Times are dire for Africa’s biggest democracy, no doubt. In February, 2023, the country faces a daunting hurdle that will definitely define her either as an elite captured pseudo-failed state or a nation-state with roots of citizen’s paramount interests. It’s a battle between Nigerian ruling elite versus the people. A class struggle sort of – that has all the trappings of a do or die democracy. For damning 62 years, Nigerian ruling elite plundered the state with reckless abandon, enriching themselves, families, cronies, oligarchs and foreigners through illicit siphoning of public funds and deliberate carnage.
Therefore, in the forthcoming Presidential contest, the elite represented by the All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar are all up in arms against Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi, whose momentous rise has revolutionized even apolitical citizens wanting to take back their country from the ruling elite who careless about the wellbeing of the people. Thus, every shades, missiles, attacks, misinformation and propaganda are being targeted at no one, but Peter Obi. Though, innocuous, it’s a familiar trajectory in political campaign and electioneering.
In an article published in THISDAY Newspaper on Friday, 12th August, 2022 by one Jesutega Onokpasa, titled What Is Peter Obi Really Up To? the author laboriously attempted to paint LP’s presidential candidate, Obi as an ineffectual presidential wannabe. Onokpasa argued back and forth, while contradicting himself with utmost loss when he alluded that “Peter Obi is qualified to be president but I cannot see how he can become president nor how he can succeed.” He went on to assert that “Peter Obi simply does not know how to work with people and has never been able to assert himself as a political leader.”
The implication of the above quote in the piece by Onokpasa insinuates that Obi is politically ‘impotent’ and that the episodic cases of impeachment that characterized his tenure as the then Governor of Anambra State will be re-enacted if Obi eventually becomes the President. Onokpasa with so much energy attempted to compare and contrast Peter Obi and APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu.
For clarity, Mr Onokpasa’s article sounded as a thumps up for a criminal state and an applause for illiberal democracy, as practice then in Anambra State, a signpost of the challenges of political accountability. John P. McCormick in his work, Machiavellian Democracy: Its Rise and Fall (2011) opined that the crisis of political accountability in contemporary democracy is entrenched when an electoral system upends the power of the majority or majoritarian votes for the support of ruling political and economic elite whose sole interest is self-aggrandizement and confiscation of public wealth. Onokpasa’s paymasters vividly fit that billing and description. For the records, when Onokpasa and his co-travellers cite Obi’s impeachment by the then Anambra State House of Assembly members as a ploy to downplay Obi’s political sagacity, they inadvertently project the LP presidential flag bearer as an astute democrat with the best temperament that adhere to constitutionalism and follow the rule of law. Erroneously, Onokpasa painted the said lawmakers, and Tinubu as undemocratic; who are not bent on following due process and the spirit of the law.
Further, Onokpasa’s comparison of Obi and Tinubu, and how the latter was able to advance his political machinery, is laughable and smacks of a self-indictment of his principal, Tinubu. Critically, Obi is above the pay grade and class of Tinubu in terms of accountability and transparency in public and private life in all ramifications. Obi, unlike Tinubu has never been accused of cornering public funds, nor corruptly enriching himself.
In 2007, weeks to the expiration of his tenure as Governor of Lagos State, Tinubu propped up the then lame duck and lapdog state assembly to promulgate the Public Office Holder (Payment of Pension) Law No 11 Official Gazette 2007 in which Tinubu as a former Governor was and till date is entitled to two houses in Lagos and Abuja; six brand new cars every three years; rapacious salaries and allowances running into millions of naira, among other things. These allowances as Frederick Douglas posited above is a clear case of oppression of the Lagos people. Sensing this broad day robbery, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has been in court against Lagos State Government on this.
Now, let us flip the page on Obi. At the end of his tenure as Governor of Anambra State, all entreaties and persuasion were made to ensure that Obi promulgated a pension act for himself and other political goons in the state. He vehemently turned down the offer. They offered land and houses, Obi shockingly rejected it and has provided the letter of request and rejection to the public. So, why can someone who is accountable and transparent be Nigeria’s president at a time when leadership has become the country’s albatross? If the likes of Onokpasa care to know, Nigeria is sinking, collapsing, tagging along as the poverty capital of the world and high up there in ranking in the Global Terrorism Index, and speeding towards the precipice. Thus, Peter Obi represents the change that Nigerians long for to end the current catastrophic slide of the country. A reason that has continued to elicit and attract many Nigerians from different class, tribes and faiths who see Obi as an altruistic and sincere presidential candidate for a better Nigeria.
Paul Obi, Abuja
