By Chidi Amuta


The period between a general election and the swearing in of a successor administration ought to be filled with excited anticipation. It is usually a time of pleasant speculations on the new faces that will soon grace television screens and newspaper front pages. For the masses in a polity in virtual captivity, it is time to begin getting used to new overlords and masters. For the elite, this ought to be time to debate policy perspectives and options for the new administration.

There is so much in the present atmosphere that defies the tradition of a civilized political transition season. Instead, the incumbent All Progressives Congress (APC), which is also the incoming triumphant squad, is consumed by an overwhelming nervousness. Instead of engaging the public in sensible debates about policy options and directions, the APC appears to have retreated into a perpetual campaign mode.


Party hawks and attack hounds are still busy insulting our public sensibility. They are berating, abusing and profiling their election season opponents. It is as though the elections are not yet over. In the process, two dangerous things are happening. First, the polarization and bitter divisions in the country is being further deepened. Second, the groundwork for a new climate of tyranny and authoritarianism is being laid. Clearly, we are in the throes of an imminent administration that is likely to invest in tormenting the opposition and abridging the liberties of citizens. Otherwise, why has Mr. Tinubu not disbanded his abusive and divisive campaign propaganda machinery?

After a bitterly fought election, the nation requires soothing words and healing hands to mend broken bonds and assuage wounded feelings. But unfortunately, all we are getting from APC’s front line propagandists is an overdose of negativity and sickening ethnocentrism. They are still fighting the ghosts of Mr. Bola Tinubu’s opponents in the presidential election. Consequently, in the prelude to May 29th, the nation still wears the appearance of a landscape of war with hate as the dominant language of public discourse.


By some unwritten law of tyrannical power consensus, however, all the post election hostile barbs have now found one common target: Mr. Peter Obi and his political movement. Hardly any one in the APC and the incumbent government (one and the same) mentions Mr. Atiku Abubakar who came second in the INEC presidential election vote tally. It is now all about Peter Obi, Datti Ahmed and the Obidients. This systematic narrowing down requires further investigation.

To give official stamp to the concerted targeting of Mr. Obi, Buhari’s Minister of Information, the famous Lai Mohammed has gone junketing to far away Washington DC to announce that Mr. Obi could be guilty of treason. His crime? Just expressing his reservations about the credibility of February 25th presidential elections ‘won’ by Mohammed’s party, the APC. He has followed this by getting the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to slam a fine of N5 million on Channels Television for hosting an interview with Obi’s running mate in which the gentleman expressed strong reservations about the conduct and outcome of the presidential elections.

Quite interestingly, the rhetoric of the APC/Tinubu campaign trumpeters has opted for the same choice of words as the government organs in characterizing Peter Obi and his followers. ‘Treason’ is the word of common choice. Insisting that the election of 25th February was not free and fair is now treasonable. Going to court to challenge the outcome of that election is now also ‘treason’. Pointing out anomalies in INEC’s procedures and processes is also ‘treason’.


They have gone several steps further. Government and APC propagandists and pro-Tinubu enthusiasts on the social media have begun linking Peter Obi with IPOB and ESN, even if there is no evidence to that effect and in spite of the man’s repeated dissociations from these groups. Implicit in these mischievous associations and linkages is the assumption that Mr. Obi is just another Igbo politician. There is also an ongoing feverish attempt to use paid party jobbers in the Labour Party to destabilize the party and discredit the Obidient movement. The desperation is to disentangle the Obidient movement from the Labour Party and return the party to its previous small time status. In Imo state, the party has been factionalised and its offices shut down by factional hoodlums supervised by the police. In Abuja, a renegade faction claims to have ousted the party chairman and forced its way into the party headquarters.


To the political elite in the rest of the country, Peter Obi, perhaps unconsciously because of his surname, also became the unspoken voice, the uncomfortable variable and indeed the ominous face of something that at once frightens and attracts the Nigerian imagination.  All those factors that have held Nigeria hostage since 1970 have remained curious of what Nigeria could become under the leadership of the Igbo people who have been absent from the central seat of Nigerian power for 57 years.


There is in the Nigerian subconscious a certain envious curiosity and yearning about the difference that the Igbo ethnic identity could make in the way Nigeria is run. But Nigeria is also united by a baseless fear of what the Igbo could become if Nigeria were to let them add apex power the entrepreneurial and mercantile sagacity and expansive spirit. There lies their strength and also their weaknesses as a people.

But Peter Obi is a completely detribalized Nigerian. He is also above everything else an Igbo man, a quintessential one at that, one who is both a catholic, a trader, a politician and a man of Spartan discipline. Nigerian youth and the urban majority believed in the power of his example and shared his vision of a new better Nigeria.


The many pluses of the Peter Obi and Obedients phenomenon has engendered a fear in the political consciousness of both the incumbent and incoming  dispensations. Fear of the man in black has replaced normal opposition allergies. Having commenced a programme of repression and harassment of Mr. Obi and his followers, we can look forward to a coming dispensation ruled by fear and that will therefore  rely on authoritarian methods to silence an opposition that is already in place as an alternative power contender. Unfortunately, the incoming government can only fix the economy through unpopular policies. When trouble erupts in the streets because of hardship, the natural first recourse would be to blame it on Mr. Obi and the Obidients. Welcome to the new APC republic!

credit: thisdaylive.com