By Michael Chibuzo
Peter Obi finished third in the 2023 presidential election under the platform of the Labour Party, buoyed by a strong religious and tribal sentiments that characterised the presidential election. He was able to create a base of ardent supporters for himself called Obidients. This support base is mostly populated by highly ignorant and easily impressionable fellows who also exhibit fascist tendencies but lack any clear cut ideology.
Perhaps, Peter Obi’s over-performance at the 2023 polls gave him a false confidence that he can actually win a presidential election in Nigeria. Like a trader, he did some basic buying and selling calculations and felt that if he could sell himself more to Nigerians, especially in many parts of the North where he expectedly performed woefully, he could be able to defeat his fellow southerner and the incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027. Thus Peter Obi began by christening himself, the “Leader of the opposition in Nigeria” ahead of his ‘senior brother’ and perennial presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.
Peter Obi, who relishes being the talking point, then began what many have come to describe as “cho cho cho”. He wants to be seen criticising every action of the federal government led by the man he described as Chief Tinubu, even when he usually ends up displaying crass ignorance and sometimes pedestrian thinking on the subject matters he is criticising. He also activated a subtle 2027 campaign posture, which he masked as a tour of the North/thank you tour.
In his tour of the North, which started during the holy month of Ramadan, Peter Obi tried to project ’empathy’ and ‘meekness’ by breaking fast with Muslims at some selected locations, where he usually comes with jollof rice in take-away packs. This particular gesture is obviously targeted at watering down his miscalculation of the Nigerian political landscape where he thought he could win a presidential election in Nigeria solely on the strength of Christian bloc votes and declaring a religious war.
However, currently Peter Obi by some of his actions and those of his Obidient mob maybe inadvertently doing more harm to the Obi brand, which before now has not really been subjected to any deep and clear-headed scrutiny. Before the elections, Peter Obi as well as his supporters made loads of outlandish claims about his stewardship as Anambra State Governor, which most likely convinced some of his ardent followers that Peter Obi was the best candidate for President and motivated them to take extreme stands and making incendiary statements such as, “you’re after my life if you are not voting Peter Obi”.
One of such actions of Peter Obi is his philanthropic attempt to provide water to few communities in the North where he is on a wooing mission. Peter Obi thought he was scoring huge political points by commissioning hurriedly erected ‘boreholes’ to communities he visited in the North. At a glance, one could see that the quality of the job is so shoddy and most times erected for the camera (Obi goes around these places with a full complement of TV and other media houses).
The so-called water projects donated by Peter Obi are simply geepee tanks mounted on concrete platforms with one or two taps. There is no borehole to supply actual water to some of these tanks. For the commissioning, Peter Obi would fill the tanks with water from water tankers and that is it! He will then come to X (twitter) and pontificate about how water is a critical indices of human development index and millennium development goals blablabla. His excited base would then nickname him the Waterman for erecting less than a dozen geepee tanks without source of water supply. What a con artist!
The latest unraveling of Obi took place recently following a challenge by former media aide to President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omokri to Obidients to name a single new school that Peter Obi started and finished building in his 8 years as Governor of Anambra State. This challenge went viral because Obidients were unable to present any. They instead resorted to their trademark insults, abuse, grandstanding and shifting the goalpost. The Obidient base were confused by the Reno challenge, some Obidients tried to pass classroom block renovations or construction by Obi in existing schools as building new schools while other Obidients defended that there is no need building new schools when the existing ones were not yet TOTALLY fixed.
Peter Obi naively fell into the Reno Omokri trap when he saw that the conversation around the Reno challenge was not dying down, he called a press conference where he responded to the challenge. Peter Obi confessed that his administration did not build any new school in Anambra State because firstly, it was not part of his manifesto and secondly, there was no point building new schools when the existing ones were ‘dilapidated’. This is the Peter Obi that many of us know – always thinking unidirectionally.
Peter Obi by the above defence is basically saying that Anambra state’s population remained stagnant for the 8 years he was Governor and that new settlements and influx of families into urban centers did not put pressure on existing schools. As far as Obi is concerned, even if the population of residents of Anambra of school age quadruples, so long as the existing schools in the state are not “fixed”, he would not construct new schools in new locations. Meanwhile, “fix” is an entirely different term in Obi’s dictionary that requires additional explanation.
When you hear Peter Obi say that he fixed so so number of schools as Governor, just know that he is talking about renovating/constructing one or rarely two blocks of classrooms in a school via UBE after providing the state’s counterpart funding. He also includes provision of boreholes (not the type he provides for the North by the way) to some schools, donation of a generating set and HP computer sets to some secondary schools and an Innoson 18-seater bus to secondary schools (which were not meant to ferry students to school daily but as official vehicle of the Principals) as ‘fixing schools’.
Like I said in a different write up, Peter Obi is a minimalist. He does not think big or wide. Throughout his 8 years in office, there was no teachers recruitment, Parent Teachers Association had to employ auxiliary teachers to augment the staff strength with their wages coming from PTA levies paid by students every term. You cannot point to any school in Anambra State that witnessed total transformation/rehabilitation or modernization. Teachers were always at loggerhead with Obi over salary matters. This is the governor who wants people to believe he transformed education in Anambra State.
The Reno challenge has forced Obi to confirm his record of mediocrity in education that he has largely succeeded in masking over the years. Now, many people including some shocked Obidients now know that Obi did not build any new school in Anambra. Also thanks to Obi’s North tour, many can now see the quality of jobs Peter Obi is proud to associate with his name in the name of providing water to the people. Peter Obi, in trying to sell his brand of ‘pious and competent’ legacy has rather succeeded in further demystifying himself. In the coming days, weeks and months, I may likely chronicle many of Peter Obi’s “the more you look, the less you see” over-hyped legacies as Anambra State Governor for eight years. This is a duty I owe my conscience as an Anambrarian.