DISSECTING PETER OBI PR DISASTER ON NATIONAL TV
BAYO ONANUGA
Having watched Peter Obi’s interview on Channels TV on Sunday for about 30 minutes, I wasted no time tuning off. If the political nomad thought the interview would re-energise his ebbing 2027 presidential ambition, it turned out to be a PR disaster, judging from the spate of reactions to the many lies he referenced.
Two issues caught my attention while I watched him.
First, when his interviewer, Seun Okinbaloye, questioned him about his political nomadism, he tried to make the question a non-issue, saying, with a smirk on his face, that he has not done anything different from what President Bola Tinubu has done in his political odyssey.
No, Mr Obi. Tinubu has not been jumping from one ideologically different party to another. Since he joined party politics in 1991/92, Tinubu has stayed the progressive path all the way. He started with the Social Democratic Party and won an election to the Senate on the party’s platform, polling the highest vote ever by any candidate in the country.
When the election of June 12, 1993 was annulled, Tinubu joined the struggle for de-annulment. He didn’t collaborate with the military; he defied the junta, reconvened the National Assembly, joined the protests, went to detention, and when the country became too dangerous, he opted for exile, along with his family, where he continued the struggle against military dictatorship.
When Tinubu returned from exile in 1998, he joined the Alliance for Democracy and was elected the governor of Lagos in 1999. The AD, which Obasanjo wanted to decapitate, went into a factional crisis. Tinubu still won his 2003 election, his second term, with the INEC-recognised faction.
With the AD still in crisis, Tinubu founded a new party, the Action Congress, taking a large number of the AD members to the new platform. Babatunde Fashola, Kayode Fayemi, and Rauf Aregbesola contested on this platform in 2007.
The AC became Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) for the 2011 election. In 2013, the party entered into merger talks with Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), New Nigeria Peoples Party, a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), and the new Peoples Democratic Party(nPDP) to form the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Tinubu remained true to his ideological persuasion: he stayed in the same lane. He didn’t jump to the PDP in 2003, after he remained the last man standing, with fellow AD governors swept out of office by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s brazen rigging machine. Instead, he built a new party from the bottom up, which has grown like an oak tree from an acorn.
Tinubu is unlike you, Peter Obi. You were elected Governor under the platform of APGA in 2007. You swore with your children and even by the hospital bedside of Ikemba Odumegwu Ojukwu that you would never leave the party. Not a man of your words, you abandoned APGA after your second term and joined the PDP. You were in the PDP when you ran with the perennial presidential contender and loser, Atiku Abubakar, in 2019.
Your presidential pair lost to Muhammadu Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo of the APC. You did not wait to rebuild the vanquished PDP. Instead, you pursued your selfish interest by joining the Labour Party. You ran as the party’s candidate in 2023. You lost the election and came third behind Atiku and President Bola Tinubu.
The Labour Party fell into a serious leadership crisis after the election, with campaign funds in your possession not fully accounted for. Instead of waiting to solve the crisis and rebuild it into a formidable group like a good leader would do, you again chickened out. You teamed up with Atiku to hijack the political group called African Democratic Congress, a special purpose vehicle. When you found that you would not be able to clinch the group’s presidential ticket in a free and fair primary election, you didn’t hesitate to jump ship to join the court-registered NDC, promoted by a former governor, Senator Seriake Dickson.
It is not in doubt that if the NDC fails to deliver what you want, you are not far away from the exit door. You would shamelessly migrate to yet another party. You do not build; you always want to reap where you did not sow.
The second issue is that Seun gave you a golden opportunity to redeem yourself in respect of the outcome of the 2023 election. You lost, Peter. You didn’t win that election. You came third, and if not for the bloc vote from your ethnic group, you would have ended up a miserable third. Seun pointedly asked you whether you believed you were rigged out. You fell into his trap by concurring. You did well in the election, no doubt- a politician with no structure in the states, except the noisy followers on X, Instagram and Facebook. But I was utterly surprised that more than three years after the Supreme Court threw away your petition, you are still in denial of the loss, and you still nurse the delusion that you won the election, echoing the sentiment of your gullible followers on the streets.
Mr Obi, it is time you accepted the stark reality of the loss. Stop dreaming of a victory that you never had.
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