WHAT DOES PETER OBI STAND FOR?

Give different audiences different answers on same issue, reckons JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

On Monday in Sokoto, Peter Obi told a town hall that his administration would bring back the petrol subsidy once corruption had been dealt with. His words were not ambiguous. He assured them that subsidy would return.

Five weeks earlier, at the Nigerian Bar Association conference in Port Harcourt, he had said the opposite in language equally plain. He subscribed to the removal of subsidy and maintained that position. He argued then that the government’s mismanagement of the savings was not a sufficient reason to bring the policy back.

Port Harcourt in August. Sokoto in September. Same candidate, same question, two different answers.

I want to be careful here, because a politician is entitled to change his mind and we should not make that a hanging offence. A man who holds a position for twenty years regardless of evidence is not principled, he is inflexible. What we are owed when a position changes is an account of what changed it.

No such account has been offered. What we have instead is a subsidy that should stay removed when the audience is lawyers in the south-south, and a subsidy that will return when the audience is a town hall in the north-west. The new condition attached to it, that corruption must first be eliminated, is not a policy. It is a hedge with no date on it, and it happens to arrive in the same season that his running mate has promised to bring subsidy back in their own way, and that Atiku Abubakar has built a campaign around restoring it.

That is the context that makes the reversal worth writing about. It did not follow new evidence. It followed Atiku.

Now the pattern that a single reversal only illustrates.

Peter Obi has been a member of five political parties, one of them twice. He was in APGA, having helped register it after leaving the PDP in 2001. He moved to the PDP and stood as its vice presidential candidate in 2019. He joined the Labour Party in May 2022 and contested the presidency on that platform. He joined the African Democratic Congress at the start of this year. He resigned from the ADC on 2 May 2026 and was ratified as the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress on 29 May.

Three of those five platforms have carried him inside a single year.

He has explained each departure, and the explanations are internally consistent. APGA became toxic after a disagreement with his successor. The PDP was transactional and ignored due process. The Labour Party was wrecked by orchestrated litigation. The ADC, he said on leaving it, was being infiltrated by the same state agents who had wrecked the Labour Party.

Examine the shape of those four explanations rather than their content. In every case the party failed him. In every case the failure was somebody else’s doing. In no case is there a policy disagreement, a principle he could not accept, or anything a voter could use to work out what he actually believes about how Nigeria should be governed.

A man may be unlucky with four consecutive institutions. It is also possible that a platform, to him, is transport rather than conviction, and that the question of what a party stands for has never been the question he was asking of it.

There is a third thing, and it needs stating more precisely than it usually is.

Obi has condemned the violence in the south-east. In July 2023 he described the sit-at-home as criminal activity that must be stopped. In June 2024 he condemned the killing of five soldiers by gunmen enforcing a sit-at-home order in Abia, and demanded investigation and punishment. In June last year he told Arise that he criticises every wrong act wherever it happens and is hard on everybody.

Anyone who says he has never condemned it is simply wrong, and I will not make that argument.

What he has consistently declined to do is name who is doing it.

His position in July 2023 was that IPOB had publicly denied issuing the sit-at-home directive, and that what was happening in the region was therefore the work of criminals rather than of the organisation. He extended the group the benefit of its own denial, in a season when video of enforcers attacking market women and schoolchildren was circulating freely.

He condemns the act but never identifies the actor. Condemnation without attribution costs a politician nothing, because nobody in the room has to feel accused.

The same architecture appears in how his movement is defended. When supporters behave indefensibly online, the response is that those people are not really supporters. It is an unfalsifiable defence. Anybody who embarrasses the movement is, by definition, not of the movement, which means the movement can never be held responsible for anything done in its name.

There is a core that has not moved in twenty years. Frugality in government. Investment in human capital. The insistence that Nigeria’s fundamental problem is not any single policy but the theft that runs underneath all of them. He said that in Sokoto too, and he has been saying it since Anambra. Six million Nigerians voted for that in 2023.

He stands for a disposition rather than a programme. Prudence, austerity, anti-corruption, a certain moral seriousness that people find credible because he appears to live it. (Prof. Charles Soludo, his successor in Anambra, has a lot to say about that though).

What he does not stand for is a set of positions that can be relied upon between August and September, or a party that can be relied upon between January and May. Governing is a sequence of specific decisions taken under pressure, in front of audiences who want incompatible things, and the evidence of the last five weeks is that when two audiences want different answers, this candidate gives each of them the answer they came for.

This is why the question matters, what does Peter Obi stand for? Port Harcourt and Sokoto aren’t so far apart to make a leader take the polar ends of the same policy question.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing