became a damp squib’. Unable to conceal how bitterly disappointed she has been, she summed him up as ‘so pedestrian’.
Had she stopped at those searing words, she would have conveyed her message copiously enough, leaving nothing else to say, not even to the imagination. But she thundered on nevertheless: “He has become so pedestrian, making anodyne statements on TV. He is a good guy, but we can’t see a leader the opposition needs.” This was already and fully so dismissively characterising that she needed to say no more. But never one for half measures, she launched an extra, parting salvo: “I’m not an Obidient anymore, to be honest with you, because he’s such a disappointment. I mean there’s no aggression…” Well, Ms Kogbara’s verbs were vigorous enough and needed no further lexical help, but just to make sure that the cadaver stands no chance of any kind of resurrection, now or on the last day, she has had to dragoon some high-powered adjectives and fierce gestures during the interview to qualify the political specimen she once idolised.
Observe very well Ms Kogbara’s quaint use of words: damp squib; pedestrian; anodyne statements; no aggression; not a leader; and on and on – all memorable individual putdowns, each goose-stepping after the other. Yet, she was not scurrilous, and never intended to disparage. But her words drove home the utter disappointment she felt, having, among LP’s and Obi’s other teeming and unquestioning supporters, deified her champion and cast him as a David armed with nothing more than a sling to slay the detested and flatfooted APC Goliath. That she and many mesmerised LP supporters came to grief was more unbearable than the fitting electoral disaster their champion experienced. As she ruminated on and declaimed upon Mr Obi’s lack of competence and capacity, it was unclear how she still held on to the falsehood that he probably won the election. Indeed, how she thought someone who couldn’t master or manage the art of opposition could have been trusted to run a multi-ethnic, multireligious and politically complex society remains unfathomable.
But perhaps the biggest contradiction in what became a phonetic extravaganza between the interviewer and interviewee is her disinterestedness in interrogating the abject incompetence of LP followers in accurately gauging the capacity or even charisma of Mr Obi, their candidate and champion. They imbued him with some electric qualities when in fact right from the beginning there was no spark in him. It is remarkable that Ms Kogbara was only recently disillusioned only when it became obvious her champion could not muster the sense and composure to offer quality opposition to the APC. She failed to admit it in the interview, but what ailed everybody in the starry-eyed politics of the LP and its former presidential candidate was the lack of capacity of Mr Obi’s followers. They were impressionable, guileless peasants sheepishly dragged to the guillotine. They thought him ‘a sparkling, inspirational figure’, when in reality it was the platform of ethnicity and religion he rode on that sparkled. Mr Obi had always been himself, both as governor and as a political peregrinator. He has an engaging dullness about his politics, aided by his feline voice and chasmic lack of ideological depth. If they imbued him with something inspirational and deep, the problem was not that he disappointed them or that he suddenly lost those virtues; the problem is that his supporters endowed him with qualities they nurtured in their dreams and ambitions.
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In any case, after the fateful 2023 presidential poll, and after it was no longer tenable for Mr Obi to take refuge in his electoral grief, it was time for him to settle into the humdrum of opposition politics. In January 2024, he appropriated the title of Nigeria’s chief opposition figure, but has since then failed woefully to don that onerous regalia, especially in the face of the APC’s many missteps, as Ms Kogbara ably identified. But to be a leading opposition figure, Mr Obi needed to ride on the steady platform of his party, the LP. Unfortunately for him, the party, a small electoral and political vehicle he gave the impression he did a favour to adopt for the race, was itself mired in turbulence and confusion. That turbulence was his first test to prove his mettle, assuming he had the capacity to see it. It took months for him to weigh in on the party’s many crises, and once he did, he showed a spectacular lack of capacity to even manage the smallest of crises. He ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds, and assailed by friends and foes alike, he constantly beat an ungainly and unmanly retreat.
Ms Kogbara may not have summed up her disappointment expertly, nor honestly admitted her culpability in being led by the nose despite her education and experience. But she gave a general impression of Mr Obi’s inadequacies and yawning lack of depth and charisma. As far as she is concerned, and notwithstanding the abuse of the Obidients or the pointless visit by Mr Obi himself to her residence days after she excoriated him, she is unlikely to return to the LP fold, a party for which, like her champion, she had never shown any affinity. For her, Mr Obi and LP are history. Had she been a politician, she would have, given the scale of her disappointment, toyed with defecting to the ruling party. But she is just one of those punctilious neutrals drawn to the embrace of an unworthy politician. She will lick her wounds quietly if Mr Obi will let her grieve privately.
