News
Peter Obi: The Daura plot that failed
Why does Reno Omokri, appear so inconsolable? Since the conclusion of the burial of Muhammadu Buhari, President, 2015-2023, on Tuesday, he has been all and about the social media, displaying the disposition of someone who was unfortunate enough to be rubbed by agbara – that dangerous fruit, found in the forest, which contact with the skin causes great itching and discomfort to its ill-fated victim.
Forget that he has become so engrossed with Peter Obi for a long time now that he has now been named in some quarters as Minister of Peter Obi Affairs, his posturing in the last 24 hours has been replete with some strange verve and frenzy that could only be attributed to serious and undiluted frustration. The question, is why?
Within that period, he has dished out more than three statement – all pointing to one subject matter – Obi’s absence at the funeral of Buhari, the former military Head of State who later became the 15th leader of Nigeria, after his passing in a London on Sunday.
This morning, he upped the ante with a fresh, mocking claim, that it was because there was no food to be served at the funeral event that made him decide to be absent – in apparent reference to the video, which showed Obi serving food last week at charity event organised by the Catholic Church in Imo State. See the frustration, witness the high degree and depth of his pain!
Come to think of it, Obi has more than enough reasons not to attend Buhari’s funeral. Such reasons are either cultural or political or both. In Igbo land, funerals are not only cultural, but highly spiritual. Indeed, the spiritual aspect is so fundamental and strong that any form of disobedience to its dictates could be fatal. Let me explain.
If my father dies and a friend of mine doesn’t come to pay me condolences, I’m constrained to return the same treatment if his own father dies. It doesn’t matter the bond between us. In other words, condolences to the bereaved is a debt to be paid or repaid. Again, if you did not take a cow to my father’s burial, I must not come to yours with one, and if he did, no matter how long it takes me to gather enough resources to reciprocate the gesture, it is an obligation that must be fulfilled. It must not be ignored.
Now, how does this relate? I’m aware that Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the late Ikemba Nnewi, a senior military officer of the Nigerian Army, who before his stint with Biafra, must have commanded Buhari’s commanders, if not him directly, was given a state burial, after he died in 2010, the same way the late former President was given on Tuesday. I don’t recall seeing Buhari or most of the people who were in Daura, his community in Katsina at that event.
Obi was the governor at the time the event took place under former President Goodluck Jonathan. In other words, he was the chief mourner that took the condolences on behalf of the state. So, on that score and added to the fact that Ojukwu was his political father, Obi, could conveniently rely on that as an excuse not to be in Daura.
But even if it didn’t constitute a taboo for him to attend, on the argument that the late Ikemba was not his biological father, there is another cultural norm to cover his absence. ‘Uno onwu a-di erure, utu k’ona agba’ – translated – condolences don’t rot, but only grows moulds. What this means is that unlike a rotten item that becomes useless, you can clean off a mould on an item and still find it useful. In other world condolences or funerals could be deferred to a period of convenience. It doesn’t end in one day.
On the political side, Obi also has every reason to be antagonistic of Buhari. Who doesn’t know the role the late President played in cheating him out of the 2023 presidential election, which he clearly won? Buhari was not only an opponent but his silence to the crooked electoral process made him both an enabler and arrowhead of the manipulation that saw Obi come third from the obvious first position.
Outside that, who doesn’t know what Peter Obi represents in Nigeria’s political firmament today? Now, think for a moment what the situation could have been, if Obi was sighted anywhere near that event. The mistake most people make is to think that his cult following is restricted to the South. His appearance at that event would have provided the naysayers evidence of his deep and widespread influence.
Let me paint the different scenarios Obi’s cameo appearance either in Katsina or Daura would have caused. The first, would have been that the crowd of youths could have broken into wild ululation capable of causing a stampede, capable also of resulting into fatalities. That’s one.
The second one could have been that knowing his political leverage, the All Progressives Congress (APC) hunters looking for his leg to make pepper soup with, could have organised a befitting welcome party for him. For instance, they could have hired some urchins to pelt him with pure water or even some more dangerous items, just to prove a point that Northern youths hate him.
Again, given the high-octane security arrangements, particularly captured in the frenzy and the razzmatazz on display at that event on Tuesday, there is no gainsaying that some overzealous operatives, eager to please their masters, could not have taken it as part of their remit to embarrass him, either by restraining him from coming close to the centre of action or found an opportunity to physically manhandle him, as part of their security operations.
In that case, not only that nobody would come to his rescue, the APC goons, including Reno, would have gone to town with embellished tales of how he got what he deserved.
All these scenarios, were any of them to have happened, would surely have detracted, diminished and blurred the solemn nature of the event and distracted many people from appreciating its import, which is respect for the dead. Any of them would have made him the centre of discussion. Obi, will never allow himself to fall victim of such an outcome.
Indeed, a development like that would have created the sort of set-up Reno Omokri, Deji Adeyanju, Omoyele Sowore and other APC goons were waiting for to feast on. But they have apparently been denied the opportunity. No wonder the whining and bellyaching.
Indeed, what these traducers appear to miss is that apart from Obi’s personal lifestyle and proclivities, he has been out there in the field for decades long before they were out of their dippers. They forget that even before breaking into the public arena as Governor of Anambra State, he had been there, crossing the proverbial seven seas and seven jungles and battling all the countervailing forces at the same time.
Someone who posts the record of constructing bank buildings and developing properties, engaging in multi-million businesses as a student, someone who sat on the boards of blue-chip companies, became chairman of a bank in his 30s and set the most historic records in his checkered political life as governor and later presidential candidate, cannot fall to the antics of minions like Reno, whose only calling is using the social media to hype or abuse people according to their pays or lack of it.
In other words, Obi, being overwhelmed or defeated by such antics, is akin to the proverbial crab, which swam across the mighty ocean only to end up in a woman’s soup pot. That Peter Obi, eventually showed up at the home of the Buhari’s less than 24 hours after the Daura staccato noise – in a quiet, unobtrusive and solemn manner – tells the whole story of who the master truly is in this game. Again Peter Obi, has won, just as I know he would!
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice!
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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