Chuks Iloegbunam toasts to a political phenomenon on his birthday
Peter Obi, currently the main issue in Nigerian politics, is 64 years old today. It says a lot that one person in a country of 200 million others can encapsulate through their worldview the hopes and aspirations of the masses across all age groups, ethnic divisions, religious beliefs, and political allegiances. He manages to attract and repel with remarkable calmness the polarities of love and rejection from vast segments of the nation, displaying exceptional bravery and supreme confidence as he extends this invitation to his fellow countrymen and women: “Please, come with me, I know the destination of our national salvation, and I have meticulously charted a sure course to it.”
Decades ago, there was another politician in this country who believed in ideas, in planning, and in directly facing challenges. He always aimed to identify the core issues, not for fame, but to find ways of mastering them. As a Premier, he ran a government that invested heavily in education, building a university, a pioneering television station, and housing estates for his people. Yet not one of his achievements was named after him. In a moment of inspiration, General Ibrahim Babangida, as Military President, sent the man a birthday message in which he declared him “the main issue” in Nigerian politics. That man was, of course, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. There were a few others in Awo’s mould, including Dr. M. I. Okpara, who, as Premier of Eastern Nigeria, oversaw the fastest-growing economy in the world. Dr. Okpara rapidly industrialised Eastern Nigeria and escalated educational growth from kindergarten to the tertiary level. Yet, he named none of his achievements after himself. By the time he passed in 1984, he did not have a house to his name.
Between Awo and Okpara, there is a common set of traits that are evident in Peter Obi. Neither valued extravagance nor engaged in chasing shadows. Neither made grand claims of unearned academic laurels, dubious ancestry, or unverified identities. Neither would have entertained, even for a millisecond, the inane thought of riding in a 100-vehicle cavalcade with sirens and horns blaring through dirty, potholed streets to showcase their political stature. To this practical and realistic duo, who harboured neither illusions nor pretensions, being grounded in thought and positive actions was the guiding philosophy.
Peter Obi is cast in that mould, which is why, for each of his claims and postulations, he optimistically leaves a challenge: “Go and verify!” As a state governor, Peter Obi was often in convoys of just a handful of vehicles bearing only officials, security personnel, and pressmen. Well, Awo passed in 1987. Neither he nor Okpara departed with their legacy. Their positive footprints in the sands of time remain with the people they led – a testament to steadfastness and purposefulness. Peter Obi is very much around. So, how would he mark his anniversary today? One thing is certain. There would be no parties. Stories abound in this country of folks with undocumented pedigrees and undeclared sources of wealth who hire tourist Caribbean villages in any of Barbuda, the Cayman Islands, Mustique, Eleuthera or Saint Kitts, etc., for the celebration of their birthdays with bashes crawling with aspiring felons, freeloaders, hangers-on, never-do-wells, assorted parasites, and plenary sycophants. Count Peter Obi out of such bizarrity. He would rather sit alone or with like minds to ruminate and meditate on ways to improve the Nigerian condition.
It is this practice of subjecting Nigeria to constant interrogation that has enabled him to proffer, at every turn, the best steps forward for the country to become meaningful. Baldly, he has repeatedly declared that directing the affairs of a nation should never be left to the devices of drug barons, turncoats, kleptocratic vultures, conceited ignoramuses, and their retinues of “cut it down, whether ripe or not.” To demonstrate that he wasn’t simply all talk and no action, he contested a presidential election in which he trounced, even in their backyards, self-declared electoral “champions” and political “strategists.” Then the heist came. Who doesn’t know that, just as the shell follows the snail, so does desolation trail plunder? Today, woe is in ascent. The entity, previously in a state of stasis, has degenerated into sepsis.
That is why a coalition has come up. A coalition to determine whether an 11th-hour salvation is feasible in the circumstances of near hopelessness. How does one say no in the face of thunder? No new jobs are being created. The employed are rapidly receiving severance letters. Those clinging precariously to jobs are hardly paid. Of the miserable few that earn at all, the shock is that, in most cases, the take-home pay is barely enough for commuting. There’s no health system worthy of the name. A good percentage of the available drugs are either fake or expired. It bothers them not because, when ill with even an earache or a toothache, they jet off at public expense to the Riviera or somewhere nearby for expert medical attention. When, as sometimes happens, they kick the bucket in alien territory, their remains are crated home, again at public expense. Tell that to the doubly jeopardised septuagenarian afflicted by diabetes and hypertension. Holding tightly to her doctor’s prescription, she rues the insufficient money in her purse and mutters, “I will buy the diabetes drug and go home. The management of my high blood pressure can wait.” Why should this tragedy of unrelenting proportions be commonplace in an oil-rich country?
How could it be said and repeated that Fulani herdsmen invaded and wiped away 200 lives in one night, with Abuja unable to call the massacre by its name? How can it be the case that Abuja is unable or unwilling to confront, halt, and reverse the bloody effrontery of mass killers prowling across the national vastness with impunity? The dire straits in which the country is trapped are the reason a coalition has been formed to determine whether an 11th-hour salvation from national despondency is attainable. This alliance to overturn dismal political leadership is a frontal attack on injustice. After all, clueless leadership is a gross injustice to the people. There is, therefore, one piece of advice for anyone who would come into equity. Come with clean hands! It would be absurd to confront blatant injustice with a process that is itself unjust.
All other geopolitical zones have produced presidents, some for repeated times. But not the South East. When the 2022 PDP presidential primary election discarded the process that could have addressed the grievous injustice, Peter Obi, on principle, ditched the party and became the Labour Party’s presidential flag-bearer, a role in which, with his unwavering army of the Obidients, he stunned the cynics. The coalitionists know, or ought to know, that in treating conjunctivitis, the application of pepper is anathema. If, despite this knowledge, they give him a short shrift, Mr. Peter Obi, the main issue in Nigerian politics today, will look in another direction because nobody will be allowed to use him and the Obidients to boost their political avarice. If Mr. Obi turns his back to the coalition, it will instantly collapse like a pack of cards, and it will become clear to all that the alliance cheerleaders were insincere charlatans livid because power resided other than in their backyard, and not because of the imperative of extirpating a cancerous tumour from the body politic. Will reason and statesmanship ultimately prevail? Or will covetousness and a rabid sense of entitlement press the default button for the sustenance of a decadent status quo?
If, in choosing a presidential flag-bearer, the coalition gets its act right, the challenge will shift to the critically patriotic duty of teaching the perpetual perpetrators of electoral corruption that the head is bigger than the body. From all indications, the foreseeable future promises a basketful of news, wholesome and unwelcome, for those who care and others who pretend to be unconcerned. For now, two prayers must end this piece. One, may God deliver the long-suffering peoples of this country who, interminably, are being incessantly and remorselessly raped with a barbed phallus. Two, and for the birthday celebrant: May the Creator of Heaven and Earth keep and lead you in so far as you intend to place a healing balm on the essences of the severely wounded peoples of your fatherland.
Chuks Iloegbunam is the author of The Promise of a New Era, a biography of Mr. Peter Obi.
