From the sidelines, I have watched the movement named after Peter Obi assume different forms to adapt to the contentious and often acrimonious nature of Nigerian politics. It has duly transformed from a too conciliatory, good-natured, even sometimes forbearing section within the body politic to a boisterous and combative political moving force. I say ‘duly’ because the onslaught of bitter broadsides from the other side of the political spectrum, often directed and modulated by the traditional political parties and their bigwigs who stood in opposition to the movement (on paper), was only ever going to last so long before there was a decisive pushback. That pushback against the large-scale mischaracterization, ethnic denigration, and religious imposition with which the movement was openly confronted in the lead-up to 2023 and after has now become the permanent form of its supposedly third-way character.

Understanding, however, that the movement emerged from the ruins of the 2020 EndSARS protests—though I am not particularly enamoured of the man after whom it is named—I have, for the most part, viewed the combats behind it as comrades of sorts, and as a result, never taken an openly antagonistic position against the movement. But for the first time, the movement has embarked on a consequential, rather impolitic course which may as well spell its doom and create a boomerang that will either retard or deaden (at least partially) hopes of youth-centred oppositional movement in the near future.

At the formation of this excessively romanticized alliance between the established political class and its scattered extensions playing the role of opposition, it became quite clear, perhaps only to a few, that this Special Purpose Vehicle is going nowhere that the masses of Nigeria have never been before. If anything, the newly promised shadowy destination, which is completely unconcerned with the desperate conditions of ordinary Nigerians between now and 2027, could only be worse. Unfortunately, it is the case that in our time, there is often a rash of impatient blow-ups that ignorance foists on people, and it is one that assumes a needlessly hostile if not virulent character. These unrighteous blow-ups, such as those witnessed after my last piece, prove enough that there is a dangerous gap between what many young Nigerians think Nigerian politics is about and what it is in reality. It has thus become necessary to elaborate on my earlier sketch and remind us what Nigeria’s political scene looks like presently.

Elections Before 2023

Before the fraudulent general elections in 2023, the All Progressives Congress (APC) had the highest number of state governors (21) and controlled the F.C.T., meaning the APC had the most widely distributed political power to rig elections at the state level and the F.C.T. The 12 Sharia States, including the three nominally PDP-controlled States, stood solidly behind Buhari during his tenure. Hence, when you combine this state power with the federal executive imprimatur to militarize, thuggify, and grossly undermine the collective will of citizens, as was explicitly the case under Buhari’s watch, the self-perpetuating purpose and goal of these elections can only have been too obvious.

On the other hand, the APC also controlled the majority of seats in both chambers of the 9th National Assembly, with 59 Senators and 192 House of Representatives members, not to mention the many bootlickers belonging in name to other parties and kowtowing to Buhari’s whims and caprices. As far as the judiciary was concerned, court orders were either flagrantly disregarded or commandeered, again in service of Buhari's whims. Naturally, the consequence of this toxic state capture, when you add a defanged INEC to the whole morass, was a country where elections were either rigged outright, decided at gunpoint or determined by confounded policemen and APC-controlled tribunals.

Throughout Buhari’s horrific reign, the passive acceptance of rigged and militarized elections by the ruck of this country only emboldened him to carry on with his onslaught. Under these circumstances, the ignominious outcome of the 2023 general elections—along with the Muslim-Muslim phenomenon and its allied campaign of ethnic denigration—was already decided before it was held. But what stood out in the 2023 experience was not so much the rigged electoral process as the manner in which the rigging was done. Evidence of that campaign of national shame can still be found in the IReV portal and the traumatic cache of brutalized citizens and bereaved families. Certainly, logic would argue that if that eyesore had held uncontested in 2023 when Tinubu was not yet in Aso Villa, things should not be any different now that he is there with the total capture of the state and unlimited capital at his disposal.

After the 2023 General Elections

Owing to the ruthless execution of his Machiavellian politics, the EmiLoKan protagonist is presently in a favourable position as far as the 2027 elections are concerned. Apart from being the Commander-in-Chief, which also means he is now the Rigger-in-Chief, 23 APC State Governors are firmly installed at the state level, with half (if not the whole) of Rivers State also captured by the APC while the other States are all there for the taking before 2027. The judiciary is simply completely tamed, and the INEC is an electoral umpire in name only.

At the National Assembly, both the Senate and the House of Reps are awfully dominated by Tinubu’s loyalists or APC members, with the numerical majority hold swelling by the minute as party defections—including from the Labour Party—continue to blow up their ranks. At play here is the so-called 3G-Rule—Gun, God, and Government (i.e. state resources)—executed by Akpabio and Gbajabiamila and strongly reminiscent of Escobar’s notorious ‘Plata o Plomo’ (money or bullets)—which has solidified Tinubu’s position as a political godhead of sorts. Thus, apart from Atiku and Obi, who share a strong competitive advantage in the so-called coalition, there is not one politician among the rest who cannot make an abrupt deal with Tinubu if the offer is as good as he’s been making them. And that’s if such a deal has not already been made.

Meanwhile, excluding El-Rufai, the other squad members in this misalliance are not particularly known for their capacity to deploy, sustain, and institutionalize large-scale ruthlessness, which is a rudimentary characteristic for anyone who wishes to defeat EmiLoKan. Add to this the presence of Shettima—perhaps as vicious an ethnoreligious extremist as El-Rufai, and even so in more ways than Atiku might ever be—suggesting the 12 Sharia States already have their chief fanatic in the Aso Rock Villa. Yet, even if we don’t know anything else about the Sharia States in the Core North, we do know that they only care about two things in politics: Islamism and Ethnic (Hausa-Fulani political class) Dominance. Thus, it was perfectly in line with their political philosophy to unanimously shut down the proposed Zoning Bill in the National Assembly in May this year.

Know Your Enemies, Know Your Friends, Know Thyself

For now, let us agree to differ that the likes of El-Rufai, Amaechi, etc., etc., are of a political standing nowhere near that of Atiku and Obi. Nonetheless, between Atiku and Obi, we know that a public dance in 2019 foundered under Buhari’s undemocratic watch, and in 2023, bagging and splitting over 13 million votes between themselves, their break-up is said to have contributed to Tinubu’s victory. The failure of both men, in keeping with the character of their social class, to act on the wave of their support in 2023 and organize their followers for a robust and sustained direct or disruptive action, unlike Mondlane's resistance in Mozambique, led eventually to the enthronement of the monumental catastrophe which is EmiLoKan himself. Had both politicians decisively seized the opportunity to slough off their conciliatory, reactionary and often mercantilist habits in 2023, there may have been a different tribunal verdict read to the Nigerian public and the world.

Beyond this, however, pro-Atiku choristers would most likely argue that their master has done enough ‘stepping down’ for other presidential candidates in his lifetime. Indeed, we know that in 1993, Atiku stepped down for Abiola in the presidential race, and in 1999, he abandoned his governorship mandate in Adamawa to play a second-in-command role to Obasanjo, hoping to inherit the throne in 2007, but for his rift with his former boss, which denied him the opportunity. Between then and now, he has lost consecutively in all his attempts to become Nigeria’s president—2007, 2011, 2015, 2019, 2023. Certainly, those who are familiar with his political journey know that his persistent determination to become Nigeria’s president is part ego, part ambition—not dissimilar to the goal he set himself to serve at the apex level of the Nigeria Customs Service which, to all intents and purposes, he had relatively achieved before his retirement as Deputy Director at the same institution.

By its very nature, politics in Nigeria, as Azikiwe once wrote, is ‘a means to an end which is more glorious than the means through which this end must be attained.’ In this sense, someone must pay for the enormous resources Atiku has in over 30 years unproductively splurged on wanting to become Nigeria’s president, and the Nigerian public treasury is more than capable of doing so, whether they say Nigeria is broke or not. Hence, I cannot imagine any scenario, as I expect no rational person would, in which the Nigerian presidency for Atiku would be principally anything but a recoupment and retirement plan. In this regard alone, the chances that he would step down again, this time for Obi, are extremely slim, especially considering his current age and the rigours of campaigning and occupying the office he is after.

By African standards, present and past African rulers in Atiku’s age group, such as Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire, Obiang in Equatorial Guinea and Bozizé in Central African Republic, had already ruled, respectively, for 10 years, 38 years and 10 years at this time in their respective lives, with Bozizé already dethroned into the bargain with an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity still hanging over his head. Then there is Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, who had already been in power for 10 years at Atiku’s current age. Even Mandela, by that same token, who spent 27 and a half years in prison, had returned as a veritable champion of post-apartheid South Africa and was already three years in power as President. At Atiku’s age, the whole world would be rather inconsiderate not to understand his desperation to become Nigeria’s Commander-in-Chief. In any case, no other spot than deputizing Atiku can be rationally expected for Obi in that misalliance, and he must certainly be aware of this. Even so, one should not be shocked if Obi is, by some Nigerian-style legerdemain, outgunned by his more ruthless peers in that collusive ring and ends up losing even the spot of deputizing Atiku.

On the other hand, if we must take this further, there are at least three clear hurdles that Obi and his supporters must overpass in the so-called coalition to maintain their movement’s current momentum: (1) Emerge as the consensus candidate of the coalition, meaning Atiku would have to step down; (2) Win the presidency, against all odds; and (3) Perform nothing short of a miracle in his newly promised single-term tenure, potentially flinging his goal of continuity and ‘sustainability’ to the winds.

The Miracle Performer

If there is any confusion, however, as to the direction in which either of these fraternal politicians would steer Nigeria should either of them, by some cosmic design, become the country’s president, all doubts instantly vanishes at the review of their respective manifestos, which Obi, in particular, only grudgingly provided three months to the presidential election to, in the main, appeal to popular sentiments. Atiku’s plan to besiege the country with neoliberal policies and hurl the people into a neoliberal concentration camp is clear enough, with the only real difference from Tinubu’s manifesto being his expertly worded neoliberal globalization hogwash, which they all share in common nonetheless. Even so, none of these policies concretizes clarity of ideological action, and none provides any concrete roadmap to equality of opportunity and outcome.

Instead, you will find the repletion of financialization, ‘liberalization of the foreign exchange market’, privatization of capital and factors of production, etc., etc., very prominently written into nearly every line of their policy documents, excepting, of course, the grudging concessions here and there to popular sentiments which Obi managed to do so proficiently. For instance, his promise of restructuring is laden with unrelieved vagueness—i.e. ‘moving agreed items to the concurrent list’ (what items, agreed by whom, for whom, and how?)—and an impractical faith in the federal legislature where his party, the Labour Party, is not even close to being the minority party in both chambers, to say nothing of the uptick in defections by his party’s lawmakers to the APC. Here, we find a serious flaw in Obi the politician: the hallmark of a good politician lies in their ability to consolidate their position and increasingly present a robust force against those opposed to their camp and objectives. Still, there is a sneaky, if not deliberate trail of obfuscation in Obi's manifesto, with references like ‘Marshall-plan type programme’—a specious fancy phrase for describing an idea which, fundamentally, is rooted in America’s foreign aid to European countries after the Second World War and, therefore, begs the question of how Obi plans to fund his nebulous economic programme without exacerbating Nigeria's already complicated relationship with international finance and Western neo-colonial structures.

Both Obi and Atiku have manifestos which are not remarkably dissimilar from what EmiLoKan himself presented to the public: from their promise of digitization of government institutions and public service systems to Obi’s judiciary reform programme, his plan to include the Nigerian diaspora in democratic governance, to ensure the ‘promotion of made-in-Nigeria goods’ (very similar to Atiku’s), his intention to marry unspecified aspects of ‘our customary laws’ with the country’s ‘formal law’ (currently in the legislative agenda of the 10th House of Reps), his self-deceiving anti-people plan to integrate an extremely unindustrialized society into the Fourth Industrial Revolution without worsening mass inequality and economic impoverishment, his idealistic emphasis on the Oronsaye Report (which Tinubu has glibly set in motion), and then, after implementing the Oronsaye Report in his ‘first year,’ effectively eliminating redundancy and streamlining the forms and functions of government agencies, he will still go ahead and create the ‘Office of Special Counsel to investigate and prosecute every executive abuse of power that do not fall under the prosecutorial power of existing agencies or are bureaucratically concealed’ (such as what and what?)—and that while reducing the cost of governance!

Yet, nothing in Obi’s manifesto, overburdened as it is with needless portraits and self-glorification, points to any grounding in the necessary policies of a labour candidate: absolutely no reference to and no indication of his commitment to the policies of organized labour, no signs of any creative ideas to systematically beat down and substantively crush the raging cycles of privations pushing the poor masses, the labouring classes and the ever-widening unwaged youth demography to ruin, no specified initiative to actively engineer social equality and regional solidarity, nor is there any policy roadmap for the harmonization and development of productive forces to create sustainable employment, save for his nebulous ‘Green Army’ concept (with an unknown size, function, etc.), which, at its core, is another grand scheme, utterly devoid of creativity, for subjecting multidimensionally poor and working-class Nigerians to the ravages of international finance capital. You can actually count on one hand how many times ‘workers’ are referenced in his manifesto—and you still won’t exhaust those fingers!

Judging by their respective manifestos, one should be shocked that there should be any discord between Obi and his senior brothers, Atiku and Tinubu, in the first place. Indeed, Obi’s manifesto is a quintessential populist playbook: there is every reason to expect a credibility gap when the rubber meets the road in a government led by Peter Obi, primarily because he has grafted to his manifesto too many vaguely defined, ‘UN template’ promises that would both be difficult if not impossible to measure or achieve. Populism, from the Latin populus, meaning the people, is itself not a negative term. But when establishment politicians like Obi ride on the wave of public disaffection—specifically youth disaffection in this case—to present a quasi-alternative veil to the ‘evil, nasty and corrupt’ political class to which they themselves belong, then the ugly populism that’s easily detestable rears its head. Sadly, the bubble of populism calcifies at the expense of substance. Obi’s rudderless policy document demonstrates, in any case, all there is to know about the lingering generational affliction which is the Nigerian political class: all they do is constantly talk at the people without linking their all-knowing assumptions and neoliberal interventions to the actual privations of the oppressed population.

Worse, politicians like Obi serve as the sort of perfect ‘good-man’ effigy for collective malingering, an easy escape from the more ugly necessity of mass confrontation against the established political class of a failed bourgeois state like Nigeria. Still, within this context, I will add that Obi is the kind of ‘rebound lover’ that people who have been through a traumatic experience—i.e. EndSARS, Lekki Massacre, etc.—feverishly latch on to in order to palliate their trauma and existential angst, instantiating, in the end, a stellar example of an abusive relationship in which the oppressed become so passionately complicit in their own oppression.

Meanwhile, by comparison, the social-democratic manifesto of John Dramani Mahama of Ghana is profoundly true to its ideological purpose, unambiguous in its apprehension of the problem and solutions, clear in its programmatic goals and resolute in its elaboration of retributive and restorative action. Hence, it is no surprise that the Ghanaian Cedi became the world’s best-performing currency at precisely the end of the 120-day contract of the Mahama administration, gaining 44% and simultaneously knocking down inflation to its lowest for the first time in more than three years. This is what happens when policy documents are underpinned by ideological clarity and praxis, or harmony between actual thought and genuine action.

If, however, there is one thing Obi’s manifesto has in abundance, it is the conciliatory, sometimes maudlin rhetoric of Dr Azikiwe in his 1937 book, Renascent Africa, wherein he wrote about the necessity of birthing a ‘New Africa’ and a ‘New Nigeria’, whilst swearing off old habits that impeded social regeneration, mental emancipation, economic determinism and spiritual balance. In his time, ‘Zik’ was one of the influential intellectuals in British West Africa, and his influence spread from the Gold Coast to the Gambia, Sierra Leone and even Liberia, ultimately crystallizing into the eponymous Zikist Movement in Nigeria that further cemented his reputation as a political panjandrum. ‘There must be revolutionary changes in order to have a new order,’ wrote Azikiwe in 1937. Unfortunately, when the balloon went up and the time for revolution came, Zik’s ‘old habits’ and conciliatory tendencies got the better of him, and he publicly denounced the Zikists after they put their lives on the line for the very revolution he often orated on. Like Zik, Obi’s fraternity with this foredoomed coalition says enough about his own old habits and conciliatory tendencies. Whether or not that would help him achieve his ‘New Nigeria’ in the long run, only time will tell.

At any rate, I understand denialism is a common experience when coming to terms with unvarnished reality. Someday, maybe soon, we will come to the full realization that a ‘New Nigeria’ is impossible without first agreeing on coherent and socially reproducible values.