Peter Obi has been criticized as a pretentious actor over his Democracy Day speech by June 12 activists who claimed that contrary to his high-minded message vaunting the ideals of democracy, the former Anambra Governor was aligned with anti-democratic forces in the struggle that began in 1993 when MKO Abiola’s popular victory was annulled.
They pointed at Obi’s self-admitted appointment to the ports during Abacha’s military dictatorship, a post that revealed him as a senior disciple of an undemocratic government responsible for the killing and disappearance of several activists, journalists, students and other groups agitating for the return to popular government.
The defeated Labour Party candidate in the last presidential election had sought to use the June 12 celebration to burnish his image as a pro-democracy actor, despite his refusal to accept his comprehensive defeat at the polls and his troubling leadership of a denialist movement that threatened the country’s unbroken stint of peaceful transfer of power since 1999.
He said in a statement that “our democracy is deeply troubled while our nation’s destiny remains uncertain and precarious.” But Nigerians were quick to remind him that he lies at the source of the problem, mainly due to his insistence that he won an election in which he only appealed to a tiny segment of the country and sought to throw the country into a “religious war” after his inability to win became evident.
They highlighted Obi’s ethnoreligious campaign and the divisiveness it prompted. His leaked audio call with a popular cleric in which he urged a ‘religious war’ was held up as the ultimate sign of his lack of commitment to the Nigerian project, let alone the principles of democracy undergirding it.
Notably, activists who fought for a return to democracy in the Abacha years dismissed Obi’s message as hypocritical, adding that were it left to him and his boss, the country would have remained in the grip of a dictator who sought to extinguish the fire of freedom and the rule of law.
They urged Obi not to desecrate the important day by wearing the heroic struggle of MKO Abiola as an accessory to appeal to his modern-day crowd who may not be aware of the ignoble and opportunistic role he played in the 1990s.