The cost of Peter Obi’s politics is often borne by someone else, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
In Manchester on Sunday 18 October, Peter Obi told a hall of Nigerians living in Britain what to do about their relatives. “You have people at home in Nigeria today who are begging you for money. Tell them no! Let us put somebody who has proven to be productive.”
By Tuesday he had clarified. He said he deeply appreciates Nigerians in the diaspora, that their remittances pay for school fees, hospital bills, rent and feeding, that their sacrifices deserve profound respect, and that he never asked anyone to abandon their loved ones. His message, he said, had been distorted by political opponents.
He did not say he had been misquoted. The video exists and he has not suggested otherwise. What he disputed was the meaning, and we are entitled to examine the meaning for ourselves.
Let us start with the mechanics of his proposal.
A nurse in Manchester sends two hundred pounds to her mother in Lagos for blood pressure medication. Under this instruction she says no, so that her mother feels the full weight of her electoral decision, so that her mother votes differently, so that governance improves, so that one day the transfer becomes unnecessary. Or maybe not, considering the global phenomenon of remittances.
The mother is the instrument. The nurse makes the decision. The candidate collects the benefit.
However, notice what the prescription does. It locates the pain in the poorest participant, the one with no agency in the transaction, and it asks a working nurse to administer that pain to her own mother on the strength of a promise from a man who will not be present for the conversation. It also assumes that voting the beneficiary candidate will improve the outcomes of governance.
It was not only the governing party that recoiled. The Labour Party, the NNPP and the SDP all criticised the remarks. When three opposition parties that have every incentive to stay quiet decide to object, something has gone beyond ordinary partisanship.
And this is the point, because the Manchester remark is not an isolated clumsiness. It is a method. His supporters assume he has the right thing to say, until he says something.
Go back to the Anambra doctors’ strike that ran for thirteen months under his own governorship. The defence, which he has restated across years, is that it did not affect a great many sick people, that no catastrophe occurred. Nobody died en masse, so the harm was not real.
Look at the structure of that argument rather than its content. The suffering is acknowledged and then declared acceptable, because the person declaring it is not the person who bore it. The mother who did not survive childbirth during those thirteen months cannot be produced as a witness. The patient whose treatable illness turned terminal is not in the room. So the absence of a headline becomes the proof of innocence.
It is the same architecture as the Manchester instruction. Somebody else’s hardship, assessed from a comfortable distance, and judged bearable.
Then there is the question of what he actually tells people, which varies by room. In one video, he said he had lived in Nnewi all his life. In another, he said he lived in Lagos. And both statements did not leave room to suggest he stayed at more than one location. He seems to forget his assertions, so he sets up contradictions at will.
On 24 August, at the Nigerian Bar Association conference in Port Harcourt, he reaffirmed his support for the removal of the fuel subsidy and argued that the government’s mishandling of the savings was no reason to bring it back. On 28 September, at a town hall in Sokoto, he assured his audience that subsidy would return once corruption had been dealt with.
Five weeks. Two cities. A yes and a no to a question that requires a simple yes or no. Schrödinger’s subsidy. He will remove it and he will not remove it.
A politician is entitled to change his mind. What is owed when a position changes is an account of what changed it. None has been offered. What we have instead is a policy that stays dead in the south and comes back to life in the north, with a condition attached that has no date on it.
A man who will give two answers to the simplest question in Nigerian politics is a man telling each room what it wants to hear, and the honest word for that is not nuance. This has cost him a lot of ground as Atiku Abubakar has now firmly established himself as President Tinubu’s main challenger.
Consider also the platforms. APGA, then the PDP, then the Labour Party, then the ADC in January of this year, then the NDC in May. Five parties, three of them inside twelve months.
Each departure has an explanation, and in every one the party failed him rather than the reverse. But people joined those parties because he was in them. Volunteers, candidates, donors, young people who put their names and money behind a movement. A platform you can leave three times in a year is what? Maybe a vehicle. And the people left stranded on the platform.
Then the supporters. When people campaigning in his name behave indefensibly, the response is that those people are not really his supporters. It is an unfalsifiable defence. Anybody who embarrasses the movement is by definition outside it, which means the movement can never be held responsible for anything done in its name. This is genius by the way. In a sense at least.
In every case the cost of Peter Obi’s politics is carried by somebody who is not Peter Obi. The nurse and her mother. The patients of Anambra. The volunteers of a party he has since left. The ordinary supporter who is disowned the moment he becomes inconvenient.
Because the question is not whether he believes what he says in any particular hall. It is who pays when he is wrong, and the pattern so far gives a consistent answer.
Never him.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing