By Emeka Alex Duru
(08054103327, nwaukpala@yahoo.com)
Even without the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officially lifting the lids on 2027 politics, activities towards the date, especially for the presidency, have commenced effectively. From President Bola Tinubu’s engineered endorsement by his All Progressives Congress (APC) as sole candidate; instigation of crisis in the opposition fold and literally coercing first-time governors from other political parties to cross over to the APC, the entire scheme is being tailored to a no-contest in which Tinubu would have an easy ride for a second term. That is the permutation; and it seems to be working. But one issue that has refused to fall in line, is the Peter Obi factor.
To be sure, Obi is not a small fry in contemporary Nigeria’s politics. From his days as Anambra State governor to the aspiration for the presidency in the 2023 election under Labour Party (LP) in which he broke the tradition of name-calling and ran a campaign that focused on challenges facing the citizenry and how to tackle them, he has come across as a new face of Nigerian politics. For his audacity in doing so, for the nationwide reception his brand of politics has earned him among the downtrodden, he has become a figure to watch in 2027. Tinubu and his supporters are not taking kindly to the Obi phenomenon, knowing that the government has performed poorly and does not stand any chance of reelection in any free and fair poll. To bring down Obi, is therefore a task that must be accomplished by the foot soldiers of the presidency. This accounts for the barrage of attacks on him over issues that ordinarily should not matter. One of such ludicrous outings is the deliberate misinterpretation on felicitations from Obi to the newly crowned Olubadan of Ibadan land, Oba Rashidi Ladoja. Let us recap the incident and matters arising therefrom.
Recently, Oba Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja was crowned the Olubadan of Ibadan land. The event which took place in the ancient city of Ibadan, saw many Nigerians wishing the monarch well in their congratulatory messages. President Tinubu, was at the occasion to felicitate with the Olubadan. Former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, sent his congratulatory message. Obi also sent his goodwill message. In each congratulatory message sent by the trio of Tinubu, Atiku and Obi, one thing stood out – they all addressed the royal father as “my dear brother”. However, bigoted minds bent on advancing the frontiers of hate, quickly isolated Peter Obi’s address of the royal father as “my dear brother”, as amounting to insult to the Oba and his traditional stool. Incidentally, tributes from Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar that were couched in similar expressions, were not seen as ridiculing the Olubadan.
Even when Obi explained that no disrespect was intended in his message to the monarch and that his choice of words stemmed from a personal style of referring to individuals he holds in high esteem as “my dear elder brother”, the clarification did not matter. The mob had already been sent into the market with instructions of destruction. A particular shadowy character with the name Wale Ojo Lanre, took the animosity to the extreme, going to the extent of attacking Obi and his roots. In a social media Facebook thread in response to an earlier post by fellow idle hand who insinuated that Obi dishonoured Oba Ladoja, Lanre retorted; “Don’t blame him (Obi)—how can you expect decency from one who was never bred with honor? It is not his fault, but the fault of his progenitors, whom the Creator denied the grace of civility and noble comportment. He cannot give what he does not have. His veins are steeped in animalistic instincts; barbarism flows through his pedigree. A shameless fraud, a congenital liar, a man whose entire lineage reeks of mannerless degradation”.
It did not occur to Lanre and his partners in mischief that Obi and Ladoja, were former governors who may have had outstanding relationship. It also did not matter to them that Obi as governor of Anambra and Ladoja in Oyo, suffered same fate of impeachment at various times under President Olusegun Obasanjo and could have been united by that experience. Not even a disclosure that the Oba did not see anything wrong in the felicitations by Obi, could make sense to the hate-mongers. What mattered to them was to hit Obi very hard. Such is the problem with actions driven by petty sentiments. They can always be catastrophic.
An instance that readily comes to mind is the heat among the plebeians in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which a certain poet, Gaius Helvius Cinna was lynched at the funeral of Julius Caesar, the tragic hero of the drama. Caesar, a Roman general and statesman, was killed by members of his political class, on suspicion that he was becoming too dictatorial. Later explanation that Caesar was not the picture painted by the elite, provoked anger among the ordinary people, who, driven by the mood of the moment, took to the streets, hunting for the conspirators.
Helvius Cinna, the poet was unfortunate to be at their way. He was mistaken by the mob for Cornelius Cinna, one of the conspirators, who had spoken in support of Caesar’s assassination. Because he bore the same name as Cinna the conspirator and being on the way of the protesters at the time, Cinna the poet, was killed by the rampaging plebians, despite his vigorous profession of innocence. His cries of, “I am not Cinna the conspirator, I am Cinna the poet”, were disregarded. The mob rather chanted, “Kill him for his poor verses”. That is the danger of misplaced aggression.
That is the price Peter Obi is paying in the hands of Tinubu and his goons. Obi is not the cause of the hunger in the land. His sin is indicating that in line with his constitutional rights, he would run again for the presidency in 2027, God keeping him alive. Another issue counted against him is his courageous observations that the political, economic and security situations of the country are worsening daily, despite contrary claims by the government of improvement in different spheres of human endeavour.
In January when Obi alerted that things were going out of control while state officials kept deluding the people, APC National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, accused him of inciting Nigerians to bring down the government. Morka injected threats in his misguided anger; “Obi has crossed the red line so many times, whatever he has coming to him, he should manage it”. Morka was not known to have been called to order by the security agents for the unguarded remarks. Rather, two APC governors, Reverend Father Hyacinth Alia of Benue State and his Edo counterpart, Monday Okpebholo, who have been very low in public rating due to abysmal performance and fleeting route to office, saw in moving against Obi, a shortcut to relevance. In April, Governor Alia issued a directive preventing Obi from visiting and impacting on inmates of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Camps in Benue, citing frivolous reasons. Okpebholo followed suit by warning Obi to obtain security clearance before visiting Edo state. Obi had visited Benin, the state capital, on July 7 and donated N15m to St. Philomena Hospital School of Nursing Sciences for the completion of some projects in the school. Okpebholo lacked the grace to appreciate the gesture, preferring to halt Obi from extending similar goodwill to other institutions in the state.
It is therefore not surprising to hear concerned Nigerians ask: ‘Why always Peter Obi?’ And as a corollary; ‘Who is afraid of Peter Obi?’ The answer is simple; such is the extent Nigeria’s democracy has been reduced to under the Tinubu administration. It is one in which a player is either counted on the side of the president or viciously brought down. Obi is thus, the issue that must be dealt with.
Such disposition is fraught with many dangers, including paving the way for dictatorship. That is the kernel of the 2018 publication on comparative politics by Harvard University political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, titled; ‘How Democracies Die’. The book alerts on how leaders can subvert the democratic process to increase their power. It warns; “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders – presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power”. In the programmed onslaughts against Peter Obi by government and its attack dogs, Nigeria’s democracy is approaching that piteous point.
*DURU is the Editor, TheNiche Online Newspapers, Lagos