Rotimi Fasan
The Yoruba have a saying that chickens do not feed on each other’s entrails (Edi? ki j?`fun ara w?n). But that does not apply to the obidients, followers of Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 elections. They claim membership of a so-called movement that is basically a simulacrum, existing mostly in the imagination of those who proclaim its existence.
The online presence of the obidients is much diminished than during the build up to and immediately after the elections that brought their principal into widespread national prominence. Like a flaming stick dipped into a cold bowl of water, they imploded into disorderly hisses. They nevertheless crawl out of their holes in occasional outbursts of anger.
Forever rushing and swarming their targets with the heedless rage of the Gadarene Swine, they are the woke version of Peter Obi’s pretentious politics. Not many are able to connect the discourteous ways of the obidients to Obi’s outwardly respectful behaviour. But, in fact, the obidients take their page straight from Peter Obi’s playbook. He is on the surface calm and naturally easygoing but his politics, generally identitarian- polarising, sectarian and tribal, stinks once it is shorn of its veneer of genteel sophistication.
Thus Charlie Boy aka Charles Oputa or Area Father had it coming when he was caught grinning happily at a social event in a photograph with Hope Uzodinma, the Governor of Imo State. As it is well-known, Mr. Uzodinma is of the All Progressives Congress party. Obidients have no truck with other parties much less the APC that is led by President Bola Tinubu, perhaps the one person that gives them the worst form of bellyache. They heaped on Charlie Boy such profanities as they have always reserved for the likes of Tinubu and other Igbo politicians in the APC, their so-called efulefu.
Charlie Boy, is an obidient who rejected the victory of Governor Uzodinma in 2019 in typical obidient fashion. Imo State, he wrote, is gone. Even if it was in jest, as the exaggerated excitement he displayed in the photograph with Uzodinma suggests, that means nothing to obidients. He has betrayed the “brotherhood” by identifying with a political opponent. You sure have to be an enemy to be in any party other than the LP. There was, for them, only one way to explain Charlie Boy’s meeting with the governor: the pull of lucre.
This all may look funny and infantile but not when the obidients are involved. They are forever literal-minded and humourless. One wonders what they would have done had it been Peter Obi that met President Bola Tinubu as Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, did a few weeks ago during a chance meeting at the National Mosque? Would they have tolerated Ali Ndume’s handshake with Tinubu as happened about the time they were roasting Charlie Boy last week? All three men were friendly when they met. The photographs taken during these encounters didn’t trend for the wrong reasons. None of the supporters of either Tinubu, Atiku or Ndume have so far griped about the men exchanging greetings. The obidients won’t have any of this, I presume.
They were probably irked seeing their beloved President Olusegun Obasanjo shaking hands with Tinubu when they met during the inauguration of Ghana’s president a couple of weeks ago. Who knows if Peter Obi now dreads the day he would meet Tinubu. It’s either he pretends not to see him or he could expect to be thrown under the bus for allowing the contamination of a loathed enemy. Obi’s natural self won’t have any trouble meeting the president.
He must, however, worry about his base who would as likely as not demand an explanation for his behaviour as they did after he sent birthday greetings to General Yakubu Gowon. Obi, in the words of Burna Boy, go explain tire. Just as he did during General Gowon’s birthday. He spent more words explaining himself to his disagreeable base than he did wishing the retired general and former head of state good health. All they could see in his message was the wasted opportunity to pour scorn on Gowon, if his 90th birthday had to be acknowledged at all.
The civil war was a terrible episode of our national history. There are however casualties on different sides and there is hardly anyone you’d talk to of those directly affected by the war or who lived within a distance of the war zones that won’t have something bad to say about the other side. For a man who aspires to national leadership, Obi’s so-called supporters couldn’t even show some understanding for his action- see it as a “handshake across the Niger”, away from his Eastern enclave. They unwisely take for granted the idea that he is admired across political and ethnic divides and encourage his deceptive effort at hugging the limelight in the mistaken notion that he is the main opposition figure in Nigeria.
Where can his opposition take him without a proper political home? Where is the opposition when he and Abubakar Atiku continue to shirk the responsibility of getting down to the tiring task of dirtying their hands and providing leadership for their respective parties? Credible opposition is not about being the first to comment without reflection on every reported shortcoming of the ruling party. That was what led to him making the slip about the National Grid collapsing for the twelfth time last weekend.
Peter obi’s eagerness to jump on every negative news about public institutions or the present government is a variant of Obidients’ tendency to hurl insults at everyone and write off everything good about Nigeria while celebrating negative reports at every given opportunity. Which is to say that Obi is partly responsible for the fascist ways of this segment of his support base. Somebody said he apologised for his latest slip. I didn’t see an apology anywhere. In his usual way, he glossed over it and said he had since learned that what happened was not a grid collapse but a trip-off in some places mentioned in his tweet. Rather than apologise, Obi moves seamlessly from direct criticism to a veiled one, thanking the TCN for clarifying what happened.
He engages in subtle language games that misleads those not careful enough to spot the gaps in his argument. It was why he was able to execute the verbal sleight of hand that transformed a robust verbal response to a threat to life. It is also why some would assume he apologised for his error about the collapse of the national grid when he did not. A political opponent is not necessarily an enemy. The supporters Peter Obi needs today are not those ?f his zone who are his self-proclaimed apostles already.
