In his latest call for a debate with Obi, Umahi challenged the NDC presidential candidate to point to what he had done for the Igbo to justify being voted for in 2027. To be sure, Umahi is not alone in this gambit. He has a happy ally in the current governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, a respected professor of economics. While Soludo has turned his criticism into almost comical but anecdotal tale about “the soldier who returned from the war without his boots,” Umahi is dead serious about questioning what Obi has done for the Igbo. He points to how he, as governor of Ebonyi, transformed his home community of Uburu into London, one would suppose, while Obi’s community of Agulu remains a village after his eight-year tenure as governor. Yet Umahi, in all his boasts, has not been able to explain why Ebonyi State remained the most backward state in the Southeast during his tenure in terms of unemployment, education, poverty and other development parameters.
By Uche Ugboajah
Any less-than-avid student of history would easily understand the active role played by the people of the Southeast, particularly the Igbo, in the government and politics of Nigeria, from the pre-independence and post-independence eras up until the civil war of 1967 to 1970. Although the Igbo were not the first to encounter Western education, they quickly caught up with and, as many would argue, even overtook their Southwest counterparts. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, who would later become Nigeria’s first president, albeit in a ceremonial capacity, gave a fillip to the quest for Western education in the Southeast following his peregrinations across the Atlantic to acquire the proverbial golden fleece at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His achievement opened the door for others from his region. Of course, you must have read about the Eight Argonauts, which included Mazi Mbonu Ojike, Dr Nwafor Orizu and Dr K. O. Mbadiwe.
It was therefore not surprising that, with Azikiwe’s educational advocacy and support, the Igbo produced a formidable crop of activists in the nationalist struggle for independence, with Zik as its most consequential actor. To cut a long story short, before the civil war, the Igbo were not just visible but major actors in the commanding heights of Nigerian politics, the economy and the military. One of these days, some ill-informed politician would ask: What did Azikiwe do for the Igbos?
Then came the unfortunate war waged against the Igbo.
The civil war changed everything for the Igbo in Nigeria. Not only did the people across the River Niger lose millions of lives, particularly their able-bodied youth to bullets and children to kwashiorkor defending themselves for three years. They also lost their wealth. Worst of all, they lost their place in the tripod that had hitherto held Nigeria together. But they did not lose their heads in the aftermath. As I argued in a previous essay, the Igbo have been constantly praised for how quickly they rebuilt their land, society and economy, virtually with their bare hands, after the devastation of the war. However, this came at an extremely prohibitive cost. The Igbo have had to work ten times harder than their counterparts from other parts of the country to stand a chance of making a few quid. They have had to navigate federal establishments and buy jobs awarded to other contractors because their tainted presence would never be accepted at bidding tables, and their names evoke national resentment. The situation was so bad that an Igbo could establish a business and be forced to beg another Nigerian, perhaps from the North, who had nothing to contribute beyond his or her name, to become the board chairman just to make the company attractive to the Nigerian establishment for the sake of patronage.
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By far, Igbo body politic suffered the greatest casualty as a consequence of the civil war. It lost its autonomous capacity as a direct consequence of post-war Nigerian statecraft, which sought to ensure that the people of the region would never again be a strong cohesive unit to mount another form of agitation within the Nigerian state. This explains why almost all political decisions in Igboland after the civil war, whether in the area of the election or appointment of political officials, have been taken outside the region. The idea is to have this crop of political elite, especially political appointees, serve external interests that run counter to Igbo interests.
So, when you constantly hear some people, among them governors, legislators, ministers and business people take vapid positions and actions considered offensive to the majority of their Igbo kinsmen and women, just understand where they are coming from. Many of them, especially those who claim to be successful business people and politicians, cannot begin to recount the indignities they encountered on their way to the top. Because of the odds stacked against the Igbo person in Nigeria, they have had to carry bags and run errands for Northern politicians and, more recently, Southwest politicians who may not be half as smart as they are. So, any ideas that challenge these people from whose hands they have been feeding become an existential threat that must be guillotined, lest they lose their privileges. I am sure nobody has forgotten how some Southeast governor used to grovel before the Late President Muhammadu Buhari, the same way he is doing today to President Tinubu. It is a pattern of survivalist politics.
As part of this tactics, David Umahi has embarked on a personal mission to fight the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Gregory Obi. Yes, Umahi is not expected to support Obi simply because they are fellow Igbo. The reality is that both men belong to different political parties. Yet what many find annoying is the viciousness, lies and mendacity with which the minister is attacking Obi. Even President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, their master, must sometimes be chuckling and wondering what was wrong with these Igbo foot soldiers of his, given the folly in their attacks on Obi. If Umahi is not challenging Obi to a debate, he is accusing him of changing the name of a street named Abakaliki in Anambra State which, occurred decades after leaving office as governor, or of sacking an Ebonyi man as vice-chancellor of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, a federal institution whose appointments are made by the President, not Obi.
Let us, for now, forget about these infantile attempts by Umahi to heckle Obi and dwell on a more substantive issue of democracy and development that the minister has raised.
In his latest call for a debate with Obi, Umahi challenged the NDC presidential candidate to point to what he had done for the Igbo to justify being voted for in 2027. To be sure, Umahi is not alone in this gambit. He has a happy ally in the current governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, a respected professor of economics. While Soludo has turned his criticism into almost comical but anecdotal tale about “the soldier who returned from the war without his boots,” Umahi is dead serious about questioning what Obi has done for the Igbo. He points to how he, as governor of Ebonyi, transformed his home community of Uburu into London, one would suppose, while Obi’s community of Agulu remains a village after his eight-year tenure as governor. Yet Umahi, in all his boasts, has not been able to explain why Ebonyi State remained the most backward state in the Southeast during his tenure in terms of unemployment, education, poverty and other development parameters.
Sadly, reducing democratic governance to how a governor uses state resources to develop his own community exclusively, is patently dangerous. It reveals the myopic and Lilliputian mindset of those in authority. A governor is elected by the entire population of his state to serve them, not to favour his or her community. If Obi concentrated on developing the entirety of Anambra State, even if that left his own community short-changed, he would be seen as fair-minded and a better person than Umahi. The minister, though he likes to debate, cannot, I am afraid, call for a debate on that.
More importantly, it is people like Umahi who have devalued the nexus between democracy and development. Umahi’s flyover-and-tarred-road theory of democracy detracts from the pristine meaning of the system of governance. This is where Soludo and Umahi have strangely missed the point. By seeing democracy as a system that provides only infrastructure, such as erosion control, roads and flyovers, these Tinubu acolytes have fallen into a reductionist trap and missed the fundamental and normative essence of democracy: a system that allows individuals to strive to be the best they can be through the guarantee of liberty and personal freedoms. Even if Soludo solves all the erosion crises in Anambra and achieves his Dubai-Taiwan ambitions, but the people cannot freely express themselves on any matter, the purpose of democracy will still have been defeated. Similarly, even if Umahi turns Uburu into a mini-London, with flyovers largely leading nowhere from Abakaliki and an airport now serving as a worship centre, his idea of democracy remains warped.
Now, this is where Peter Obi is different.
Before Peter Obi emerged on the national political scene, the Igbo had become a byword in Nigerian politics, seen as inconsequential and incapable of agreeing on any political position. Since the return to civil rule in 1999, the Southeast had overwhelmingly supported the PDP governments, from Olusegun Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan. In 2019, they again supported the PDP ticket of Atiku Abubakar, with Obi as his running mate. Leading up to 2023, there was a general argument that it was time for Nigeria to turn to the Southeast for a president, if fairness still had a place in our body politic. Interestingly, some of the Igbo who now look us in the face to insist that it is still not their turn to become president once believed that 2023 was the finest hour for the Igbos and indeed contested the presidential primaries that year. To be sure, Senator Anyim Pius Anyim and Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa contested and lost the PDP ticket to another Northerner, Atiku Abubakar after Buhari’s eight years as president. In the APC, the late Ogbonnaya Onu, Dave Umahi and Rochas Okorocha were easily overpowered by the man who is now President, Tinubu.
But in a deft political move that has permanently altered Nigerian politics, Peter Obi defected from the PDP to the Labour Party and, as the weather-beaten cliché goes, the rest is history. Obi indeed put up a magnificent performance. Despite the court rulings, not a few still believe that Obi won the 2023 presidential election. Yes, Obi did not end up in Aso Rock Villa as Nigeria’s president, but he won the hearts of Nigerians, especially young people longing for good governance and genuine change in the country. Peter Obi has also won back for the Igbo a modicum of political dignity, respect and a sense of what is possible. For decades, the Igbo were mocked for being unable to produce a candidate from among themselves capable of challenging for the highest office in the land. That was before Peter Obi showed up in 2023 to prove that a good candidate with integrity from the Southeast could sweep votes across the entire Southeast, the South-South, Lagos and the North-Central.
Peter Obi has also won himself a fair share of enemies among politicians, not only across Nigeria but also in his own backyard. Among his Igbo adversaries are politicians and businesspeople who prefer to sit anywhere near the table rather than at its head. To this category, politics is nothing but a zero-sum game. Hence Soludo’s insistence that there is no prize for coming second or third. There are also politicians who lack altruistic considerations but enter politics, in the words of famous American political scientist, Richard Fenno, to pursue individual and particularistic interests. For this group, once their families and, possibly, their immediate communities retain certain privileges, democracy is working. It does not matter to them if the entire Southeast is politically humiliated or stripped of every dignity, as long as they remain “useful idiots.”
Let it be clear: Obi’s place in Igboland cannot be determined by the outcome of the election down the line, but is already assured. It does not matter if he wins or loses the election in 2027. Indeed, that he is still on the ballot is already looking like a win, given the array of state instruments that have been deployed against him since his outing in 2023. The attacks have been relentless, coming from every direction. Even the moral bar has to be lowered in the country if doing so can somehow discredit Obi. Today, financial prudence and frugality in governance are no longer virtues but crimes, as long as Obi is involved. Drawing mouth-watering sums in pensions and retirement benefits from state coffers after serving—or, as a matter of fact, misserving—as governor is now considered a selfless act because Obi does not do so. Not stealing enough to become a godfather and hold the political levers in one’s state as a former governor is now considered weakness and a lack of political sagacity because Obi has allowed democracy to thrive. In short, integrity no longer counts in public office as long as Obi is in the conversation.
Even then, Peter Gregory Obi has nothing to prove to the Umahis of this world reeking of all manner of scandals. He has already done for the Igbo what a thousand Umahis could ever do in ten lifetimes. Even Umahi himself acknowledged this recently in a statement in Ebonyi when he insisted that, by speaking the way he does and presenting himself as a saint, Obi was demarketing politicians like him from the Southeast.
About three years ago, or thereabouts, I attended a town hall meeting Governor Soludo held with Anambra people resident in Abuja. All the federal legislators from Anambra were present, and the governor sought their cooperation in his quest to develop the state. Almost everyone who spoke tried to be politically correct and avoid annoying Soludo, except one man. When it was his turn to speak, the senator representing Anambra North, Tony Nwoye, told Soludo pointedly that there was nothing wrong with setting partisan affiliations aside and cooperating to develop Anambra State. He, however, told the governor that he could not, in good conscience, call on everyone to join hands in developing the state while employing more than 13 aides whose sole job was to daily insult Peter Obi, the man whom, according to Nwoye, the Igbo owe the little respect they are accorded in the Nigerian state today. What more can anyone add to this except to ask: Who needs to know what Peter Obi has done for the Igbos?
Uche Ugboajah, a political scientist is the Editor-in-Chief of Ikengaonline and can be reached at: ucheugboajah@gmail.com; 08033197167
