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Kanu: Tinubu’s final wreath on Buhari’s grave
President Bola Tinubu has finally paid the last respect to his latter-day friend, ally and predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari. On Thursday, November 20, he handed the late President a highly-prized gift – Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.
It would have been the head of the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), on a platter. But something must have restrained his hands not to go the whole hog. Otherwise, what would have saved the IPOB boss from the hangman’s noose? It must have been some unseen hands – a silent voice of reason.
Else, he would have gone the way of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was decimated by Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s version of the notorious Idi Amin Dada of Uganda or more recently, Saddam Houssen, the Iraqi leader the US killed after making a song and dance of capturing him from a hole, following a manhunt that came at the end of the war which they prosecuted against him.
Abacha, who hinged his decision to delete Saro-Wiwa, in the infamous Ogoni Nine case, due to the role he allegedly played in the killing of four of his kinsmen, popularly known as the Ogoni Four, had remained implacable.
He had refused all the pleas from all quarters – local individuals and the international community – while America went after the slain Iraqi leader on the ground of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), a charge the same American officials later declared false, decades after.
So, in a way, Kanu could be counted lucky that he would still be allowed to have his head on his neck, for whatever it is worth. Now, nobody knows how well this sits with Buhari in his grave. Would he be smiling with joy, unenthusiastic or outrightly gutted that Tinubu didn’t give him the head of his sworn enemy, as with Herod’s wife?
For all you saw in all this saga, is about Muhammadu Buhari. Make no mistake about it. Let me explain. Kanu would have fizzled out like Ralph Uwazuruike, founder of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Fredrick Faseun or Gani Adams of the O’odua Peoples Congress (OPC) fame, were he to come at a different time.
In fact, the highest he would have gotten would be billions of naira and dollars in his account and some cult following from some entrenched tribal individuals and groups, like those following Sunday Igboho today. Don’t forget he had a similar case. Who still hears of the Ibarapa strongman?
But he came at the wrong time – under Buhari – perhaps, one of the haters of Ndigbo that ever lived on the surface of the earth. What didn’t Buhari do to prove his vaulting hatred for the Igboman? Was it in his 97-5 per cent policy, which he ran throughout his miserable and disastrous eight years in office?
Was it the Operation Python Dance with which he decimated and sent countless Igbo youths to their early graves, clamping several others into detention and making the rest suffer the most horrendous torture known to man? Was it in his derisively describing the South East as “a dot in a circle?”
So, from his arrest, detention, release and eventual attack at his home in Afarukwu, Abia State, to the death of his parent – forceful capture and rendition in 2021 – long detention, terrorism charge, trial and now conviction – the hidden fingers of Buhari have been evident.
What appears quite strange and out of character is that Tinubu continued the onslaught even after his death. Indeed, there are many ways he could have extricated himself from all this. He could have adopted the political solution that many people had pled over the years. Remember that virtually every past Igbo leader had made such representations, ranging from George Obiozo and Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, former Presidents General of Ohananeze Ndigbo to Mbazuluike Amaechi and Chukwuemeka Ezeife, elder statesmen.
Ezeife, a member of the now defunct National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), had tried to activate his connections with the group to push Tinubu, his friend and ally in the struggle to the project of freedom for Kanu, to no avail. In the case of Amaechi, he had attempted to flaunt his age as a nonagenarian, who not only saw Nigeria at its infancy, but participated as a member of the famous Zikist Movement that played a major role in bringing independence to Nigeria, for which he even went to jail. No dice!
He had gone to the Villa with a singular prayer – his last wish before joining his compatriots – Zik, Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro et al in the independence struggle – give me Nnamdi Kanu, I’ll tame him. But just like others before him, he was ignored, snubbed and allowed to return home, empty-handed.
Many had expected Tinubu to end the saga, by entering a nolle prosequi. Afterall, this was not his baby and there was no basis to inherit it.
But no! You now saw how Kanu was blamed for virtually all the killings in the South East. It was like playing the Buhari card. What I didn’t hear in all the allegations heaped on his head as Justice James Omotosho, of the Federal High Court, Abuja, read his verdict on Thursday, was that Kanu actually participated in the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2003! But there he was quite close. Part of the allegations actually touched on the US and United Kingdom.
Curiously, not one single line in the judge’s long list pinned Kanu to a specific case in terms of direct participation. All the world heard was how he incited IPOB members through the Eastern Security Network (ESN) to commit the offences through his broadcasts. Interestingly, this was the only aspect that appeared credible in the entire saga and perhaps what nailed Kanu. Otherwise, nothing else pointed directly to the culpability of the IPOB leader.
In fact, not only did IPOB officially deny involvement through its official channel, they pointedly accused the Buhari government of masterminding the killings using both official state or non-state actors, who stage-managed the mayhems only to turn around to blame the organisation.
In what they painted as an obviously practical case of giving the dog a bad name in order to hang it, they said the aim was to pollute the intention of the group, skew its legitimate pursuit of Biafra, by creating doubt and causing the people to hate them.
To achieve this aim, Buhari was said to have found partnership in South East governors whom he wielded both the carrot to which they would have limitless political powers in their domains or the stick in which they would face strong oppositions or even be kicked out. Of course, the politicians chose the obvious.
To effectuate their choice, they allegedly donated their thugs who now took charge of the scenario. With adequate slush funds provided by the governors and politicians, their goons were said to have commenced their campaign by recruiting more able-bodied youths, who formed many camps in different parts of the communities the states. This was how the insecurity in the South East was activated, the counter allegation.
In fact, Kachi Ononuju, a known television face engaging mostly in security and public affairs analysis was quite direct in advancing this line, when he attributed some of the offensives including those directed at security operatives as string operations with the backing of the late President to turn Ndigbo against IPOB and its leaders.
This, they say, accounted for why the gunmen, would have ample time to operate at their chosen targets without any challenge from any of the security forces. Recall, for instance how the Owerri Prison was freely attacked for hours without anyone raising a finger. To boot – local government headquarters, police stations, offices and facilities of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) among other federal and state institutions.
Indeed, has it occurred to Nigerians and the world watching the saga that not a single culprit has been made either to face trial or have his case concluded for offences relating to IPOB or the violence in the South East outside Kanu.
Is it not strange? Is it not even more bizarre still that nobody else was arraigned with or tried alongside the same IPOB leader? Of course, nobody needs look far for an answer, given the foregoing.
It was obvious that Buhari might have outsmarted Kanu. The IPOB leader, it appeared simply handed him the weapon he needed – the loudmouthed declarations through his radio broadcasts. With that the late President, simply plotted his strategy apparently extracted from the President’s experience as a top military officer to go into a counter offensive.
This, seemed to have worked to a large extent, especially amongst many in the communities who bore the brunt of the several onslaughts. Many of them have taken their anger against the group. In fact, if anyone is rejoicing today over Omotosho’s verdict, they are to be found among many of these affected communities.
Stories actually had it that even out of office, one of the briefings taken daily to Daura or Kaduna by the men he left behind, was the whereabouts of the IPOB leader. It was said that nothing made him happier than being told that he was still firmly behind bars and nothing could have distressed him to hear that he was a free man under and circumstances.
Tinubu, the smart man he is must have known this. Even if he was not briefed and it didn’t form part of Buhari’s handover notes, could have realised from his body language that the release of Kanu was a no-go area. What else but rabid passion would have made Buhari to put all resources available to him at play including handing a blank cheque from the national till to achieve the singular feat of bringing him back?
Don’t be surprised that part of the debt Nigeria is paying today came from the supposed multi-million-dollar operation that could have created a large hole in the nation’s till. Knowing the former President and his undying anger against Ndigbo, nothing could be put beyond him in this regard.
So, the greatest hara-kiri the President could have commited against his late ally is to allow Kanu be a free man. For one who left no one in doubt through his vow to continue where his predecessor stopped – for one who has upped the ante in terms of marginalising Ndigbo, the way he has done – what other way could he have retained a shared memory?
Indeed, what has he to lose by keeping Kanu in confinement, when the entire South East political structure is already firmly in his pocket and many more struggling to empty into his camp? On the other hand, what would he gain by offending the spirit of a man in lieu of a people without political value?
Yes! Buhari may have taken his exit, but his spirit still hovers around., if not him directly, foot-soldiers to whom he handed the baton of Igbo hatred. Wouldn’t they be watching and reminding the President about his vow – to continue where their boss stopped – part of which is to ensure Kanu never enjoys his freedom?
In the words of Omotosho – Kanu must not only be kept away from humanity, every connecting instrument must be severed. Yes! Tinubu had a chance to save Kanu. But, how else could Buhari’s memory be preserved? How else to please a spirit? Afterall, agreement is agreement! _ 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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