By Dominic A. Okoliko (PhD)
By February 25, 2023, Nigeria’s next president will be decided, and the choice is between Peter Obi (Labour Party), Bola Tinubu (All Progressives Congress), and Atiku Abubakar (People’s Democratic Party) with Rabiu Kwankwaso (New Nigeria Peoples Party) as a possible fourth. My argument is that Obi’s emergence as a candidate in the election strikingly distinguishes the 2023 election from previous ones. It is therefore, important to know the conditions that made this turn of history possible.
A symbol of political revolution, rebellion
Observers of this election can agree that whether Obi wins the election or not, he will be remembered for giving the establishment parties a run for their monies and extreme influence. Until his emergence, a third force unsettling the status quo was a mere wish. Nigeria’s electoral history post-1999 shows that presidential elections used to be a two-horse race between an incumbent party and an often-weak main opposition party.
The two-horse race phenomenon is properly a recent history associated with the 2015 general election which witnessed the surprising outing of the APC at the general election, a party that was formed two years earlier from a merger between three smaller parties. Before the 2015 APC victory over PDP at the polls, the presidential election was largely a one-party show run by the latter.
Following this dynamic, it was only possible to run a successful presidential campaign if one was a member of either the incumbent party or a main opposition party with a national force. Consequently, Nigerians have had to choose from candidates delivered by either of the powerful parties. The rots in these parties could only produce what is exactly like them which often means candidates with questionable antecedents. Professionals from all ranks and members of civil society repelled by the rots looked on hopelessly. Many of them could not afford the price needed to feed the appetite of the party machines to put them on the ballot.
But as successive career politicians kept ruining governance in Nigeria through maladministration and corruption, conditions for change were being created. It increasingly became clear that to harvest alternative leaders from non-career politicians, there is a need to decentre electoral power in Nigeria’s politics beyond the mainstream political parties.
Several past attempts to do so, however, failed, including those championed by Prof Pat Utomi, Donald Duke, Omoyele Sowore, Fela Durotoye, Kingsley Moghalu and others. This was mainly because most of the attempts failed to manage coalition, lacked an iconic face to lead a third-force movement, and there was a general absence of acceptance that such a movement could succeed in Nigeria’s politics.
What is different under Obi?
His person
Obi, like the others who attempted to stage a political revolution in the past, was a professional before venturing into politics. He was a banker and a self-described trader.
Unlike them, however, he embraced the establishment, gained relevance within it, and seized the chance to prove his worth before Nigerians as a sitting governor of Anambra State (2007-2014). Obi’s performance as a governor of Anambra State was a popular reference in various quarters long before his shot at national politics: commitment to frugal government, building state capital (saving for rainy days), outstanding service delivery (education and health in particular) and exemplary accountability (no record of a corruption case against him while in government).
It was for this sterling record that PDP picked him for a joint ticket with Atiku in 2019. The same public record made him a popular choice by Nigerians on social media when various parties were shopping for candidates in the first quarter of 2022. Obi’s popularity thus, singled him out as a sought-after iconic face to lead a third-force movement.
The other thing that made Obi a selling candidate for the third-force movement in this election is his ability to court the establishment and existing power brokers even while maintaining a counter-cultural posture. Diplomacy is one of Obi’s strongest strengths: everyone, including those who are on the opposing aisles, is an ‘elder brother/sister’. After Obi emerged as a presidential candidate, he immediately went about interacting, connecting, and building bridges between power brokers like Obasanjo, IBB, and religious and traditional leaders. Previous attempters either scorned the establishment and existing power brokers, or did little to engage them and this affected their ability to build broad-based coalitions.
Serendipity
Perhaps, the weightiest factor in Obi’s favour is what I call serendipity: a series of events whose arrangements are not made by Obi. First among them is the prevailing failure of government that created an aggressive army of Nigerians who are extremely tired of the status quo. Things may have always been bad but the level at which Nigeria sunk under President Muhammadu Buhari’s APC regime is undeniably tiresome for many: increased insecurity, a battered economy with about 22% inflation rate, a 400% debt increment and a high unemployment rate. Adding to the list is the charge that Buhari runs an exclusive rather than inclusive government that further severed the fragile ties which hold Nigeria’s complex and fragmented polity together. There is also credit to the charge that he largely failed to improve basic service delivery – access to education (consider ASUU’s over 6 months strike), health, and energy.
The manifestation of such anger created the #EndSARS movement which was mismanaged by the government through violent suppression. While the government approach drove the youth from the streets where they were protesting police brutality and other sundry governance challenges in October 2020, it could not end the movement. The youth kept their self-organising elements and the conversation for a different Nigeria alive with the help of social media. When the election season came thus, they quickly deployed these soft powers and negotiated their way through Nigeria’s murky politics to “create” a candidate that could bear their hopes and aspirations.
Before I touch on how this force outside mainstream politics contributed to creating the Obi candidacy, let me mention the other events making up the serendipity factor. They are to be found in the collective failure of both APC and PDP to manage internal party affairs which led to the emergence of candidates that the two parties are currently struggling to sell across Nigeria. PDP snubbed its own party rule on power sharing, conducted questionable primaries that left many contenders aggrieved and failed to resolve post-election matters. APC, even with a bad record of performance as an incumbent party, sacrificed other candidates with good standing to Tinubu’s “emi lo kan” (my turn) whip. The outcomes from both parties’ primaries failed to appeal to the aggrieved sections of Nigerians, the majority of whom were either direct participants in the #EndSARS or share in the cause. They were thus, forced to look elsewhere.
The Obi-Dient Movement
The Obi-Dient Movement is a prodigy of #EndSARS in that the early drivers of the movement were mainly supporters of #EndSARS. They challenged Obi, first to contest for PDP’s ticket and in the occasion that he fails, he was encouraged to run on an alternative platform. Obi yielded to the demand. By May 25, 2022, he dumped PDP and his contest in the party and joined the Labour Party (LP) three days later. By May 30, 2022, LP gave Obi its presidential ticket.
The immediate reaction from the establishments and naysayers was that the move was a political suicide. LP and Obi have no structure, they argued. Obidients more than Obi himself swiftly mobilised and increased LP base across Nigeria. Next, naysayers charged that Obi is only a Twitter president, meaning that he mainly enjoys support on social media. In reaction, Obidients launched a series of demonstration rallies across cities to register their support beyond online.
The result is that between May 2022 and today, a relatively unknown party and a candidate that was rejected by a major political party as a lightweight has become not just a major presidential candidate in a three-horse race. Obi is the top choice among all the candidates in several polls. In ANAP’s December 2023 poll, Obi leads with a 10% point ahead of his closest rival, Tinubu. In Nextier’s November 2023 poll (focusing only on rural demographics) Obi also recorded about 40% of potential voters favouring his presidency, followed by Atiku with 27% and Tinubu with 21%. Similar results have been recorded in other election polls, including the one by Bloomberg in September 2023.
These performances indicate the successful conduct of the campaign by Obi and his team which, as we have shown, includes an army of organic supporters called the Obidients. In the end, there should not be any doubt that Obi is a game changer in Nigeria’s electoral history, although it remains to be seen whether he will win at the poll.
*Dr. Okoliko writes from Stellenbosch University, South Africa
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