If Obi were a leper, this essay would be unnecessary. The road would already be clear, the verdict already delivered by his skin, and no one would need five separate news cycles a week, an ecological-fund audit, a godfather denial and a debate about tomato puree just to justify keeping their distance. He is not a leper. He is merely inconvenient, gloriously and stubbornly inconvenient, the way the one honest trader in a market full of adjusted scales is inconvenient. Which is precisely why they keep needing new stones — and precisely why, fable after fable, market day after market day, they keep missing.
By Kalu Onuma
The eye that watches another man’s sores from a safe distance rarely notices its own decay.
— Igbo proverb, retold
The priest examined the mark and pronounced him unclean, and put him outside the camp — not because his guilt was proven, but because his presence had become inconvenient.
— After the ritual law of Leviticus 13
In every village there is a rooster who believes the sun rises because he crows. When a stranger rises without crowing, the rooster calls him diseased.
— An old fable, told and retold
In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Jozef De Veuster — remembered by history as Father Damien — accepted a posting nobody else wanted: ministering to the leprosy patients quarantined at Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai, in what was then the Kingdom of Hawaii. Officials had shipped the afflicted there and largely left them to rot without proper housing, clean water, or coffins. Damien built the coffins himself. He dressed the wounds himself. He dug the graves himself. In time, inevitably, he contracted the disease himself, and he died among the people he had chosen to serve, in 1889. Before he died, and even after, men who had never once set foot on Molokai wrote confidently about his character. A clergyman comfortably stationed in Honolulu, the Reverend Charles McEwen Hyde, let it be known that Damien was coarse and headstrong, and that if he had caught the disease it was likely through some carelessness of his own rather than through years of touching the sick with his bare hands. It took a visiting Scottish novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, who actually travelled to the settlement and spoke with the people Damien had served, to publish an indignant rebuttal that shamed Hyde before the reading world. Stevenson had noticed something elementary, the kind of thing only distance can hide: the men most eager to diagnose Damien’s defects were the ones who had never gone near the wound. Nigeria, bless her stubborn heart, has produced not one Reverend Hyde but an entire choir of them, robes pressed, microphones sound-checked, ready to sing in four-part harmony about a wound none of them has ever bent down to look at.
Consider the leper, in every society that has ever needed one, from the ritual law of ancient Israel to the settlement at Molokai to the WhatsApp groups of Awka and Aba where uncles who have never balanced a checkbook in their lives suddenly become forensic auditors the moment Peter Obi’s name appears on the screen. The leper does not need to have done anything in particular. His only offence is a visible mark that the healthy find endlessly convenient to point at, the way a village will always find a reason to blame the one man who refuses to attend the age-grade meeting in a Mercedes. The examining priest, in the old law, did not ask the leper what he intended. He asked only whether the mark showed on the skin. Once it showed, the verdict followed automatically: unclean, outside the camp, do not touch, do not eat with him, and should he approach uninvited, let him cry out his own diagnosis so the healthy can step back in time, the way a man in Onitsha market shouts “Ndo, ndo!” not because he is sorry but because he wants you to jump out of his barrow’s way. This essay borrows that method, and it will not apologise for it, any more than the tortoise apologised for winning by cunning what he could not win by speed. At every turn we will ask one deliberately absurd, deliberately serious question about Peter Obi — the businessman turned governor turned presidential candidate who has spent a decade being accused, in the very same season, of being too frugal to be trusted with billions and too rich to be trusted with power; too Igbo to be national and too national to be properly Igbo; too transparent to be honest (“go and verify,” they mock him, as though verification were a moral failing rather than the entire point of citizenship) and too dishonest to be transparent (“licensed to lie,” the Presidency itself has called him, apparently forgetting that a licence, by definition, is something a government issues). Nigerians have a saying for a man who is criticised for both moving fast and standing still: they call him “the goat that is blamed whether it enters the yam barn or merely stands near the gate admiring the yams.” Peter Obi has become that goat, and the yam barn in question is Aso Rock.
The question, then, is this. If Obi were a leper — if his affliction were written plainly on his skin instead of buried in the more fashionable language of “integrity concerns” and “records” and “it is not his turn” — would the men now circling him dare to come as close as they do? Would Soludo cross the road to release a press statement about a man’s ecological fund, or would he do what every sensible Nigerian does when he sees a leper approaching in the market: cross to the OTHER side, adjust his agbada, and pretend to be very interested in a phone call? Would Umahi climb a podium in Benin City to explain, with the seriousness of a man defending his doctoral thesis, that he is in every way equal to a man with a communicable skin disease? One suspects not. One suspects the entire cabinet would develop, overnight, a sudden and profound respect for social distancing, a policy this country has not enforced with any consistency since the actual pandemic. Ask the question again as we go. A fable does not persuade by argument alone; it persuades the way palm wine works on a man who insists he is not drunk — steadily, repeatedly, until by the fourth cup even he can hear himself slurring the moral.
The French thinker René Girard spent a career arguing that societies under strain do not usually resolve their anxieties by solving the actual problem. They resolve them by finding a single figure to blame, loading him with the community’s unspoken sins, and marching him out of the gate — a scapegoat chosen not for provable guilt but for being different enough to be plausible and vulnerable enough to be safe to attack. The mechanism is ancient, but it is also entirely, gloriously modern, and it runs on Nigerian data bundles as efficiently as it once ran on temple altars. There was once a flock of sheep, frightened by a wolf none of them had actually seen. Rather than search the forest, the flock settled on the one sheep who insisted on grazing at a different hour from everyone else, wore no wool coat in the harmattan, and had the nerve to keep her own accounts. It was easier to agree that her habits were suspicious than to admit that nobody in the flock had a plan for the wolf. Nigeria’s political anxieties in this season are real enough: a naira that keeps losing weight faster than a man who just discovered intermittent fasting, a cost of living that eats a salary before the alert even finishes vibrating, and a political class that has spent two generations promising a rotation of power by ethnic turn rather than a competition of ideas — a kind of national suya, where everyone waits patiently in line, seasoning already rubbed in, for a turn that keeps going to whoever is standing closest to the grill. Peter Obi is a convenient figure onto whom all of this can be loaded, precisely because he sits outside the two dominant party machines, built his 2023 candidacy on a reputation for personal thrift that embarrassed more lavish colleagues the way a man who walks to church shames the ones who arrive in a convoy for a building with no parking problem, and belongs to a people whose claim to the presidency has been deferred, by gentleman’s agreement, since the Nigerian civil war ended in 1970 — a deferral now so old it qualifies for its own pension.
If Obi were a leper, the crowd could point at him without needing evidence; the mark would do the diagnostic work by itself, the way everyone in the village already knows, without being told, which man’s goat keeps entering the neighbour’s cassava farm. Since he is not, the mark must be manufactured, fresh, on a rolling basis — a debt figure released this week, a resignation date disputed the next, a catchphrase mocked on camera, a turn-taking calendar recited as though it were natural law, each one a lesion painted onto skin that, until recently, showed nothing at all. It is, if you squint, an entire cottage industry: Nigeria’s most reliable growth sector, ahead of tech and agriculture combined, is the manufacture of Peter Obi’s sins.
Several men have, over the years, auditioned for the role of chief accuser, and the Nigerian establishment — which never met a rival it could not eventually convert into a full-time hobby — has been generous enough to give each of them the stage, the microphone, and in some cases a ministerial car to arrive in. Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra, a former Central Bank governor whose own political rise owes something to the same Igbo goodwill that carried Obi to national prominence in 2023, released figures in September 2026 claiming Obi left behind ₦127 billion in unpaid debts, salaries and pensions from his time as governor, adding, almost as an afterthought, that his own administration had already cleared ₦22 billion of the inherited pension arrears — the fiscal equivalent of a man loudly announcing he has been sweeping his predecessor’s compound while quietly hoping nobody asks who has been living rent-free in it since. Nigerians online did not receive this as an act of housekeeping; many accused Soludo of playing bitter politics with a rival’s old balance sheet instead of governing forward, and a commentator writing in BusinessDay put the obvious question in print: whether Soludo, in his zeal to diminish Obi, was not in fact keeping Obi permanently in the headlines, free of charge, like a man who insults his neighbour so loudly that the whole village comes running to see whose side has the better generator. Days later, Soludo’s own household found itself issuing a public denial that Obi had ever been the godfather of one of the governor’s sons, a dispute so intimate and so far from any spreadsheet that one begins to suspect the real audit here is emotional, not financial.
Dave Umahi, Minister of Works and former Ebonyi governor, stood before a crowd in Benin City that same September and announced that there was no area — not intellect, not family background, not record of service — in which Peter Obi could be considered his superior, before insisting, in the same breath, that he did not believe any reasonable person would insult Obi, which is a bit like a man announcing he would never dream of touching your goat while already holding the rope. He then confessed, on camera, to a strikingly personal irritation: “I hate hearing this statement he always makes, ‘go and verify.’” Not the claims behind it, not the record it points to — the phrase itself, as though transparency were a Bluetooth speaker playing too loudly at a wedding he did not want to attend. And Umahi settled, more than once and in public, the entire question of Igbo presidential ambition with a single line: it is not yet the Igbo’s turn, delivered with the calm confidence of a man reading out a bus timetable that only he can see.
Bayo Onanuga, the presidency’s special adviser on information, took his turn in the same September, calling Obi “overhyped and overrated,” “clueless,” and “a spectacular failure” as governor, then adding that “a wannabe national leader must have a governance pedigree, which Peter lacks” — an interesting standard to set from inside an administration not universally celebrated, at the time of writing, for the naira’s health or the price of a bag of rice. And then there is Femi Fani-Kayode, the most theatrical of the lot, a man who has never met a rhetorical flourish he did not immediately marry, who once dismissed Obi as “a mannerless dunce with low self-esteem,” “a charlatan and a modern-day walking disaster,” and — in what may be the single most Nigerian insult ever typed into a keyboard — a man who “all he knows is selling tomato puree, bournvita and toothpaste,” as though building a successful conglomerate from provisions trading were a moral failing rather than the exact thing every Nigerian mother has been begging her son to try since 1999. Fani-Kayode added, for good measure, that Obi “would not last five minutes in a debate with any of our presidential spokespersons,” a claim that would carry more weight if Nigerian presidential debates were not themselves a genre better known for absences than for arguments. Festus Keyamo, never one to be left off a group photograph of any kind, chimed in more recently that “Peter Obi got away with lies in 2023,” a sentence that manages to compliment Obi’s political survival skills while trying to insult his honesty, rather like telling a fisherman he is a terrible swimmer while he is holding a boat.
If Obi were a leper, nobody would need five separate press conferences, three ministerial interviews, one debt audit and a godfather dispute to justify keeping their distance. The skin would already have delivered its verdict, and the priests could go back to their actual jobs — filling potholes, defending the naira, explaining why fuel costs what it costs this week. Instead, the accusers must keep working: mocking a catchphrase, re-litigating a decade-old ecological fund, denying a christening, comparing curricula vitae on a public stage as though the presidency were a wrestling belt to be defended in Benin City, reaching for tomato puree as an insult. Because the disease they keep diagnosing has never once been demonstrated. It has only been asserted, loudly, in relay, the way a bucket of water travels down a fire line — except in this case nobody is quite sure there is a fire, only a great many buckets, and a great many men eager to be photographed carrying one.
There is a delicious irony buried in Umahi’s confession, and it deserves to be dug out rather than left for the fable’s moral to carry alone, the way a good pepper soup deserves to have its meat located before the broth is praised. “Go and verify” is not, on its face, an insult. It is an invitation to scrutiny. It hands the citizen a task the citizen would ordinarily be denied: check the figures yourself, rather than accept an official’s arithmetic on faith the way you accept a mechanic’s word that the noise under the bonnet is “nothing serious.” What Umahi actually objects to, whether he knows it or not, is not a lie being told but an audience being trusted — a genuinely revolutionary idea in a country where budgets are sometimes read out faster than the National Anthem and filed away with roughly the same expectation that anyone will ever check the words. Compare this to the old priestly examination of the leper. In Leviticus, the priest alone held the authority to declare a man clean or unclean. The patient never got to go and verify his own skin against the law; he waited outside the tent for a verdict handed down by someone else, the way a JAMB candidate waits outside a WAEC office in Yaba hoping the result has not been “withheld pending further investigation” for the third year running. Obi’s habit — inviting the public to bring their own scale, repeatedly, in public — reverses that ancient arrangement. The accused, for once, requests his own inspection rather than paying a priest to certify it on his behalf. That is precisely what a certain kind of politician finds unbearable: not the dishonesty, but the loss of the exclusive right to diagnose. There was once a shepherd who weighed his flock in the village square, before every eye, and invited any man who doubted him to bring his own scale and check the number for himself. The other shepherds, who weighed their flocks behind locked barns and reported the totals from memory — give or take a few thousand sheep, depending on the season and who was asking — found this unbearably rude, the way a student who actually reads the textbook is considered rude by the ones who have perfected the art of “malpractice by committee.”
And then there is Umahi’s other line, the one delivered almost as a mercy: it is not yet the Igbo’s turn. Whatever else it is, it is an honest confession dressed as patience — an admission that Nigeria’s presidency is treated less as an office earned by competence than as an inheritance rotated among ethnic lineages, with a waiting list nobody voted for, nobody can produce in writing, and which somehow always seems to have room at the front for whoever is currently in government but never quite reaches the back where the Igbo man has been standing, receipt in hand, since roughly 1966. It is the national equivalent of the bank teller who tells you, every single visit, that “the system is down” only for the man behind you, who happens to know the branch manager, to be attended to in ninety seconds flat. A man’s fitness for the highest office in his country, on this account, is measured against a queue, not a résumé. The old law at least had the decency to base its verdict on a mark that could be examined under decent light. Ethnic turn-taking bases its verdict on an accident of birth dressed up as natural order — which is, if one strips away the euphemism, a stranger thing to build a republic on than any leprosy ever was, and considerably harder to treat with ointment. If Obi were a leper, no one would need to invent a queue; the disease itself would have made the decision, automatically, without anyone’s vote, the way nobody needs a rotation calendar to decide who eats last at a wedding where the caterer has clearly under-catered. But ambition, unlike leprosy, cannot be quarantined by decree — so instead Umahi must dress an ethnic waiting list in the language of natural law, as though turn-taking were as objective, as visible, and as beyond argument as a lesion on the skin, when in fact it is closer to the queue at a Lagos fuel station: everyone insists there is an order, nobody can point to who wrote it, and somehow the man with the convoy always gets served first.
Whatever the ledgers say, and let them be examined honestly rather than shouted about across three news cycles and a WhatsApp broadcast list, Obi’s supporters point to a governorship remembered less for its debts than for a reputation, unusual among Nigerian executives, for personal frugality — a man said to have flown commercial where colleagues chartered jets, the kind of behaviour that in most countries would be unremarkable and in Nigeria gets treated with the same suspicion as a pastor who refuses a private jet: everyone assumes he is hiding something, because surely no one turns down a private jet for free. Whether every figure in that reputation survives an audit line by line is a fair question, and it is one his critics are entitled to press, loudly and often, in the open; a man who built his brand on “go and verify” has, after all, invited exactly this kind of homework, and it would be poor form for his admirers to now complain when someone actually does the assignment. That is not the target of this fable. The target is narrower, and considerably more entertaining: the shape scrutiny has taken. There is a difference between a governor auditing a predecessor’s books and publishing the result for citizens to weigh, and a governor’s household issuing statements about a rival’s godfather status as though Vanguard were a family WhatsApp group; between a minister challenging a claim with figures and a minister confessing, on camera, to hating a phrase the way some men confess to hating jollof rice cooked with the wrong stock; between a legitimate argument about competence and a settled ethnic queue recited as though it were physics, or a man’s provisions-trading past thrown at him as an insult by a country whose greatest heroes include a former head of state who once ran a construction company and a former president who sold Peugeot cars, apparently on the understanding that selling things is respectable so long as one does not also sell tomato puree. Scrutiny of any leader, Obi included, is not merely permitted in a democracy — it is required, and this essay does not ask anyone to stop asking hard questions of him. It asks only that the questions be asked at the man, on the record, rather than at the mark on his skin, which is a different and much older kind of examination — the kind that does not require a scale, only a crowd willing to nod along.
If Obi were a leper, this distinction would collapse entirely, because the mark and the man would already be the same thing in the eyes of the law, the way a masquerade and the cloth it wears are, for ritual purposes, treated as one and the same, no questions asked, no peeking behind the raffia. He is not a leper. Which is precisely why his accusers must keep working so hard, and so loudly, and in relay teams of five or more, to make the two look identical.
The old fable does not end with the leper’s death outside the camp. It ends, if it is told honestly, with the healthy man, years later, discovering the same mark on his own skin, and remembering, too late, how loudly he used to shout Unclean at someone else’s door — the way the loudest voice at the town union meeting condemning “this new generation’s lack of respect” is so often the same man who, forty years earlier, was the terror of his own age-grade. Father Damien’s Reverend Hyde was, in the end, remembered for one letter, and remembered badly; Damien was canonised a saint in 2009, a hundred and twenty years after his accusers thought they had the last word on Molokai. History, it turns out, keeps its own ledger, and it does not accept “go and verify” as a defence — it simply goes and verifies, in its own time, without asking anyone’s permission.
Every society needs a leper, someone to carry the collective anxiety so the healthy can feel healthy by comparison, the way every extended family needs one relative everyone agrees is “troublesome” so that every other quarrel can be quietly filed as normal by contrast. But a nation that spends its energy hunting lepers instead of curing its actual diseases — a currency in free fall, institutions too weak to outlast the men who run them, an elite fluent in turn-taking but functionally illiterate in delivery, roads that remain, despite several ministerial tenures and a great many ribbon-cuttings, more pothole than road — will keep manufacturing new lepers forever, one election cycle at a time, because the manufacturing is cheaper than the cure, and considerably easier to schedule a press conference around. Soludo and Umahi and Onanuga and Fani-Kayode and Keyamo, and whoever queues up next for the microphone, may yet be right about a figure here or a claim there; ledgers should be checked, and no man, least of all one asking for the presidency, should be above having his sums re-added, twice, by someone other than himself. But a nation owes itself the honesty to notice when scrutiny has curdled into ritual, when a chorus has replaced an argument, and when a settled queue has been mistaken for a law of nature. If Obi were a leper, this essay would be unnecessary. The road would already be clear, the verdict already delivered by his skin, and no one would need five separate news cycles a week, an ecological-fund audit, a godfather denial and a debate about tomato puree just to justify keeping their distance. He is not a leper. He is merely inconvenient, gloriously and stubbornly inconvenient, the way the one honest trader in a market full of adjusted scales is inconvenient. Which is precisely why they keep needing new stones — and precisely why, fable after fable, market day after market day, they keep missing.
