Why Peter Obi must become Nigeria’s President on Saturday ~ by Onyemaechi Ogbunwezeh
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Chinua Achebe is the tallest African in the house of literature. He is one of our greatest social prophets and voices of reason. He towers over many in his moral probity. The sharpness of his mind, the breadth of his integrity, and the profundity of his intelligence are peerless.
His genius attains full expression whenever he undertakes social analysis.
His analysis of the Nigerian situation is the reason why Peter Obi must be elected Nigeria’s president on the 25th of this month.
Peter Obi is the President we need currently in Nigeria’s history. He is the person prophesied by Achebe to be the solution that Nigeria needs.
Achebe the social prophet never said that Nigeria’s trouble is the Fulani like many Biafran irredentists have been peddling. He knew that the Fulani man in the streets of Kano and Kaduna suffers under the same dysfunctionality that Nigeria became under visionless and avaricious leaders.
He never nominated any ethnic group as the trouble with Nigeria.
He knew that generalizations and stereotypical portraits of any group are the shortest routes to genocide. He witnessed all that in the pogroms and genocide against the Igbo between 1966 and 1970. He knew that generalizations are generally wrong whenever applied to groups.
When Achebe criticizes, he targets the structures of oppression; the individual characters sustaining those structures and, the psychologies that make those structures of anomie subsist in being and wreak havoc on the people. Achebe, like Noam Chomsky, knew that power is a very violent institution. That is why for him, it is criminal to join the structures of power in the oppression of the weak. He knew also that every power structure that holds a people down in the mud would be muddied too; as it must go down in the mud to keep the people down.
Achebe never shied away from taking the battle to all those establishments of rogue power, oppressing the weak; be they colonial, epistemic, national, international, or even a “clique of renegades boasting its connections to power, trying to turn his homeland into a corrupt and lawless fiefdom”.
Achebe’s analysis has never been refuted. He pointed at the problem. The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely the FAILURE of leadership, he posited.
Why did Nigerian leadership fail?
Achebe answered again:
“It is the failure of Nigerian leaders to rise to THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PERSONAL EXAMPLE”.
That is the crux of the matter. That was why we have failed across all spectrums of our national life and social evolution.
We did not fail because we didn’t have Biafra or Oduduwa or Arewa republics. Those Republics wouldn’t have become Plato’s idea of a republic. They all would have degenerated into terrible cesspits of the same corruption and dysfunctionality plaguing Nigeria today. The Igbos have a great adage for it: Agwo aghaghi imu ihe toro ogologo- The snake would also give birth to a rope-like figure.
You can see snippets of that in IPOB and their murderous atavisms. You can see that also in the cultural heresy against Omoluabi, which the Oba of Lagos committed while threatening to drown people in the lagoon if they don’t vote for his anointed candidate. We also see that in the murderous arrogance of Boko Haram, giving Christians in northern Nigeria an ultimatum to leave northern Nigeria, as if they are the lords of the manor, and as if Christian’s don´t belong to every part of Nigeria.
In all these examples, one can then see that I.F. Stone, one of the great journalists of all time, was forever right when he said that “a certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.” To this end, anyone who peddles any movement marked by ethnocentrism is a moral imbecile.
This is why anyone who tells you that it is his turn or the turn of his tribe to rule remains a moral imbecile. This is also why the moral imbecility of any candidate screaming “emi lokan”, can never be matched by anything seen so far in this election season. This is also why any candidate telling you that you should vote for him because he is a northern candidate is also a moral imbecile. They are all peddling an ethnocentric movement, marked and tainted by moral imbecility, as Stone contended.
This is why you should vote only for that candidate that tells you that it is the turn of all Nigerians to reclaim their destiny and reposition their country on the path to greatness.
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That candidate is Peter Obi.
That is why you must vote for Peter Obi on Saturday the 25th of February 2023, as the President of Nigeria.
In this election, in Peter Obi, and for the first time in Nigerian history, a leader has arisen, who has risen to the responsibility of personal example.
For Peter Obi, it is not the turn of any ethnocentric movement to govern Nigeria like has been the case all these years. It is the turn of Nigerians to take back their country and navigate her out of those turbulent waters of dysfunction, that has been her lot, since her leaders ran her aground, marooned on the sandbanks of corruption, consumerism, and unproductivity.
Peter Obi is Achebe’s dream for a new Nigeria. He is the only candidate among the lot that has risen to the RESPONSIBILITY OF PERSONAL EXAMPLE. His stint as a governor saw him serving his people and ditching the pomp, pageantry, and belligerent privileges of office.
He chose to serve, and on departing left legacies both infrastructural and moral, which has given Nigerians hope that a new Nigeria is possible.
Peter Obi’s greatest legacy in office has been moral; namely “the responsibility of personal example”.
He has challenged anyone, who could accuse him of stealing one cent of public money to come forward, and he would stop campaigning.
To date, no one has ever come forward. He was not corrupt. He is not a thief. And he served his people well and to the best of his ability. No other candidate has ever dared to make such a claim in this season, since their public records are huge indictments waiting to unmask their pretenses, were they to dare Nigerians.
Peter Obi is Chinua Achebe’s vision of what Nigerian leadership requires. That dream must come true this Saturday.
That is why you as an individual, must move all the forces, at your disposal to turn Nigerians out, to vote for Peter Obi.
A new Nigeria is only possible with Peter Obi/Ahmed Datti ticket.
Now, jee gwazia ndi yard unu!
