By Azu Ishiekwene
Peter Obi has the best chance against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027 of all opposition candidates. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) may have received a slightly higher percentage of the votes (6.9 million or 29.1 percent) in the last presidential election; still, that was poor for Atiku, a sixth-timer in the presidential race.
Obi had less than one year to prepare after his former party, the PDP, shafted him, followed by the bitter struggle for control between Atiku and the former Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, which left the party in ruins.
Outside the wreckage, Obi scored 6.1 million or 25.4 percent of the votes, toppling the All Progressives Congress (APC) in its traditional Lagos stronghold, energising young voters, and causing a stir amongst the complacent political elite.
Born to survive
After coming a solid third, the question was whether he could keep the momentum, strengthen the LP and manage his vibrant, sometimes fiercely unruly crowd of “Obidient” followers until the next election cycle.
He has, so far. To have survived the tumult in the Labour Party (LP), which now has three rival claimants to its leadership, and watch from the outside, what could be the final burial rites of his former party, the PDP, Obi has done well.
Yet, as surely as success invites its perils, he is entering what may prove to be the most delicate phase of his political journey, two years before the next presidential election. Obi is confused, and dangerously so, when he needs clarity the most.
Adventure to ADC
He is flirting with the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the party former President Olusegun Obasanjo vowed in 2019 would unseat the APC, but which failed disastrously to do so. The ADC’s past failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is the renewed crisis in the party; they all have problems, only different in severity.
The problem is that Obi is unsure whether to join the ADC, which, like the bat, neither resembles a political rodent nor a coalition bird, or to stand firm and try to repair a fractured LP before the next election. Although he says he is not desperate, pinching himself while saying so, he believes this might be his best chance to become president, which is a fair ambition.
After being governor for eight years, running mate to Atiku in 2019, and his own man in 2023, Obi is qualified for the number one spot. His prospects are brighter, in my view, than Atiku’s, who is exhausted from chasing a marabout’s prophecy or Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s, who is in this race to entertain.
A coalition to nowhere
The problem is that, for reasons best known to him, instead of focusing on repairing the LP, broadening his base and appeal, Obi has fallen for the seduction that his salvation lies with joining Atiku, Amaechi, and former Governor Nasir El-Rufai in a coalition to nowhere. I’m shocked.
Obi has forgotten what brought him this far. It was certainly not the political dinosaurs he is now in love with. Polls showed his strongest support was with women aged 18 and 24, who comprised 82 percent of the cohort that voted for him. Others included the largely urban middle class and social-savvy Nigerians, across regions and age groups, apart from disaffected voters. Instead of cultivating and expanding his hold on these demographics, he has been infected by the obsession that his salvation is with the group he turned his back against.
In a political system that requires the winner to secure no less than 25 percent of the votes in at least two-thirds of all the states, Obi’s main challenge is bridging this divide, especially across the North, where he is very weak. But his approach to solving this problem is dangerously flawed.
Chasing a phantom
His misjudgment is that he needs assistance from two prominent Northern politicians, Atiku, El-Rufai or any of the vagrants from the legacy CPC. They cannot and will not help him because their broken dreams have consumed them. NNPP leader Rabiu Kwankwaso might have been, by far, a more valuable ally, but he will not accept a subordinate role.
The obsession with relying on the “tripod” or any single region, claiming that it’s the sole determinant of the pathway to power, has been shattered more than once since 1999, with Obasanjo’s election being one and Muhammadu Buhari’s another.
In what he has framed as possibly his most consequential attempt at the presidency in 2027, it is tragic that Obi either doesn’t believe or is too confused to give it a shot without using the coattails of some exhausted Northern politicians.
Under the sheets
I know that politics indulges strange bedfellows, even actively encouraging intimacy amongst them under the sheets. Still, it came to me as a stunning surprise that Obi should so easily find accommodation with El-Rufai, who has called him some of the most horrendous names in the book, the most flattering of which was an ethnic bigot, a tyrant, a joke and a Nollywood actor.
As for Amaechi, the man who doesn’t like money except when it comes in the form of a Rolls-Royce, Obi should know him better.
But these are Obi’s new friends and associates – political wanderers, united mainly by ambition to seize power and have it for themselves for its own sake. He’s perfectly entitled to his new company, but I wish he would pause, reflect, and perhaps watch his back.
Trouble at home
In his South-East home base, Anambra Governor Charles Soludo thinks he’s superior and that “Obidients” are a nuisance. In Imo State, where Governor Hope Uzodinma thinks himself the only highway to Abuja, the governor would mount a tollgate against any perceived threat to his franchise. Of course, there’s no love lost between Obi and the only LP, Governor Alex Otti of Abia State.
There’s nothing for him in any coalition of the disaffected, and his running mate Datti Baba-Ahmed said so bluntly. To paraphrase him, a coalition with Atiku, El-Rufai, Amaechi, and other internally displaced politicians is a coalition of the second fiddle.
As things stand, Obi is neither here nor there. After being with Atiku all these years, and despite the wreckage the former vice president made of the PDP, which is now survived only by his ambition to become president, it’s surprising that Obi thinks that ADC or any other coalition with Atiku will work for him.
Long memories
Politicians from the South-East face a double jeopardy of ruinously expensive election costs, and, after the Civil War, deep mistrust amongst the political elite, especially in the North. Despite fervent claims of no victor, no vanquished, nothing is forgotten or forgiven, and appeasement will fail.
Obi is with the wrong crowd, and worst of all, faces a serious risk of losing his party’s support. He should cultivate and use help wherever he can find it, but not at the expense of what he has built, especially in the last two years. He is now doing precisely what desperados do.
Except, of course, if he was lying about not being desperate for power.
Ishiekwene is Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.
This column goes on a two-week recess.
