Femi Akintunde-Johnson
And now to the darling of Nigerian cyberspace: Peter Gregory Obi. It bears repeating that the focus of this article is located in the spine of its first edition: ‘Three Hunchbacks and Their Heavy Baggage’ (June 25, 2022). Keynote: “…Now, if the hunchbacks are saddled with extra bags and whatnots to carry from one point to another, the excruciating exercise can hardly be imagined, as you cannot fathom what it is like to be in their shoes. Such is the fate of the three major presidential flag bearers with arguably the most vociferous supportership in this current electioneering season… We hope to spend quality time reviewing the enormous “baggage” – code switch for unsavoury issues and incidents in their pedigrees they would rather wipe off; but that stand as unshakable reminders of their frailties, possible stumbling blocks, and herculean obstacles – their spin-doctors must roll up sleeves to tackle frontally. And their detractors would be joyously smacking their lips to sink their teeth into.”
Since May 24, 2022 when Obi resigned from People’s Democratic Party, PDP, his stock has grown exponentially, such that his candidature has attracted the ungarnished enthusiasm and bravura of many Nigerian youth; the hitherto sidelined and disgruntled adults whose hope for some sort of national redemption had been severely pummeled and similar discontents and “siddon-look” contemporaries.
In spite of Obi’s seemingly “unNigerian” positive pedigree and proclamations, his public civility and business acumen, there are growing fears that he is swimming against the tide, and has become fodder for lip-smacking opponents and their supporters to knock around the rustic farmlands.
Unlike his co-contestants with trailing clouds of corruption, graft and other ‘high crimes’ attached to their flowing garments, Obi’s traducers would have to dig deep into dirty archives to find some stain to paint on him. But surely, if not critically, there is something to find. He was implicated in the infamous ‘Panama Papers’ leaks of 2021 globally exposing wealthy individuals stashing funds away in safe havens and tax-free islands. The allegation: “Mr Obi is one of the individuals whose hidden business activities was (sic) thrown open by the project. Indeed, he has a number of secret business dealings and relationships that he has for years kept to his chest. These are businesses he clandestinely set up and operated overseas, including in notorious tax and secrecy havens in ways that breached Nigerian laws…
“The former governor admitted that he did not declare these companies and the funds and properties they hold in his asset declaration filings with the Code of Conduct Bureau…
“He said he was unaware that the law expected him to declare assets or companies he jointly owns with his family members or anyone else…
“However, our investigation, based on records obtained from the UK Companies House shows that Mr Obi continued to be a director of Next International (UK) Limited for 14 months after becoming the governor of Anambra State, thereby breaking Nigeria’s law. The politician resigned from the company on May 16, 2008, 14 months after he assumed duties as Anambra governor. He took office on March 17, 2006…”
Another Achilles tendon of the former Anambra governor was the charge that he is easily given to dissembling and mendacity: in other words, he cannot stop lying! On December 16, 2018, an investigative report on the Nigerian website of the International Center for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), fact-checked about 13 “facts and statistics” churned out by Candidate Obi during the Vice Presidential debate towards the 2019 elections, and the platform declared eleven to be “false, grossly exaggerated or only partly true”.
Let us skim over some of them:
“Claim: Nigeria’s poverty rate grows at 6% per minute
Not only is this claim outrageous on the face value, but it is also not true… Data highlights from the clock, Brookings noted in June, show that “extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute”. It is possible this is how the PDP vice presidential candidate had intended to phrase his statement.
Verdict: The claim is false.
“Claim: In 2015, we attracted $21 billion in FDI, and only 12 last year …
Verdict: The (claim is) false. The FDI figures were grossly exaggerated.
“Claim: Nigeria has only 2 million vehicles, 10 per 1000.
Nigeria’s estimated vehicle population as at the second quarter of 2018 is 11,760,871, and the vehicle per population ratio was put at 0.06 (as against Obi’s 0.01)…
Verdict: The claim is false and grossly exaggerated.
“Claim: The power generation in Indonesia is 50,000 for 250 million people… Verdict: The (claim is) inaccurate and outdated.
“Claim: Buhari on March 26, 2015… said he should be removed if he doesn’t deliver.
There is no record of Buhari delivering a reported speech on this day.
Verdict: The claim is false and could not be substantiated….”
Obi has been accused of progressively growing more prolific and less accurate, over the years – a predilection scantily diagnosed by ThisDay columnist, Simon Kolawole in his backpage column of June 26, 2022, while also highlighting his other weighty baggage: “Obi himself, it has to be said, also has issues with his statistics and claims and has become a nightmare for fact checkers, but my assumption is always that this is mostly because of memory lapse on his part rather than a genuine attempt to mislead or misinform.”
On Obi’s other debilitating baggage, Kolawole writes: “His strength is becoming his weakness: the fan base. His followership has clearly caught fire and is spreading not just on social media but also on the streets in many parts of the country. But some of his overzealous supporters are so unruly that this is turning out to be a baggage for him. It is putting off a lot of people. It is a bit of a bitter-sweet phenomenon: he is gaining more supporters partly because of the aggressiveness of his diehard fans but this aggression is now going overboard and becoming nauseating to even some of his admirers.
“First, some of them are using religion to promote him. They are proposing that the structure of the Catholic Church in Nigeria, to which he belongs, should be used as his political machinery. This is supposed to be a response to concerns that Obi needs a structure to reach the grassroots to be able to win the presidential election. There is also the subtext that he is the only Christian among the top candidates and Christians should rally around him. This is absolutely silly… In a multi-cultural society like ours, we need to be careful with this kind of campaign….”
With a few clicks, you may come across the ogres that Obi’s haters would want you to behold: efforts to conscript him as the Igbo candidate; rhetoric that isolates him as tolerant, if not fearful, of South East based secessionist group, IPOB; innuendos that suggest indiscretions and abuse of office in the financial deployment of state funds as Anambra governor between 2006 and 2014; the Anambra’s ‘wakapass’ N250 million cash loitering allegedly in front of his Apapa, Lagos company office (Next) in 2009; the admittedly self-indicting lampoons that portray him as stingy wIth a craving for unprofitable parsimony… a trait his supporters flaunt as industrious frugality, in a nation that callously celebrates sleaze and impunity.
Of course, the internet is also littered with memes and mementoes of Obi’s alleged sundry lies and ‘misyarns’, fueled by his affection for buttressing his sweet-and -sour narratives with condiments of facts and statistics from across the world – especially the Asian variety. Surely, Obi and his supporters who dream of upending the status quo are poised for the toughest fight of their lives.
