I don’t think our labour unions understand their roles anymore but have become political activists and loony leftists. How do you justify a National Strike based on assault on one person in one state based on local political situation?
Why should workers in 35 states and FCT become victims of what happened in one state?
I believe that reforming our labour laws is now a matter of urgency” -Dr Charles Omole.
This is ‘the Peter Obi effect’ on Nigerian politics since he infused a ‘village mentality’, not only into electioneering campaigns, but into a political party structure, its internal workings and sociology.
Let me borrow Presidential Special Adviser, Bayo Onanuga’s, words in his response to Peter Obi’s verbal diarrhoea regarding the Supreme Court judgment on his, and Atiku’s, appeal on the 2023 Presidential election which, as the world now knows, they lost ignominiously with not a single one of the12 Lord Justices, at both the PEPC and the Supreme Court finding in favour of either of them on any of the issues they canvassed.
Onanuga wrote:”The grand delusion that made Mr. Obi believe he could have won a national election where he ran the most hateful, divisive and polarising campaign that pitted Christians against Muslims and one ethnic group against the other in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria should be a matter for deeper examination”.
Rather than his chimera of victory alone, it is an examination of the entirety of what Obi brought to an election he, and Atiku, have so malignancy poisoned, I intend to attempt in this piece.
That will mean psycho- analysing Peter Obi, the reason I describe him in the caption to the article as an insuferable obscurantist.
Obscurantism, by the way, is the practice of deliberately
preventing the facts, or full details, of something from becoming known.
And how does this apply to him?
Although both the PEPC and the Supreme court gave no moment to the fact that he was an 11th hour joiner of the Labour party,
meaning that contrary to INEC Guidelines, the courts gave no probative value to his name not being on the party’s membership register forwarded to the commission 30 days before its primaries, and thus implying that he flagrantly flouted the INEC stipulation, his entry, being so ethnic and stealthy, immediately resulted in an internal crisis within the party which is still smouldering as you read this.
What is more important, however, are the lies which underpinned his emergence as the presidential candidate, when Gbajue- style – thanks to the Nobel Laureate – somebody stepped down for him, in the process, deprecatingly pronouncing himself as inferior to Obi where leadership is concerned; he a normally show- boating individual who never ceases to preach to Nigerians from the rooftops, degrading himself, just so his ethnic brother could emerge the presidential candidate two – yes two days – after becoming a party member.
Although that was only one of the foundational lies in the building blocks to Obi’s candidacy, it pales into insignificance when compared to the ones Obi personally told Nigerians as his reasons for eloping from the PDP.
So was it that lies soon became the party’s modus operandi, whether it was Peter Obi’s claim that he went to Egypt to “understudy the country’s education, power and finance sectors”, or several of its dreamless pastors and bishops, regaling their hypnotised, zombie – like congregations with details of dreams they never had as to how Obi had won an election yet to be conducted, to rapturous shouts of Halleluyah.
Let’s now consider Obi’s sophistry, explaining how, and why, he claimed to have joined the Labour party and schemed his way to its presidential candidacy.
Thanks to the Nigerian print media, we can quote him at some length. Hear him:
Read Also: Peter Obi: Between recklessness and audacity
“I have chosen a route that I consider to be in line with our aspirations and my mantra of taking the country from consumption to production” – apparently he momentarily forgot everything about NEXT, the importation giant – “and that is the Labour Party, which is synonymous with the people, workers, development and production, securing and uniting Nigerians as one family”.
“I invite all Nigerians to join me in taking back our country. Be assured that I’ll never let you down.”
Having gratuitously let Ojukwu down, dumping APGA for PDP, our man just has to promise not to let Igbos down again.
But pray! Was it in two days, after he left PDP, that he did all he is claiming here?
But you haven’t heard nothing yet. So he continues:
“Since I resigned from the PDP because of issues that are at variance with my persona and principles – such as serial decamping? – I have consulted widely with various parties and personalities to ensure we do not complicate the route to our desired destination. For me, the process of achieving our goal is as fundamental as what one will do thereafter.”
Just listen to this practised obscurantist, trying to suck in, not just his Igbo brethren, but all Nigerians. His placing third overall in the election proved conclusively, however, that Nigerians were not deceived.
“Since I resigned”, Obi went on, making two days look like a millennium, “I have consulted widely with parties and personalities”, who were surprisingly nameless.
Here was a guy who had only a few days earlier submitted himself for screening by the same decrepit PDP whose Vice Presidential candidate he was only 4 years earlier.
He soon graduated into the chimera of thanking those who were yet to know he had dumped PDP, claiming:
“I thank all Nigerians, especially our youths, who have joined me in the mission of taking back and reuniting Nigeria. This project is yours and for the future of your children.
I am just a facilitator.”
Forget, meanwhile, that as at the time he was saying all this, he hadn’t even had any opportunity of campaigning on the platform of the Labour party, not even once.
Smart Alec! That should tell the reader who Peter Obi truly is.
Let us now see how the cookie crumbled; how Obi was outed in a situation akin to which Yoruba would describe as ‘bi iro ba lo logun odun, ooto ma ba lojo kan’, meaning that even though a lie may subsist for 20 years, (but) truth will catch up with it one day. He had probably forgotten all his lies when several months later, the Executive Committee of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide visited His Excellency, Barrister Nyesom Wike, erstwhile governor of Rivers state.
Their visit was, essentially, to remonstrate with him over his non support for the interest of the Southeast in its much desired quest for the Nigerian presidency emphasising, in particular, his failure to support Peter Obi.
It was at this point that the distinguished elders would most probably have had ashes on their faces when Wike told them the truth which Obi would not, even in a thousand years.
Wike let it be known to the eminent Igbo statesmen that Obi was actually bullied into leaving the PDP.
He had journeyed, excruciatingly, to Jigawa state, Wike said, intent on soliciting the support of Sule Lamido but his host had taken him to a village that took him more than four hours drive from Dukse to reach.
That was vintage Lamido who sees Fulani as the Aryan race, and was eager to teach the Igbo politician a lesson he would never forget.
The task master per excellence, that Lamido is, he respects no single Southern politician besides former President Olusegun Obasanjo who had appointed him External Affairs minister; a position for which he had nil qualification.
Obi, therefore, had to drive hours through the desert dust to hear what Sule Lamido could very well have told him on phone: simply, but brutally, that President Buhari, even after 8 years that had been most gruelling for Nigerians must, willy nilly, be succeeded by another Northerner.
Seeing then that he hadnt a ghost of a chance in PDP, Obi fled, his worshipful professors scripting a lie of a statement that would only compare with a treatise by Hitler’s lie manufacturer, Paul Joseph Goebbels.
It is all these and the fact that his brethren believe him, hook, line and sinker, indeed canonising him alive, that rankle, when in spite of the levels to which he has sunk, literally dragging the otherwise, brilliant and absolutely enterprising Igbo with him, bragging about contesting like forever, when that redoubtable race has tens of Umahi’s, Soludo’s, and several others – scholars, not traders – who would appreciate that working with Nigerians from all parts of the country, rather than remaining insular, is the minimum desideratum for Igbos, at the right time, to take their well deserved place on the Nigerian political spectrum.
It is, therefore, time some Igbos tell Obi that he ill represents them, going round, romancing ethnicity and religion as his route to the presidency which is bound to take Igbos nowhere.
