When you see and read a piece crafted in guile and motivated by parochial sensibilities, you will know.
Going through the reflection of Fred Nwabufo on Peter Obi’s ‘accidental presidential’ bid was an exercise in literary ribaldry – a journey into a mind programmed by atavistic calculations.
When you see and read a piece crafted in guile and motivated by parochial sensibilities, you will know.
When as a writer, you are compelled by ill motivation to seek to arrive at a certain predetermined end in your literary engagement, then you know that the dark art of intellectual sophism and machiavellian determinism must form the basis on which your flawed premises and conclusions must be anchored.
At such moments, despite your best attempts at intellectual obfuscation and literary piety, what is known is known – that you are only pandering to a long-established hierarchy and structure of primitive accumulators of our national patrimony. You are an attack dog, under the bondage of the master’s whistle.
Reading through Nwabufo’s attack on Peter Obi, you cannot help but come away with the feeling that the write-up is part of a trajectory of attacks that have continuously trailed Peter Obi since he declared presidential ambition under the Labour Party. It is another attack born out of fear that if he is not stopped on his track, the inevitable might happen to redefine Nigeria’s political firmament. It is a fear of the Ruto factor in present-day Nigerian politics.
For a man who was very adamant in his wholesale support of Isa Pantami, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy over his dangerous past fundamentalist proclivities, one of which led to the mob murder of a student of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nwabufo’s ever subtle ethnic dig and onslaught against the south-east is well noted. His attempt to tie Peter Obi to an ethnic predilection or tendency is also a point of reference.
Sadly, in all of his diatribe against Peter Obi, he failed to explain why the vast majority of Nigerians have defied Nigeria’s notorious fault lines of religion and ethnicity to embrace a man from across the Niger as someone who encapsulates their vision of a country that has the capacity to change and move away from an inglorious past and a hopeless present into a future full of hope and optimism.
Instead, Nwabufo says that the true test of a man who is ready to run for office is dependent on the longevity of his political ambitions. In his words:
“Running for president takes intention; it takes years of planning; building a network of people and structures.”
Surely we have seen the consequences of the man who ran for president three times in Nigeria, failing on all occasions, only to achieve his presidential ambition for the fourth time of asking. We are today witnesses of the result of that long-held ambition in today’s Nigeria. Everything is in pieces – all because of the “years of planning; building a network of people and structures” – the structure of corruption.
This is what the writer truly means when he talks about structures, because the usual outcomes of the consequences of these structures, following electoral victories have ended up pushing Nigeria into the labyrinth and cesspool of hopelessness and want.
To declare so authoritatively that Peter Obi is not into this election to win flies against every verifiable evidence. The PDP and the APC certainly do not believe Fred Nwabufo’s assertion. It is the reason why they are spending sleepless nights planning and concocting plans to pull him down.
The hard work that Obi has put into selling his candidacy in every nook and cranny of Nigeria does not bear testimony to such a declaration by Nwabufo. Certainly, Obi is the most hardworking of the candidates, especially those from the dominant political parties.
As for a manifesto, as important as they are, at least to provide a glimpse into the inner workings of the candidates, in general terms they are useless in bringing about the transformation in the absence of a committed, informed, and patriotic political class. After all, both the PDP and APC also had their manifestoes.
Regardless of who wins the presidency of this country come 2023, the monumental damage suffered by our country for 23 years under the carelessly dangerous PDP, and the consciously dangerous APC will give any serious political leadership the jitters.