As the 2023 Labour Party Presidential Candidate, Peter Gregory Obi inches towards formally joining the African Democratic Party, ADC, the question agitating the minds of his followers both in Nigeria and across the world is, will he run as a Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidate.
That question is very pertinent and relevant to how the Nigerian electorate will interpret Peter Obi’s political earthquake move to the ADC. If Peter Obi runs as a Presidential Candidate, it will most likely galvanize an unprecedented grassroots political movement never seen in the annals of Nigerian political history.
The plausible reason is not far-fetched because Nigerians are eagerly and anxiously awaiting for a disrupter to emerge to reshape and reimagine how the country is run. The one major caveat is what will be the effect of the South-East Biafran agitation on Peter Obi’s campaign? Make no mistake, the ruling All Progressive Party, APC, will unquestionably unleash a political armada on Peter Obi and equate his campaign to the current emotional agitation for Biafra by Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People Of Biafra, IPOB.
A former Governor Enugu State, Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo in an interview published in Vanguard Newspaper in November 6, 2023 alluded to the fact that during the 1999 PDP Jos Primaries, an unnamed Northern Leader convinced supporters of late former Vice President, Dr. Alex Ekwueme from that Region that he (Ekwueme) will set up a regional army if he wins the presidency to actualize the Sovereign State of Biafra. It remains to be determined if that 1999 nonsensical political gamesmanship will work in 2027.
On the flip side of 2027 political calculations and permutations is Peter Obi pairing as running mate to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The main reasoning behind the pairing push is that if Atiku and Obi had worked together in 2023, PDP could have certainly swept APC out of power based on the raw results of that election.
The question now becomes will the political marriage between Obi and Atiku work in 2027 bearing in mind that Nigeria’s political landscape has been transformed into the imperial political empire of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu with virtually all the Governors and National Assembly members joining the ruling APC from PDP and Labour Parties.
According to Dr. Nwodo in the referenced Vanguard Newspaper interview, Peter Obi left the PDP out of frustration when he suddenly realized that in the build up to the 2023 presidential election, the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike who ran as one of the PDP’s Primary Presidential Candidate had cornered most of the delegates in the South-East, while the former Governor of Jigawa State Sule Lamido personally delivered the sad news that he (Obi) had no delegates support in the North.
So Obi left the PDP to prove a point and achieved the goal of distancing himself from the old political guards of yesteryears and succeeded or nearly succeeded depending on who is interpreting the outcome of that particular election.
There is a strong belief in some quarters that the opposition build up to the 2027 has been bungled by Atiku’s strong push and quest to become Nigeria’s president based on the single-minded calculation to explore and exploit the anti-Tinubu sentiments in the North instead of first building a bottom-to-top sustainable grassroots political movement which could have possibly checkmated the avalanche of political crossovers to the APC.
Politicians hate uncertainties just as much as Christians hate the Devil and Satan. The uncertainty created by a weakened PDP and Labour Parties due to intractable crises either self-inflicted or engineered by the ruling APC as well as the upcoming ADC’s dilly dallying, forced the politicians true-to-type to begin their chameleonic and strategic political pilgrimage to the ruling party side.
Another factor that will be bugging the mind of Peter “The Rock” Obi is what will be the reactions of the Obidients if he is Atiku’s running mate. The Obidients see him as the political rock of the new generation who are allergic to the old political class who speak from both sides of the mouth and has turned the giant of Africa into their personal estate and piggy bank sharing the commonwealth amongst themselves.
The emotional Obidients will obviously doubt that Obi who is the arrowhead of change will be given any or enough room by the Atiku political acolytes more interested in capturing power, than to champion the desired change that Nigeria needs to begin to make any appreciable progress to reverse the long-term damage successive governments have inflicted on Nigeria and Nigerians. Time will tell.
FROM THE DESK OF:
NNAMDI OBIEZE-NWADIALO,
MANSFIELD TEXAS.
