Columns
Between Abacha’s five parties and Tinubu’s governors
By Sunny Igboanugo
The more things change, the more they remain the same, is the English translation of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the 1849, epic lines of French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
It is exactly 176 years today. Yet, those lines have remained eternal – a demonstrable example of the fixated nature of human mind and the culture of returning to the convenience of old practices rather than learning new things – the bane of most societies.
In 1998, Sani Abacha, the late military General who till date still hugs the history of being Nigeria’s most despotic leader, was on his way to transmuting into a civilian President. Remember the deafening din then from the political class and how everything was wrapped up towards achieving that end.
Faced with international pressure and domestic discontent, Abacha who obviously wanted to be Nigeria’s example of what Yoweri Museveni represents today in Uganda, appeared determined to show the world the democratic side of his iron-cast mien.
So, he went to work. The “democrat” he was, he went about returning Nigeria to his version of democratic rule his own way. Having effectively destroyed the platform on which Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO), Abiola was demanding his mandate, it was naturally apposite for him to move to the next stage of conquering Nigeria permanently.
His consigliere must have advised him on how to go about the project. So, in, came the United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP), Congress for National Consensus (CNC), Grassroot Democracy Movement (GDM), Democratic Party of Nigeria (DPN), and National Center Party of Nigeria (NCPN), the five political parties that Abraham Adesanya, then leader of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), aptly described as the five fingers of a leprous hand.
Remember many people believed that each of them came from the cooking pot in the inner kitchen of Aso Rock where Abacha and his inner cabal were churning out all manner of wacky dishes and forcing them down the throats of Nigerians.
I’m sure you still recall how each of the party leaders paid homage to the same Abacha and on bended knees begged him to remove his Khaki and transmute to civilian President. They not only did that, but one after the other each of them held their conventions, with one outcome – his adoption as presidential candidate.
So, if death had not struck at the time it did and Abacha did not give way on that fateful day of Monday, June 8, 1998, what it means is that there would have been no contest. He would simply have strolled out from the Villa gate as military Head of State and strolled back in as civilian President. It would be that simple.
Now, don’t get it twisted. This was a time Nigerians considered in history as their darkest period. Never had they known such psychological, if not physical torture – a time people – the ordinary folks, only managed to speak in whispers not knowing who would be listening – when the fear of the ubiquitous Abacha Boys – euphemism for the killing machines looming at every corner – became the beginning of wisdom.
In other words, behind the leadership of those political parties and the general political class trooping to the Villa to make their pitch before the notorious military despot, were millions of Nigerians practically reeling under the gruesome environment of fear that signposted the iron-fist era.
Yet, at the feet of the military General and before television cameras thereafter, these political leaders told the world that their message came direct from their people, who were so happy that God had given the country such a leader with the key to the storehouse of all the goodies beyond the imagination of the human mind.
Today, Nigeria is back to the same darkroom. It is like a reel delivering the images on the huge screen, with spectators who witnessed the past, screaming in unison – Abacha! The only difference is that there are no dark goggles and the man behind them has no tribal marks or does not cut some dummy mien to cover up his steely heart.
Today, the man we have on the bloc is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Asiwaju of Lagos, the Jagaban Borgu. His imprimatur is not the Abacha goggles. It is a special cap with a peculiar print, some say mimics a broken chain, that is supposed to announce freedom.
What a contradiction in terms regarding the freedom in Nigeria presently. But beyond the marked difference in their physical appearance and their historical background, beyond their individual approach and mannerism, expectedly so, is a notorious binding factor – love for power.
Of course, Nigeria is replete with reluctant leaders, who had power entrusted on them rather than seek it. Yakubu Gowon, Shehu Shagari, Olusegun Obasanjo, Goodluck Jonathan, who at one time or the other had the opportunity of being at the helm of affairs, either as military or civilians, are some of the most common examples.
But not Abacha and not Tinubu. Both not only loved power, they also demonstrated that they knew their way to it. They seemed to have equally been gifted a natural, unique and potent knack for manipulation. For instance, those who knew Abacha, say, right from the time he was a junior officer, he had his eyes on the seat of the Commander-in-Chief.
To achieve his goal, he was said to have his hand in all the successful coups that brought in each military leader so that by the time he finally went for the big prize himself, it was like cruising on a smooth, wide boulevard.
With Tinubu, the story is no different. Every political coup that was ever hatched in Nigeria, since he happened on the scene, especially since becoming the Governor of Lagos State in 1999, issued from his manipulative machine, such that in 2023, as others were struggling, crisscrossing Nigeria with steamy, energy-sapping campaigns, he was actually picking his teeth quietly and contentedly, in a manner that defied logic.
The only time he ventured on the scene were his cameo appearances at political grounds, where he merely entertained his audience with some uncanny acts – acts that more or less confused, rather than convinced them.
From his Emilokan delivery in Abeokuta to the Balablu Bulaba in Owerri – from his raising his walking stick like a comedia in Port Harcourt during the singing of the National Anthem to his dancing Lololo-Buga of Kiss Daniel, at the lunch in London after the Chatham House appearance, it was clear that though Nigerians, intrigued at the entire show, made jokes about it, the man knew where he was headed and how to get there.
So, today, when you see Umo Eno, Governor of Akwa Ibom State, swearing on behalf of his people that it is Tinubu till 2031, just cast your mind back to that notorious era of pilgrimage to Abacha. But don’t forget to pity and say a prayer for him. He needs it.
When Chukwuma Soludo, who is supposed to be the most intelligent and gifted governor in Nigeria today, by his attainment, is caught tongue-tied – when you see him demure or make a case for Tinubu’s outlandish policies, in spite of himself, don’t be surprised. The lion is on a leash.
When last did you hear from Bala Muhammed, who had tried to break off from the park to assume the role of an opposition governor? He has since retreated. So quickly so soon after! Was he not the one who read the resolution announcing that governors of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), would not sign in to any form of coalition or merger – a move clearly interpreted as a fait accompli, and a metaphor for blanket endorsement of Tinubu and APC for 2027.
Of course, Eno was not lying when he told his audience the forum where he endorsed Tinubu that some of his colleagues were visiting the Presidential Villa at night to pledge their loyalty. But that also is only a matter of time. What is hidden would soon be laid bare. Already the names of Sheriff Oborevwori of Delta and Peter Mba of Enugu are appearing on the horizon.
Yes! Unlike Abacha, Tinubu has no guns or better-put, not adept at their use even as a C-in-C. But no gun is needed either. The subsequent elections since he assumed power in May 2023, is enough to make them wiser. If they are not convinced about the governorship polls in Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa, the latest in Edo, is enough to make them wiser and more prudent, should they hitherto harbour any independent ideas.
Yes! Like in the time of Abacha, who superintended a Nigeria that was under a siege, with citizens praying to higher beings for redemption, Nigerians have again descended on their knees begging God to save them from Tinubu.
Like that evil era, those leaders, political, religious and temporal, who pay daily pilgrimages to Aso Rock today, bear their own stories. The accolades they donate to Tinubu, like the ones showered on Abacha are not from the people.
Yesterday, they called Abacha a fearless leader for confronting world leaders who dared him to mend his evil ways, today, they praise Tinubu as bold and courageous, for his evil policies that have seen Nigerians practically scaling over the Third Mainland Bridge and donating their bodies as meals for the fishes and other ocean serpents inhabiting the underbellies of the Lagos Lagoons, almost daily.
I could imagine how Tinubu would be nodding each time the governors individually or in groups are flat on their bellies in the dead of the night while paying obeisance. The feeling must be of inebriation – of spiritual and physical satiation. Not that he would believe them – Abacha obviously wouldn’t have believed his courtiers – but he would know where they are coming – Fear!
Those who read Want to Stay Alive by James Hadley Chase, would recall Pok Toholo schooling his recruit that fear is the key that opens the wallet of the wealthy. On the flipside, it is the same fear that today opens the hearts, minds and hands of Nigerian politicians.
So on that D-day, when Nigerians will return to the polls, one thing is sure. The governors will mark their duty posts. Their remit would be to ensure that you, me and millions of Nigerians, our times under the sun or rain to cast our votes would be wasted.
They will work with men and women of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) – the most corrupt institution of the world – to count – not the votes of the people, but in complete opposite manipulate them. The various government houses would be busy changing the figures to deliver at the collation centres.
At the collation centres the manipulated results would be delivered to university professors – the same people complaining of poor academic environments and multiple other inadequacies – they will take it from there, smoothen the rough edges before the final nail is used to seal the job by the oga patapata of INEC.
For those unfortunate enough to approach the courts, they know what to expect. I won’t be the one to say so. That judges at those courts would ask them to produce the scrotums of ants to prove their cases would not be mine to forewarn them.
So, when Tunde Bakare, cried out on Sunday at what he called the capture of the legislature by Tinubu, through his Motor Park Politics, I could only permit myself some laughter. He did not only fall short by a wide margin, he came to the party too late. Why only the legislature? Why not Nigeria? Who owns the opposition? Where is the judiciary captured?
The cleric was correct in his assertion that were the Third Term idea which failed in 2006 been floated under Tinubu’s National Assembly, it would have been a fair accompli. But who says Nigeria has escaped from it? Under Abacha, the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria designed Prayer to Nigeria In Distress.
May be today they should be designing another one aimed at skewing the mind of Tinubu away from conceiving the idea. For if he does, Nigeria would be on its way to Cameroun’s Paul Biya or Museveni’s Uganda. Who stopped Abacha? Who would stop Tinubu outside God
My name is Sunny Igboanugo and I’m The Tiny Voice!
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!
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