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Has Governor Peter Gregory Obi, 2023 Labour Party presidential candidate, bitten more than he can chew this time around? And should we begin to fear for him at this point? Mr. Obi accidentally dived into and appears to be drowning in the pool of national despair. We see him thrashing about, trying to come up for air. How he can swim out of the challenge, now that the election has been won and lost, is beyond me. If he were swimming alone, this would have been easy; he has enough resources to brush past the INEC-induced loss at the polls. But he dived into an economic pool where Nigeria systematically shoved the majority into its deepest part. How then can one man rescue this crowd from sinking further into the pool of despair, after raising their hopes with fiery soapbox rhetoric that convinced them to swim or sink with him?
Mr. Obi’s political rhetoric roused the country to believe that Nigeria can supplant a government built on and sustained by corruption. How will he then appease the monster that he awakened since INEC declared him loser? I’m not convinced that, for all his meaningful soapbox rhetoric, Obi possesses the heart, the inclination, and the capacity to shoulder the collective hopes of the majority for change. The powerful minority effectively closes every pathway to satisfy citizens’ longing for good governance in Nigeria. However, If tomorrow the courts surprise us by ruling in favour of Obi in his challenge of the election outcome, the victory will birth many happy losers!
An obvious big loser will be the stereotyped Igbo image which Nigeria’s political Mafiosi exploits to win elections. Obi arrived with an iron-cast squeaky clean image that does violence to the false characterization of the Igbo. A bigger loser will be the youths; their sense of accomplishment (being able to force a change of government through the ballot box) will make them lose their “lazy” tag and re-launch their creative and innovative potentialities. By far the biggest loser will be the downtrodden waiting to be assisted to swim out of the dire economic pool from which Obi vowed to pull them out. Obi’s win will trigger seismic social changes, capable of mobilizing and sustaining people’s renewed interest and participation in national development. The question then becomes: What happens if Obi loses in court?
This question is a challenge to Nigeria, not just for Peter Obi. It is also of greater concern for vested interests which includes greedy elements from the Southwest, the APC that was declared winner by INEC, and western interests hoping to reap from the ensuring instability from a discredited presidency. One way that the southwest interest grapples with this challenge is by selling narratives that return the image of Ndi-Igbo to its status quo, and a rash of policy actions designed to appease disgusted youths. None of this however gives comfort to the disadvantaged that there is hope of releasing citizens from the economic strangulation that President Muhammadu Buhari applied and left behind for his successor.
Mr. Tinubu has embarked on a frenzy of policy actions designed to give confidence that he knows what he is about. His greatest achievement, however, is neither the bills he signed nor the number of public agency executives he fired. Neither is it the propaganda being deployed to prop up the regime until judgement day. His greatest achievement, in my view, is being able to demonstrate that he is not the babbling, bumbling, frail old man that citizens saw on the soapbox a few months ago. He has miraculously shed this image and, in the process, proving to be an A-list Nollywood actor, the way he steps out boldly and strides self-assuredly each day. The old fox fooled everybody, demonstrating once again that he is a survivalist and master strategist in the Nigerian political game. But will he be able to stand in the gap of a potential Obi’s loss in the courts? Again, like Obi, I don’t believe that he has the heart, the inclination, and the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of those in the deepest part of the economic pool. And this being the case, the temptation to rule through sustained diversion and continued stealth, trapped in propaganda, will be high. I therefore make two predictions on how the administration will try to overcome the challenge.
The first prediction is that the Tinubu Administration will govern with stealth and propaganda.
I do not mean this in a negative sense; our current situation creates room for stealth and propaganda. The Nigerian economy has tanked, people’s purchasing power is weakest, not just weakened, and he is busy launching the right policies at the wrong time. Nobody is sure how the administration plans to promote entrepreneurship, attract foreign capital, train a new labour force to access new employment opportunities, and make life in the hinterlands safe and easy. These basic preparations represent the first order of business to enable the populace to brace for the shocks of subsidies removal and their attendant spike in the prices of necessities. How will the downtrodden – Nigeria’s low and middle income earners, a third of the population that is unemployed, and farmers unable to feed themselves – cope in a situation where, for example, the monthly cost of transportation outstrips monthly salaries and business profit of workers?
The second prediction is that the Tinubu Administration will deliberately trumpet and exploit the perennial Igbo-Yoruba rivalry to create a diversion.
Constant diversion is necessary to operate without citizens spilling onto the streets in protest. Peter Obi has put the Tinubu Administration in this mess. His entry into the 2023 presidential race dramatically achieved a change in stereotypical image of the Igbo. The received knowledge is that Igbo politicians are a greedy, selfish, and self-centered lot, constantly conducting actions that hurt the {ethnic) group interest. The effort to return to this status-quo ante was launched this week in a Nigerian Tribune column that unsuspecting Igbo shared widely in WhatsApp columns. Many believed most of the things written in the piece are true, given that it copiously quoted authority voices from the region. But the article merely rehashed familiar false excoriation of the ethnic group by those struggling to understand the ways of this republican enclave that does things which often appear alien to every other culture in Nigeria.
The Igbo, for instance, has not promoted a class system that distinguishes the omoluabis from those described with the offensive term, bastards. Again, contrary to what is trumpeted about Igbo election voting patterns, the Igbo vote passes the test of objectivity and integrity more than other ethnic groups, as demonstrated in our 16 February 2023 column entitled “Profile of the Igbo Vote.” The Region that allegedly enthrones self-hate nevertheless remains the only enclave where onye aghana nwanne ya is an article of faith and a way of life. This is reflected in its unmatched social support system, known as Igba boyi, the Igbo apprenticeship scheme currently studied in ivy league schools worldwide as a model Indigenous wealth creation practice.
Those who criticize the Igbo, using the words of their elders miss two points. The Civil War created a level of desperation among two classes of Igbos as they struggled to survive the war and a series of policies that function as windmills to check Igbo economic and political resurgence. Those windmills constantly catch the career politicians and open-market traders on the wrong foot, leading to rearguard actions that that do not define the group. Secondly, the population of Igbo politicians and open-market traders represents less than five percent of the Igbo. The trader are however in the face of individuals and families struggling to balance the home budget and noting every action based on their impact on the budget.
As in everything else, a statistically insignificant sample can be used to extrapolate and make predictions by an unscrupulous researcher or journalist. One example that closes the case is the BBC investigation that proved that Rivers State voted for Obi rather than Tinubu that was declared winner. On the basis of this lone investigation, BBC concluded that it was not enough to change the vote that was declared for Mr. Tinubu!
