Columns
Soludo’s media chat: Hyperboles, truth, little truth, alternative truth!
“Now with the Government House, we’re breaking the 34-year-old jinx. As I said to you, here you are in the Governor’s Lodge in Amawbia. It’s in a different town from Awka, the state capital. When the state was created in 1991, this was supposed to be where the Chief Judge would live and I think the Military Administrator commandeered it as a temporary place.
“The Government House happened to be the yard for the construction company that built the Enugu-Onitsha Road, where they used as their construction yard and their office. That’s where they decided to use as a temporary office. And for some reason, the government got stuck there as well – in this makeshift arrangement.
“And when we came, we thought if we’re going to build the Dubai-Taiwan-Silicon Valley, there has to be a place called Government. So, we are intentional in developing what we called The Three Arms Zone, where you now have the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Government House, Governor’s Lodge – everything – all facilities there.
“As you go on that eight-lane boulevard, you will feel this is the centre of government. As for who would inhabit it, we’re building to last. We’re building for generations like you have the White House, built more than 200 years ago. We are building for a thousand years to come, the people of Anambra, will have a home, where they call their home as their Government House.”
These were the exact words of Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of Anambra State, on Monday March 17, 2025. It was a response to a question posed to him by Reuben Abati, versatile journalist and one of the major anchors of The Morning Show, a breakfast programme on ARISE NEWS network.
Abati was among the four journalists he hosted to a media chat as part of the celebration of his third anniversary in office, where he gave account of his three-year-old government, particularly the update on his Dubai-Taiwan concept, the pillar on which his administration is founded.
Now, for anyone not casting the net too far, the immediate reading derivable from the governor’s narrative, is that the Three Arms Zone, that magnificent edifice now reportedly an eye-popping picture, was his creation. This is an outright falsehood or at best well-intentioned untruth or mental dishonesty.
That particular project, has seen about six other governors before Soludo. Each of these governors, starting from the military administration, under which it was conceived had added one brick here and another rod there before the arrival of the incumbent.
What Soludo has done, or is about to do is to complete it. Now, need the governor not acknowledge this singular fact even if he was to take full ownership eventually? Therein lies the issues around the entire gamut of that encounter on Monday, in terms of what it was meant to achieve.
Not a few believe that contrary to the impression that the parley was put together to showcase the governor’s real-term achievements within the period – an exercise very important to Anambra people home and abroad as well as other interested audiences, it was a contrived scenario to hoodwink the unwary.
Clearly, both the host and his visitors seemed to have struck a perfect setting for achieving a predetermined goal. There was clear evidence of attempts to serenade the governor towards making a pitch to capture the soul and spirit of his listeners that even a non-initiate would not fail to spot from the style of questioning.
More like the art of touching a partner at the right spot during a coital activity, it was indeed interesting watching the way Abati particularly danced around with eclectic prose before finally putting the question about the Three Arms Zone, for instance and how a receptive Soludo, chuckling with excitement, went into a voyage of self-glorification and pure adulation.
Anyone listening to him could have believed that every spot in Anambra is dotted with Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and that at night, the streets transform into a galaxy of glittering stars from the skyscrapers similar to what Taiwan have become well-known.
But residents of the state and people conversant with its affairs, know that Anambra is nowhere near the alluring picture Soludo painted at that forum. Granted, he admitted that the process has not yet fully matured, but with what he has got so far, it would be a miracle to gift Anambra a Lagos or Abuja, even if he spent the next 20 years at the rate he is going, not to talk about a Dubai or Taiwan.
Outside individual efforts from private citizens exploiting the immense opportunities prevalent in the state, the input of the Soludo government, does not appear to be as industrious or far-reaching as the claims he is making. If anything, the government is still very tall on flowery ideas and dwarfish on actual delivery.
Of course, it is expected that people would naturally cut a politician some slacks given that it is almost an agreeable art within their fold to bamboozle the public with beautiful pictures of their intents in seeking political power. Nobody, would therefore have blamed Charlie Nwa Mgbafo, if only he added a pinch of salt here and there.
But to add a bucket of sugar and a hunk of honey comb in the narrative he regaled that all-Yoruba crew from Lagos – save for one of them, said to have been selected from the Anambra Broadcasting Corporation (ABS), Awka – for obvious reason with, was far beyond the acceptable level superfluity.
In other words, for anyone who truly knows the subject matter in Anambra under Soludo, the claims he made in that encounter not only tapered towards the obscene, but even criminally so. The state is nowhere near the lofty picture the governor painted it.
But, this is not to take away that Soludo has added some bits and pieces, odds and ends to the infrastructural architecture of the state. Of course that is expected. Even Chinwoke Mbadinuju, considered by many as the worst governor the state has produced so far, did not leave it the way he met it.
Ostensibly, because the selection of that crew was quite deliberate and the governor or his handlers must have intentionally gone for those who could not ask some hard questions, being blank on what the real issues were, the governor simply had a field day, feeding his visitors with some seducing tales.
No doubt, if the governor actually wanted to create the real picture of Anambra under his care as opposed to using that forum to achieve other personal ends, he would at least diced the arrangement with some local journalists.
Perhaps, as it has become the practice these in recent times, his intention was to mingle with the Big Boys. But outside Awka, there are a surfeit of such people with local names including Amaechi Anakwe, the anchor of Focus Nigeria, a prime breakfast programme on African Independent Television (AIT), who is even from Anambra.
But then, travelling that route could mean that the real questions that bother the people would probably be asked. Perhaps, Soludo did not need anyone to interrogate him for instance, on why his late frantic, wild and frenzied effort towards the security of the land is coming in an election year.
Only a few months back, Emmanuel Obimma, a Catholic priest in the state attempted to make a mincemeat of him. The cleric even went to the extent of calling him a “reprobate spirit” for abandoning the people in the hands of merciless criminals. The obvious question from an informed mind, would be where was this magic wand he is now waving at the time Anambra became a killing field that caused the cleric and others to move against him as late as December last year? Did it mean enough people had not died to enable him so move?
Yet! An informed journalist would have asked him whether the case of Okechukwu Akanaeme, former Chairman of the Onitsha Chamber of Commerce (OCC), who has remained in a vegetative state since last year, after men said to work for Anambra State Waste Management Authority (ASMATA), broke his spine with a pestle. Perhaps, if the questions posed to him included such disturbing case of pure dark-age tactics of local revenue drivers, he might have seen the need to be less adulating and looked at the picture differently from the alluring story of his fairyland Anambra.
He would have been asked if he had heard or seen videos of some henchmen practically torturing, maiming and crippling citizens with ako-odo – a specific local brand of pestle in use by these toughies used for all manner as official enforcers – in any part of Dubai or Taiwan, as many Anambra people daily experience.
Was it not quite interesting that in that two-hour encounter, nobody raise any question about the Owere-Ezukala Three – the three young men pulled from the site of a building they were working as artisans and gruesomely murdered in the same manner as the notorious Apo Six?
Unlike that incident, which shook Nigeria and parts of the world in 2005, in which the innocence of those five Igbo traders and one of their girlfriends was proven by a commission of inquiry, the case of these three men, who incidentally were indigenes of Soludo’s Isuofia community, has remained subsumed in a rather imprudent and offensive official silence that seems the trademark of the government.
If anything had been done to bring a closure to the unfortunate incident, the governor and his handlers obviously seem to believe that nobody outside their circle ought to know. But an informed journalist, unlike the Lagos crew, would have asked all the same. Incidentally, the case in question, sadly appears not isolated.
Regrettably, new cases of indiscriminate shooting of citizens by the new security outfit now seem to be diminishing the much-touted successes of the outfit and belittling its impact. In fact, on the same day Soludo was regaling his visitors with exotic account, a video showing the body of another young lady reportedly felled by the bullets of the Agunechemba operatives, was on public display.
The victim was said to have been killed as the men fired indiscriminately while returning from an operation in Mgbakwu, Awka South Local Government Area of the state. Such recklessness! Such insensitivity! Hours earlier, another victim had been confined in a hospital after the same men reportedly shot him deliberately over disputes that had to do with riding a motorcycle without papers.
Yes! Soludo did not end his titillating story without chest-beating about how he would win his reelection. To him, the question would not be the nature of the landslide victory he would create, but whether this time, he would lose any ward in the state.
Naturally, nobody is likely to doubt him. After all, even an imbecile knows how elections in the country are won and lost. If Soludo actually wants every single vote recorded to his name in the forthcoming election, what would stop him? It would naturally depend on how much farther he could dip his hands in his pocket to get it.
What would make it so difficult in a country where a sitting governor, who supposedly won an election could not pronounce the monetary figure contained in his state budget. What could be more telling than that about the country’s electoral system?
It is true as he said that his party still won overwhelmingly after his inelegant and insensitive, if not senseless dart at Peter Obi on the heels of the 2023 presidential election. Let him say so with his full chest, would he have attempted that if he really believed that his re-election would be based on the ballots instead of pleasing the powers outside Anambra?
His comments is even a confirmation that he knows that his envisaged victory, willy-nilly might not be about how the people feel now or by November 8, 2025 when they file out for another election. He would be a daft to think so, which he is not.
Okay, since he feels he is quite popular, why has he not developed the same courage to say anything against President Bola Tinubu? Or is he not an opposition governor, who ought to be attacking the policies of a government his party would be angling to take over from?
Yes! Since he has lined Anambra with gold and would definitely win every ward in the state, let him as much as make a whimper about anything against the APC or Tinubu and see where that gets him. He dares not. Instead, it would be his remit to promote the fart from the Presidential Villa in Abuja, no matter how smelly as the most enchanting aroma in the world.
So, Soludo should spare his audience that laughable line. What is important is the quality of that Monday encounter with the media quartet. Did it pass the test of credibility? Did it create the true picture of the reality of a possible Dubai-Taiwan tomorrow or ever? Or was it an opportunity for Charlie Nwa Mbafo, to put on display his globally-acknowledged and time-tested prowess for scholarly delivery of hyperbolic ideas that got him his current job in the first place?
I will always refer to the encounter I once had with Kenneth Idiodi. He was then the leader of the Rosicrucian Society in Nigeria, otherwise known as Amok. It was a sit-down at Zodiac Hotel Enugu. Then, I was the reporter of The Guardian in the Coal City.
You know the Amok faith bases its philosophy or belief on the law of Retributive Justice – the law of Karma. That is to say, everything you do in life has its rewards or punishment in equal measure – much like the measure you give, the measure you receive.
I don’t know how much this society draws or links this belief from or with the Bible, but I do recall Jesus Christ warning Simon Peter – return your sword to the scabbard – for he who kills by the sword, dies by the sword.
As a child growing up I listened to one of the epics of Oriental Brothers with the lyrics – ogbu mma ga-esi n’mma na, ogba egbe ga-esi n’egbe na ooo! Translated – he who kills by the sword will die by the sword, he who kills by the gun will die by the nozzle of the gun.
Now, here is where this is relevant in present Nigerian reality – the reason I’m putting details of that encounter out publicly once again, having done so previously.
During that encounter, Idiodi used one event in Nigeria to illustrate his point. He told me of a Nigerian leader who commanded the troop that carried out the Asaba massacre in the heat of the Nigerian civil war – an episode, said to have claimed over 2,000 able-bodied men who had come out to welcome the Nigerian soldiers with songs and dances only to fall in the hail of bullets that descended on them like rainstorms – was not spared by fate.
That commander was to meet his own death in a hail of bullets even as a Head of State. He never mentioned the name of the military top brass. But I used my tongue to count my teeth to come to the answer. You could also do same – use your tongue.
Now, how does this relate? You may have followed the outing of General Yakubu Gowon at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, where he presented his autobiography titled: My Life of Duty and Allegiance, that contained what seemed his memoir on the Nigerian civil war, which he prosecuted as Head of State.
I’m sure you must have been observing the debate therefrom that event. Now, I’m not so much enamoured of the debate as I’m of the nuances surrounding that unfortunate episode and the role of Gowon in it, given my takeaway from that Idiodi encounter some two decades ago.
Does Gowon, now a nonagenarian really believe that presenting a pious, if not saintly account of himself to the world as snippets of his book, which I picked up here and there suggests, truly suffices for the atrocities of that period?
Take the Asaba massacre for example. Was that the handiwork of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, whom the former Head of State seems to blame for everything that went wrong. Was he also the one that commanded that mass slaughtering of innocent men?
Under your nose as Head of State, you watched citizens slaughtered mercilessly like infested herds in the streets – you watched young girls corralled into leprosy colonies and wantonly raped before being wasted – you watched as train coaches bearing people fleeing the scene were stopped and their human cargoes thrown alive into River Benue like rotten goods for fishes to feast on – you watched all these and didn’t lift a finger.
Then as Head of State, you not only supervised but watched millions of children with distended stomachs, tiny feet, glazy eyes, heavy heads on ropelike necks, practically begging for death to come quickly and save them from further punishment.
You supervised and watched the cataclysmic eruptions from the blitzkrieg on churches, markets and hospitals – all to keep Nigeria together. In your mind the brutal and merciless butchery of innocent people who were not soldiers and had nothing to do with the war could be explained away just like that?
O! It was Ojukwu that caused it. Ojukwu was the one who released the bombs, caused the blockades that led to the kwashiorkor that killed millions or other atrocities thereof? What a pity!
Now, I return to Idiodi. How else could anyone interpret today’s Nigeria without introducing the law of retributive justice that the Amok leader spoke of? How do you fault the link of the commander who massacred over 2,000 souls dying by the barrel of the same gun, even as Head of State?
How could anyone fail to relate what is happening to our Gowon today with the past? This is a Geneal that wakes up to see hundreds of his brothers and sisters being buried in mass graves as was done during the onslaught he supervised against another people and he still thinks it has nothing to do with him?
Now, the story you told at that event in Abuja on Tuesday, is not new. You simply repeated yourself. My interpretation of that event is that you’re a man undergoing daily torture. You wouldn’t be a human being otherwise, given what is before you, which didn’t start today.
You’re probably trying to escape your fate by appealing to public sympathy. How helpful could that be in the face of the clear evidence of your culpability in the deliberate wasting of more than three million souls? Nobody would believe you.
Yes! They could humour you. But that’s the best anyone could do for you. I hear money rained like a fountain and that you left the scene with billions of naira in your kitty. At 90? Haba General!
Now, here is the thing General. None of these would help.
None would work. You have tried prayers. But you forget that the prayer of sinner is an abomination and a reproach before God, unless he repents. You have also written the book. Surely, this too would end up in the trashcan of history – meaningless piece of conjectures, propaganda, half-truths and outright lies – perhaps!
But, why don’t you try the one thing you have been running away from, for more than five decades – go on your knees in total supplication and surrender, repentance and penance – then rise, call all Nigerians and empty yourself with the truth.
Thereafter openly apologise to the millions of souls whose tormenting wailing you probably hear every day during your disturbed sleep and in your quiet moments, but choose to suppress with these baby tales. Ask them for forgiveness, genuinely and see. There may lie the answer you seek.
Try that and see if it wouldn’t be a more efficacious cure for this decades-old wound than this Ojukwu-bashing and those wasted prayer sessions. You might not only have atoned for the past, but saved the future. May God guide you.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice
By MAX AMUCHIE | The Sunday Stew
In the last two weeks, Parts One and Two diagnosed a structural mutation in the Nigerian state: a dual sovereignty system in which the Institutional Mirage performs authority while the Shadow Order exercises it, sustained by The Insecurity Triad as a mechanism of mutual reproduction.
What remains is the hardest question in political theory: not what is happening, but whether it can be reversed.
The answer is yes—but not through reform.
Systems that reproduce decay cannot be repaired within their own logic. They must be structurally interrupted.
The Trinity does not collapse. It is displaced.
From Ritual Governance to Peripheral Presence
The first reversal targets the geography of illusion.
The Institutional Mirage is concentrated in the symbolic centre—where governance is performed through summits, communiqués, and administrative ceremony—while dissolving at the periphery where authority is actually tested.
This produces a distorted state: visible in Abuja, absent in the borderlands.
To reverse the Trinity, the state must abandon Ritual Governance—the substitution of performance for presence—and return to the empirical occupation of territory.
This is not military occupation. It is administrative presence as sovereignty.
A state exists not when it speaks in the capital, but when:
a child attends a functioning school without paying a parallel tax of fear;
a farmer harvests without negotiating with non-state authority;
a dispute is resolved by a recognised court faster than an armed intermediary.
Governance is not restored by declaration. It is restored by continuity.
Where state presence becomes routine, the Shadow loses its monopoly on predictability.
From Pacification Bargaining to Sovereign Integrity
The second reversal confronts a deeper failure: negotiated sovereignty.
The state has increasingly drifted into a system of Negotiated Sovereignty sustained through what may be described as Pacification Bargaining—the purchase of temporary calm from rival authority structures through ransom logic, amnesty arrangements, protection payments, or informal accommodation.
This is not strategy. It is dependency disguised as pragmatism.
Every bargain strengthens The Insecurity Triad by:
monetising abduction economies;
legitimising territorial extraction;
reinforcing the Shadow’s role as a negotiating sovereign.
The result is a system of self-financing violence in which each concession funds the next cycle of coercion.
Pacification Bargaining does not resolve insecurity. It institutionalises it.
Each transaction deepens the perception that coercion is profitable, territorial pressure is negotiable, and sovereign authority is conditional rather than absolute.
Sovereign recovery therefore requires rupture in this economy.
The state must reassert a non-negotiable monopoly over:
taxation;
adjudication;
legitimate force.
Integrity, in this context, is not moral posture. It is institutional refusal to participate in markets of coercion.
A state that bargains over its coercive authority is not managing insecurity—it is outsourcing sovereignty.
The Critical Break: Dismantling the Insecurity Triad
To dismantle The Insecurity Triad is to break the loop between performed sovereignty and enforced sovereignty.
This cannot be achieved through security operations alone, though coercive force remains an essential and non-negotiable instrument of restoring empirical sovereignty. It requires something deeper: the reconstruction of institutional credibility in the very spaces the Institutional Mirage has abandoned.
It requires the state to stop performing governance and start delivering it. To stop negotiating the terms of its own authority and start enforcing them.
To recover the map—not in abstraction, but in detail: name by name, community by community—that armed actors are actively redrawing through coercion, taxation, and enforced renaming.
Dismantling the Triad is therefore not only a security task. It is a reversal of political geography itself.
The Cartographic Re-occupation of the Republic
The Shadow Order does not only occupy land. It reorganises meaning.
Through what may be understood as Constitutional Erasure, it renames territories, restructures local identity, and replaces the symbolic map through which authority is recognised.
Once this occurs, sovereignty is no longer contested physically alone—it is contested cognitively.
Cartographic Re-occupation is therefore not symbolic politics. It is structural restoration.
It requires three coordinated acts.
First, administrative re-anchoring: the immediate restoration of functioning institutions—schools, clinics, courts, and local administration—under continuous state presence.
Second, symbolic restoration: the reassertion of original geographic and civic identities through formal public renaming and constitutional recognition.
Third, cognitive consolidation: governance must cease to appear as intervention and become the default condition of life.
The state is not restored when it returns to territory. It is restored when territory returns to the state’s cognitive map.
Intellectual Closure: The State After Fragmentation
The deeper insight of this architecture is that sovereignty in Nigeria is no longer singular.
What has emerged is a fragmented order in which authority is distributed between competing logics of governance—one performed, one enforced, both partially functional, neither complete.
This is where African political thought clarifies the structure beneath the surface.
The logic of adaptive survival described by Jean-François Bayart explains why the state persists even as it weakens. Achille Mbembe explains how survival itself becomes managed rather than guaranteed.
Together, they clarify the central claim of the Trinity: this is not collapse. It is reorganisation.
Closing Movement
Nigeria does not face a singular collapse of authority. It faces a structured competition between performed sovereignty and functional sovereignty.
The Mirage still speaks in the language of the state.
The Shadow still governs in the language of necessity.
Between them, society survives by navigating two competing logics of order.
The question is no longer who governs.
It is whether governance itself can be reassembled into a single coherent structure.
The Reversal Condition: Sequential Sovereignty Restoration
The Trinity is reversible, but only in sequence.
Protection must be restored before compliance can shift.
Compliance must shift before territorial credibility stabilises.
Territorial credibility must stabilise before institutional authority can move from performance to function.
Any inversion of this order produces relapse.
The system is not resistant to reform. It is resistant to mis-sequencing.
The Trinity reverses only when sovereignty becomes empirically enforceable again through the sequential reconstitution of protection, compliance, and territorial credibility, thereby disrupting the mutual reproduction loop between the Institutional Mirage and the Shadow Order sustained by The Insecurity Triad.
Where this sequence fails, the loop does not weaken. It adapts.
The Social Contract Is Not Broken — It Is Being Replaced
There can be no social contract in a state where the sovereign performs authority it does not possess, negotiates with rivals it cannot defeat, and watches—from the polished corridors of Abuja—as the names of its own communities are erased from the landscape it claims to govern.
The conventional framing of Nigeria’s crisis describes a broken social contract: the state has failed its obligations, and the people are paying the price.
That framing is not wrong. But it is insufficient.
A broken contract implies a single agreement that has lapsed—and the possibility, in principle, of renegotiation and restoration.
What the Trinity of State Decay reveals is something more structural.
The social contract is not merely broken. It is being replaced.
In the spaces where the Institutional Mirage does not reach—in the northwest, northeast, and Middle Belt, in renamed villages and abandoned farmlands—a rival contract is being written.
On rival terms. Under rival authority. With rival consequences for those who refuse to sign.
The Shadow Order does not offer freedom. It offers a different captivity—one organised around extraction, fear, and the brutal clarity of power that does not pretend to be something it is not.
Within its own logic, it is internally consistent and therefore predictable.
And in conditions where protection becomes uncertain and uneven, predictability itself begins to function as a substitute for legitimacy—not as consent, but as adaptation under constraint.
The Institutional Mirage, by contrast, sustains a different form of instability: the unpredictability of protection, the inconsistency of enforcement, and the performance of authority that does not reliably translate into outcomes.
It is this asymmetry—between predictable coercion and unpredictable protection—that accelerates the silent transfer of compliance from formal sovereignty to rival order.
Conventional state failure frameworks assume a linear erosion of capacity.
The Trinity departs from this by demonstrating a dual-state condition in which formal and rival sovereignties coexist, interact, and reinforce decay.
Nigeria is not a failed state.
It is a state in the grip of a Trinity.
The Definition
Drawing on the full architecture of the foregoing analysis, I now offer a formulation of the Trinity of State Decay theory:
The Trinity of State Decay is the decoupling of a state into rival sovereignties: the Institutional Mirage, which performs authority without fully possessing it, and the Shadow Order—or competing Shadow Orders—which exercises de facto authority in spaces the Mirage has vacated, both sustained by The Insecurity Triad as the mechanism of their mutual reproduction.
The Trinity intensifies where the Mirage fragments into competing centres of performed authority, accelerating the transfer of empirical sovereignty to rival structures.
The Trinity reverses only when sovereignty becomes empirically enforceable again as a stable condition of governance.
This condition is not defined by the mere presence of the state, but by the alignment of three realities: protection must be enforceable, compliance must orient toward the state, and territorial authority must remain continuous.
Where these diverge, sovereignty fragments.
Where they converge, sovereignty reconstitutes.
Recovery is not repair or return. It is the production of a new equilibrium in which the Mirage collapses into function, the Shadow is displaced, and The Insecurity Triad loses its organising role.
This condition is produced through sequence: protection must precede compliance, compliance must precede territorial credibility, and territorial credibility must precede institutional function. Any inversion produces relapse; where the sequence holds, the loop breaks.
While derived from the Nigerian case, the Trinity offers a generalisable framework for analysing state decay in contexts where formal sovereignty persists alongside entrenched systems of rival governance.
Stay seasoned.
•Concluded
•Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad Analytical Framework, and the Trinity of State Decay theory. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.
X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Godwin Obaseki, former Governor of Edo State was the first to raise the alarm. He rang the bell in the most dramatic manner in that video that went viral on the heels of the 2023 presidential election. It was about the impending tsunami confronting the Nigerian political space – the Peter Obi phenomenon!
The forum the ex-governor spoke was supposed to be a family meeting – a kitchen cabinet affair, where he interacted with the inner caucus of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in his state. But he ended up not only alerting the nation, but passing the message about the new reality in the must pungent, direct and unobtrusive manner – something new has come – Peter Obi.
Whether it was meant to be a warning, an admonition or simply a subject of amusement – as the governor seemed tickled while delivering it – Obaseki’s words in that outing hit the right spot in national consciousness across board. The young, the old, the healthy and the infirm, all heard it clearly. Now whatever they did individually remains a different kettle of fish.
In that encounter, Obaseki had told his audience how, despite being a governor and the engine room of the PDP in the state, his own family had turned against him with all children and other young members enlisting into the Obidient Movement and how that was true of every other family in Nigeria.
Now, was Obaseki’s depiction false? Didn’t it come to pass on February 25, 2023, when Nigerians went to the polls? If Yakubu Mahmoud and his INEC had not contrived that technical glitches arrangement to abjure the mandate of the people in line with the grab, snatch and run philosophy of the present beneficiary of that obvious heist, Obi certainly would have been Nigerian President.
Had that happened, Obi’s would have been not only a clean and wholesome mandate, untainted by the paintbrush of rigging or other electoral infamies bespattering previous efforts, it would have been a national mandate – delivered by the people of Nigeria – likened only to Moshood Abiola’s June 12, 1993 presidential election victory.
In fact, so pan-Nigerian was the Peter Obi effort that Nigerians of all ethnic and religious persuasions came together and on their own, in clusters, within housing estates, in villages and communities, contributed money to fund their individual campaigns to promote the project of getting him to the Aso Rock Villa for the nation’s number one job.
Nigerians abroad – Yoruba – Hausa – Ibibio – Jukun – Igala – Tiv – Kalabari – Igbo – Edo – made special arrangements to return home with the sole purpose of not only promoting the agenda, but actually making the idea a reality by casting their votes for him.
Obi was the only one out of the lot that contested the election in 2023 that secured the endorsement of virtually all the ethic organisations across Nigeria.
Afenifere – the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation – the Middle-Belt Forum (MBF) from the North Central – Pan-Niger Delta Forum PANDEF – for the South South region and Ohanaeze – their South East counterpart – all came together to declare their support for his presidential ambition.
Now this is the same person that some naysayers are labouring too hard, day and night to closet inside the straightjacket of ethnicity and religion. From Reno Omokri to Daniel Bwala to Bayo Onanuga and others controlling working from the Presidency to their counterparts at the Blantyre Plaza APC secretariat in Abuja – they continue to trumpet the spurious, bogus and fake narrative of Obi’s ambition being steeped in some sort of Igbo agenda.
Ironically, out of the entire lot, the selfsame Obi, is the only one who came out to boldly declare that nobody should cast a vote for him because he is Igbo, rather, they should do so because they are convinced about his ability to deliver on a new Nigeria of their dreams. No other had the courage to make such a bold declaration.
Surprisingly, even Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria’s most iconic figures – a central voice in national and international affairs – Nigeria’s man of the century – the Kongi himself – who had hitherto shot himself to a position of a super being – of immortality – beyond reproach – without any credible reason even by his own conjecture – called the Obi ambition – an IPOB agenda.
That underscores the seriousness of the entire scenario. But interestingly, no matter how they try to trumpet it, their efforts have continued to mimic a snake striking at the shell of the tortoise with the aim of infusing its killer poison.
Their frustration not only hinges on this apparent failure but their current desperation too! The Obi brand has continued to soar beyond comprehension. So, when you hear the echoes of ethnic baiting, religious smears or other primordial sentiments, just know they are trying to increase the tempo of the din! Such a frustrating task!
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice!
-
News4 weeks agoBREAKING: Makinde, Turaki, lose! *S’Court affirms Wike’s PDP leadership
-
News2 weeks agoTinubu to African leaders: Copy Nigeria, produce your way out of poverty
-
Features4 weeks agoJim Nwobodo: The Sun shines, thrills, at ‘The Vanguard Awards’
-
News6 days agoBREAKING: US-Nigeria troops slaughter 175 ISWAP fighters
-
News2 weeks agoWhy we pegged presidential ticket forms at N60million – NDC
-
Columns3 days agoDear General Gowon: That apology you’re running from is your nemesis
-
News2 weeks agoGowon on civil war: My book is to put records straight, remove falsehood
-
News2 weeks agoBREAKING! Coast brightens for Obi, as NDC zones presidency to South