Follow Us on Google
‘Why always me’. If you have been a lover of football, a tweenager [young adults in their twenties] or an adult, the meme that we started with in this paragraph will not surprise you. This will be more so if you have been an ardent follower of the English Premier League, the most branded, marketed and easily the most profitable football league in Europe, nay the world.
About 15 years ago, precisely in 2011, there was this Ghanaian-Italian football maestro and maverick who did exploits while plying his trade in the premier league in England. He was unpredictable, unconventional and could not be pigeon-holed. He was skillful and a warrior in the field of play on match days. Outside the football pitch he was even more controversial. But he was not a bad lad. He was unpretentiously black with all the features of a typical African. He approximated ‘’no gree for anybody’’, a provincial lingo or meme alluding to ‘stand your ground’ which not too long ago trended in Nigeria.
His name is Mario Balotelli. Balotelli was born to Ghanaian couple who were immigrants in Italy. He was later adopted by an Italian couple who were said to be fiercely protective and in love with him in spite his exhibiting eccentric tendencies even in his formative years. He became an Italian and subsequently played for the Gii Azzurri [The Blues] as the Italian national football team is also known.
Balotelli was not a man to shy away from his roots. He proclaims his Africanness and bonafides as loudly as possible. He says all the time that if he had not been grafted into the Italian national football team so quickly, he would have proudly opted to play for the Black Star, the Ghana national football team. Since he retired from the Azzurri, he supports Italy in all international tournaments as should be expected. But whenever the Azzurri failed to qualify, for instance for the World Cup, as had been happening in recent years, Balotelli automatically adopts and roots for the Black Star. He did the same until the Black Star were eliminated from the ongoing World Cup tournament being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Prior to 2011 and especially under the legendary manager, Sir, Alex Ferguson, Manchester United were the dominant force in the premiership. But there was another football club in the same neighbourhood called Manchester City. For many years City lived under the shadows of its illustrious neighbour. It had the tag of also ran in the league. But during the course of that year, there was a particular derby match between the fierce rivals. Hitherto, United or the Red Devils, had taunted City as noisy neighbours. But by 2011, it was obvious that power was about to change hands. During that particular encounter at City’s Ethihad stadium, the host beat United mercilessly, with the score board reading 6-1 at the end of the 90 minutes. Nobody predicted that scandalous scoreline. No pundit, not even a super computer did.
However, the match was not defined by the huge margin of victory and the signs of power shift. It was remembered by the act of defiance by Balotelli. When he scored as he was wont to do in the prime of his career, he lifted his shirt [jersey], and his undergarment had boldly emblassomed on its front the words, ‘’Why Always Me’’. He designed the shirt with the club’s kitman the day before the match as a tongue-in-cheek response to the relentless scrutiny on his personal life.
In his time in the premier league, Balotelli’s every off-field move was closely scrutinised, and he was made out to be too controversial. The shirt was his way of letting off some steam, and telling his critics to ‘’leave me alone’’, and at the same time making funny and defiant statement against his traducers.
In Nigeria’s political space especially since 2023, the same query could be raised: ‘’Why Always Peter Obi’’? Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, every political pundit had written off the then presidential candidate of the Labour Party [LP], Peter Obi, dubbing him as a pretender to the presidency. They said he was a political lightweight who had neither stature nor structure. His critics claimed that he was a social media creation whose presidential quest was being hyped by three or four starry-eyed youngsters locked up in a room in their own universe, and consumed by their own fantasies and tweets.
Other News
When the cloud lifted Peter Obi won as many states as the other two so-called main or juggernaut candidates. He won handily in the country’s two epic communities – Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria and the current one, Abuja. In Abuja his rivals failed to make the cut while it was alleged that the vote tally in Lagos was fiddled with to allow the candidate of the ruling party, the All Progreesives Congress [APC], who was also a former governor of the state, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to scale the hurdle of garnering more than 25% of the votes cast. Officially Tinubu was said to have won the election though many Nigerians believed otherwise. Instructively, the perception of lack of legitimacy that trailed his accession to power has barely lifted almost four years after.
Instructively, since Tinubu was created as president in the dead of the night on March 1, 2023, he and his cohorts have refused to take their eyes off Mr. Obi, a former governor of the south east state of Anambra. Among other things they have deployed an army of searchers and researchers to dig or dredge up dirts they could use to tanish his sparkling reputation as a man without blemish. They have claimed that Obi’s assertion that he owed no contractors to the Anambra state government while he was the governor, and that he bequeathed billions of Naira and millions of United States Dollars to his successor, Chief Willie Obiano, were blatant lies. As it turned out Obi’s traducers failed at the gambit. Miserably. Peter Obi did not only not owe contractors and suppliers during his administration, he provided sufficient funds to fully pay for ongoing projects that would be completed when he might have left office.
On the subject of healthy bank balances, Obi appeared to have seen tomorrow and so fortified his flanks. He wrote a comprehensive handover note and proceeded to swear a court affidavit at the risk of perjury if what he wrote was found to be lies. He beat them again. In fact, his successor who turned out later to be an antagonist of Obi privately admitted that the savings by Obi, which opposition claimed did not exist, was the money used to construct the Chinua Achebe Airport in the state. Having failed so badly, Tinubu, APC and Mandate Choristers as well as other insignificant opposition elements resorted to saying that savings in the face of other needs were misplaced priorities. The opposition could not counter the facts that while Obi was governor, Anambra state ranked number one in education on a national scale; came out tops in internal security; was in run away first position in meeting the benchmarks for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals [MDG]; had no significant issue of corruption in the leadership of the government; and, delivered even development across all major sectors of the state.
Obi has been out of office as a governor for more than 13 years, but his enemies are still searching for dirt to besmirch him. Indeed, there are whispers that the current rulers who are mortally afraid of Obi had directed security and anti-graft agencies to dredge up anything, anything at all, even if it turns out to be false, to pin on Obi to portray him as a corrupt person who’s not different from any typical Nigerian politician. They want to see Peter Obi in handcuffs and leg chains so they can set a stage for his media trial. Tinubu, APC, and Mandate Choristers will be satisfied with the public humiliation of Obi on charges, any charges, that would not hold up in court, even in their own courts whose judges they are currently providing mansions for.
Because many public officers especially politically exposed persons are so corrupt, Peter Obi’s enemies and traducers find it extremely difficult to accept that the current presidential candidate of the Nigerian Democratic Congress [NDC] for the January 2027 presidential election had no baggage arising from his public and private life. It actually sounds like a fairytale that a Nigerian could hold high offices and yet come out unblemished. The simple reason for their incredulity is that our rulers are unable to see themselves in Mr. Peter Obi. The people who are desperate to stain Obi are logging odious baggage – they are still holding political offices and are, at the same time, drawing hefty pensions from their previous incarnations as governors; they have lifetime lavish perquisites including choice homes in their respective states and Abuja, luxury Sport Utlity Vehicles [SUVs], provisions for medicals at home and abroad for as long as they lived; domestic staff including drivers and stewards paid for by the states they [mis]governed. The clincher is that the bills that awarded them these ‘benefits’ were written by them while they were governors, passed by their rubber stamp state houses of assembly, and assented to by the same persons as governors.
To these scoundrels and bucaneers the repeated declarations by the presidential candidate of the Nigerian Democratic Congress that he has no personal home anywhere else in Nigeria outside Onitsha, the sprawling commercial hub of the state that he once governed, sounds incredulous. The APC and their witchhunt agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC] had by their desperation to smear Peter Obi procured ‘’evidence’ that Obi bought a house in London while he was governor. The EFCC came out of that encounter looking pathetic. They did not not have the good sense to search the property registry in the UK to realise that the house was acquired long before Obi became governor.
With the 2027 presidential election barely six months away, our current rulers have become even more desperate. Tinubu, APC and their supporters have virtually nothing to campaign on to make the case for reelection. The most critical index to measure tthe progress of any administration is the living condition of the citizens. It is not Gross Domestic Product [GDP] nor accretion to Foreign Reserves. The living conditions of Nigerians are frightening and the prognosis for the future is dire and foreboding. Every second, every minute and every day, scores of our citizens drop below the poverty line. Even the World Bank which supports the Tinubu regime said recently that all of 17 million Nigerians of northern extraction will grapple with starvation in the course of this year. Already about about 140 million folks in our country are said to be experiencing multi-dimensional poverty. How will Tinubu campaign for a second term? Where will Tinubu and the APC campaign and ask to be entrusted with this country after almost 12 years of disaster under the APC? Will they campaign again on promises of delivery or the delivery of promises?
The options available to Tinubu and the APC are narrow and vanishing by the day. And they have realised this. The only thing left is to further constrict the political and democratic space by targeting the main political rivals. They have narrowed their target down to Peter Obi simply because they feel that the conventional rotation of the presidency between the north and south will work against the candidacy of the former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Because of this they see Peter Obi as their problem. And what they regard as the solution to that irritation has been worked out. The first is to intensify their efforts to use their courts and their judges and their ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] to keep Obi off the ballot. The second solution is to manufacture a dirt and hang it on Obi, expose him to media lynching and their courts for maximum damage. The third if the first two plots fail is to apply the Italian Solution. So Peter Obi was not being frivolous nor hysterical when he said last week that he may not even be alive to make the ballot in 2027. If you want to confirm the veracity of Peter Obi’s fears for his life, study [not read] the statement from the Presidency on the matter. There was no pretense to hide anything.
