Columns
Biafra, IPOB, OUK: How are the mighty fallen *Tale of a fallen hero!
By Sunny Igboanugo
Friends, Nigerians, countrymen! Lend me your ears! I have come to condemn Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and not to praise him! The evil that men do, in the past, lives after them, but today, not only lives after them, but with them. And so, it is with Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, who is today having his well-deserved comeuppance as a sole occupant in the dark, sticky and cold dungeon of the Sokoto Prison.
Yes! Such a deserving reward for a man who killed 30,000 of his brothers. Yes! You heard that – you heard well – you heard right – 30,000 souls wasted. Yes! Orji Uzor Kalu was keeping records. And you know, OUK is an honourable man! Was he not governor of Abia State at a time? Is he not a Senator now? Who should know if not the wise man from Igbere, Bende Local Government of Abia State?
Now, let me tell you what you might not know about OUK and this Biafra that has now brought such calamity of colossal proportion to Ndigbo through IPOB? How many of you, dear compatriots know that it was through this Biafra that OUK met his political nemesis – or waterloo – if you like?
How? You would ask me and I’ll answer. OUK, was at a point one of the most popular Onye Igbo living on mother earth. He was even as popular as MNK, if not more popular. I shall prove this because I was at the centre of it all. You know Ndigbo are forever in search of a mouthpiece or authentic leadership. At that time OUK provided both. It started with that outing on that day in the year 2000. I remember vividly, as a reporter representing The Guardian in Enugu.
We all had rushed to Hotel Presidential in the state capital, where the then five South East governors had met. It was yet another cry of marginalisation against Ndigbo in Obasanjo government as President. While his colleagues appeared reticent, cagy and prevaricating on the raison d’etre, it was this selfsame OUK that took the gauntlet and spoke forcefully. The next day, the headlines told the story. Newspapers were awash, feasting on Kalu’s acerbic words that lacerated the President deeply.
Of course, Obj, not one to be browbeaten or let sleeping dogs lie roared back like the lion he was. But surprisingly, while his other colleagues recoiled and returned to their shells like disturbed snails, OUK stood tall and fought back, sparing no unkind words in confronting Baba Iyabo. That was it! Ndigbo had found another man of courage to tell their story and confront their foes.
I still recall that fateful day at the Federation Hall, Hotel Presidential in Enugu in 2021. It was OUK’s day at that year’s edition of World Igbo Day Summit, organised by the World Igbo Congress, a conglomeration propelled by Igbo leaders in the various parts of the word teaming up with like minds at home in a forceful move to create a new base of Igbo leadership.
The only person that had created such crowd in the quantity, but quality of attendance, was the late Ikemba Nnewi, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Remember the Ezeigbogburugburu at such rare events like the 2004 Mkpoko Igbo meeting in Enugu. I recall how people were practically sitting on each other’s heads and how even an ant could not crawl freely by – how the doors and windows were thrown open and people who found no space inside the hall, primed themselves by the windows and stretching their necks to at least catch his words if they couldn’t see him.
It was at that event that Kalu referred to Igbo leaders as “errand boys” to people in authority. Remember how the media celebrated that event and feasted with that headline! It was not only OUK’s words that travelled far and wide. His image and influence too.
In fact, I remember a particularly personal experience. I had visited one of OUK’s colleagues, a governor with whom I had more than a formal relationship.
I recall as we discussed freely on every subject matter in the world including the obvious gossips men engage in. I had already destroyed two criminally-cold Odeku, which I downed with tastefully-spiced, highly-tempting assorted roast goat meat on the centre table in front of me and was on the third, when my friend, introduced the OUK matter.
“This thing Orji is saying. I agree with him. I admire him,” my friend had ventured. “But you know I can’t do it,” he added – an unsolicited angle that implied an admixture of several emotions ranging from admiration, envy, frustration and even lamentation about his own inability. “But you’re more educated that him,” I interjected, to which he offered again – “but I can’t.”
That was OUK at that time. But then, the cookie crumbled. Nobody knows what entered his head. It must have been the story of that nwa nza, who ate so much and became so full that he challenged his chi to a wrestling match. One morning, Nigerians woke up to screaming headlines in various national newspapers.
One screamed: “Kalu apologises for Ndigbo fighting Biafran war!” That was it. It was like the man who built the Burj Khalifa coming one night to bury dynamites at the base, igniting it to bring the world’s tallest building down to rubbles. A gale of anger swept across Igboland. Denunciation, odium, insult, curses! They came in torrents from individuals and groups. They disavowed; they denounced? Nwataa ekwuwaa onu! Who sent him?
Having been blown-up from the foundation, the intricately-organic, boisterous and humongous trust architecture erected on the Igbo question in Nigeria has since crumbled – dissolving and disappearing like salt on impact with water leaving the once dearly-loved OUK empty and vulnerable. But OUK is a wise man. He wouldn’t be where he is today without that highly-prized element of survival – wisdom – street-wisdom as we call it here.
He has since done the needful – he simply took his equipment elsewhere. Today, he is the official and unofficial mouthpiece of the same forces he appeared to have detested so much in that short period of his reign as, what did they call him then? – The authentic Igbo leader. He has firmly displaced the errand boys of Igboland and assumed their role with the same boldness and fearlessness he confronted Obj to the admiration of even his colleagues.
What is more? APC, has offered him the platform! Today, he is the one preening, burnishing, deodorising, advertising and trumpeting every fetid, stinking, smelly, scheme dished out against Ndigbo from the APC mountainous compost.
Yes! Every putrid, decomposed and rotten element from the APC dumpsite is now handed over to him to clean up and throw to the people as their due offering – the same people he claims to love and lead.
Just as he was never far from his “friend” Muhammadu Buhari, today he is not only by the side of Bola Tinubu, his supposed mate in the class of ’99, but apparently squats somewhere in the ante-room of the Villa, waiting for the bell summoning him to another errand to take to his people.
That is the only reason he will look Ndigbo, nay, the world in the face and tell them that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu killed 30,000 Igbo people – probably more than Osama Bin Laden did as leader of Al-Qaeda. Or wasn’t that what he meant? Don’t ask me if he deliberately withhold the angle of his “friend” – Buhari in the details of those deaths, which he gleefully fielded out to his audience. Ask him when you see him.
More importantly, ask him also, did these 30,000 wasted souls include the young men massacred at the Onitsha Headbridge for just waving the Biafran flag which Buhari considered an act of terrorism? Did it include those wasted through the bullets of Buhari’s men at a school in Emene Enugu, or those men and women seen in a primary school, said to be somewhere in Okigwe, clapping and singing, when men dressed in military gears arrived, knelt down, took aim as in a shooting range and opened fire on? Even Buhari, OUK’s friend could not brace himself to watch the replay when confronted with the video in his interview with Al-Jazeera.
Did it include those who died in Operation Python Dance, including those who were mowed down in Kanu’s Afara Ukwu home in Umuahia, OUK’s backyard.
Yes! OUK told Ndigbo not to be emotional at the fate of MNK but hold him responsible for those 30,000 souls. Why not? But before then, he also needs to clear another intriguing factor? How come since the death of his idol all seem to have suddenly gone quiet with the UGM? How come the same UGM whom Buhari, a General in the Nigerian Army and a former Military Head of State, couldn’t deal with are now being smoked out from their fortresses like bush rats.
How come that they are now being demystified? Recent videos have shown people in Ihiala, Orsu, Lilu and other communities in Anambra and Imo, who had been sacked by the so-called UGM are now returning to their home, clearing the bushes and restoring their houses?
Surprisingly, they are doing so under Tinubu – a bloody civilian – at the death of Buhari – a General? What happened? What magic did Tinubu do? Did I hear you say the difference is in the absence of the “Original Sin? That Tinubu is not continuing the Biafran war against Ndigbo the way Buhari was, which is actually at the root of the entire saga and the reason Ndigbo died wotowoto under his supervision – at least, if Tinubu is, not with the same passion, the same hatred, the same bitterness or the same vengeance? Well, well!
Suddenly, the camps of the UGM – those impregnable fortress not even the world-class Nigerian Army that saved the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone could not penetrate – are now being breached by ordinary ragtag civilian forces and their occupants pulled out and taken away, shaking like leaves – the cowards they are.
In Anambra, for instance, we hear stories and entertained with images of how the Agunechemba – Soludo’s army, daily storm the camps of the evil men, which before now, not even the most fortified soldiers in the world could attempt and vanquish the so-called dreaded occupants, who had remained untouchable for years.
Suddenly, South East governors, who hitherto threw their hands in the air to the daily bloody assaults of the blood-thirsty group during Buhari’s time, seem to have found not only a fresh gusto, but the final solution to the menace.
No more for the apparent and obvious invincibility of the gang of killers. No more storming of prisons and releasing inmates, no more burning of police stations, no more attacking and killings at military checkpoints or destroying INEC facilities. South East is now singing a new song! Only because Buhari is no more?
One more thing! MNK is not the only Igbo the APC appears interested in his case. Now, they have dealt with the noisy International Terrorist – apologies James Omotosho – Justice of the Federal High Court (JFHC), what about Peter Obi?
Tinubu, has just conveyed to him through Bayo Onanuga that he is in his radar. Before now the former Governor of Anambra State and Labour Party candidate in the 2023 presidential election has been accused of everything evil under the Nigerian sun.
Apart from accusing him of sponsoring the last hunger protest that reverberated across Nigeria, last year, Tinubu, through Onanugu and Reno Omokri, say he was the one who went to tell POTUS Donald Trump that Muslims are killing Christians in Nigeria. They say it was Obi who asked POTUS Trump to come gun-a-blazing!
For this “atrocious” act to Nigeria, the President has promised neither to forget or forgive.
Now the question to OUK: What should Obi do? It is evident that since that criminal act of undressing the big Lagos masquerade, exposing and disgracing it in that 2023 election, the Egugun house has neither forgotten nor forgiven and is out to have its pound of flesh.What should Ndigbo – nay – the world expect about their beloved son? Another MNK fate?
But ultimately, the bigger question is the bigger question. How are Ndigbo going to survive the APC-Nigeria now that it is obvious that handing them down the fourth-class citizen is not enough and the APC wants more. We must ask, because, OUK – you’re not only our eyes and ears – you’re an honourable man – a distinguished Senator!
_ 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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