Musings on Peter Obi and the Labour Party

Across the Nigeria country and beyond, political observers are fast realizing that there emanates, after all, huge electoral gains by the bonding of Peter Greg Obi and the Labour Party (LP). Initially, many a political pundits had erroneously adjudged as a risky and costly gambit, the sudden defection of Obi from the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a little while before its presidential primary election was held. Obi was to vie in that primary election before a sudden detour to the workers’ party.

The former governor of Anambra State, and a running mate of the PDP in the last presidential election, has since turned a seductive bride, judging his countrywide swing to popularity, particularly amongst the youths. Amidst Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, the big weights and flag-bearers of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and PDP, respectively!

It is a blizzard of the sort, which quivers the nation’s political turfs and unsettles the usual political permutations. This is unknown to have taken place since the return of democratic governance in the country, in 1999.

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A conservative and ubiquitous Northern Elders Forum (NEF), obviously got the outright message of a political wind of change and reacted in consonance. Shepherded by its persnickety leader, Ango Abdullahi, a most recent gathering of the northern body succinctly declared that; “neither Atiku nor Tinubu can fix Nigeria, but Peter Obi of LP…” The octogenarian Professor Abdullahi and his grey hair group, presented that Obi’s past as a governor was casted in solid performances, added to his well-articulated presidential dialogues, to rescue Nigeria from the woods and valley Nigerians have been plunged by APC’s extant eight years and the sixteen locust years of PDP.

On the sideline, Godwin Obaseki, the antagonistic governor of Edo State, as well as some key politicians, swiftly blurt out their worries about what they called the Obi and LP’s political Tsunami. Obaseki’s troubled synopsis bespeaks that the soaring of Obi and LP, as codenamed ‘OBI-dient’, shouldn’t be ignored as a mere fluke, but a political reality which has come to sweep out APC and PDP.

This obviously informs the rumoured planned defection by Obaseki and his political brigade to Edo LP, in his usual frantic search to assuage a political thirst, after serial failures to acclimatize in APC and PDP, where he won first and second governorship seats, respectively. By the way, nomadic politicking, as with frivolous cross-carpeting and sanctimonious denunciations of former political parties by politicians, enforces a drawback for LP, where some politicians had used and dumped it. Unfortunately, the like of Godwin Obaseki, who now praise LP to the high heavens, as officers in the then government LP helped to elect in Edo, were the same who thwarted the party from recognition and partaking in that government.

The pleadings by Babatunde Fashola, Minister for Works and Housing that voters should not show their angsts, somewhat enforced the premonition that the Goliath APC and PDP are bound to be felled by the catapults and pebbles of Obi and his LP.

Notwithstanding his intimidating public support, Obi’s chances of emergence as president, feasible it seems, tends to be derided by partisan debates, being orchestrated by APC and PDP, who see Obi and his party as the only rival, thus enforcing the widespread believe that APC and PDP are actually hand-in-the-glove thwarting those who could save the country from misrule.

To them, Obi and LP lack the political structures to spur the upset, as they, APC and PDP arrogate to themselves the vast experience and monopoly they believe, are etched in the country’s body polity.

On the other hand, LP’s swelling supporters bash candidates Tinubu of APC and PDP’s Atiku, as inept Methuselahs – overage candidates jaded with ill-health, since they are regarded be spent-force who wouldn’t withstand the stress known with the Nigeria’s energy sapping presidency. It is also widely alleged that both men have excess luggage of accrual huge questionable and unaccountable wealth, said to be illicit and loots from the public offices they previously occupied, for which the duo are allegedly declared persona non-grata by the U.S. authority.

But, Julius Abure, the National Chairman of Labour Party and one of the strong pillars of the current political revolutionary push, readily dismisses the opponents’ tantrum of Obi and LP lacking the structures to win. Abure, a trained lawyer and veteran labour leader, had gone through the drills to know that the end product of the so-called structures is the massive votes that Obi and LP already await to be garner. A political party as LP that have on its side the youths, the organized labour and teeming workers, civil society entities and the larger public can’t be said not to be. Abure often reminds the deriding opponents.

Ordinarily, Abure is regarded as Obi’s Siamese as simplicity and wealth creation is also his second nature. These tend to make him and Obi shoulder and head higher than the hordes of other presidential candidates and national chairmen of political parties that on display. Abure is acute mobilizer of men and resources, who has paid his national dues, with his sufferance and commitment ever and now been tapped to make the needed difference in political governance. Until the presence back to LP’s initial formation all through 2006, when he was Secretary of Edo State, its first ever state chapter in the country, Abure has made a bold statement consolidating LP political idealism, nationwide.

The reference to Edo LP is intentional and to make known the stormy pasts, appraising the presence and prying at a future LP may further traverse. In the state which once workbench the governorship election of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the very charisma who brought it to the state, I (this writer) was the commando of the state chapter of the nationwide Labour and Civil Society Coalition (LASCO), the same body of mass agitation consisting the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) and all their affiliated unions, joining the civil society fronts.

Initially, the public was taunted by the same PDP that Edo LP was structure-deficient. Soonest were they were shocked stiff as LP matched them, when push went beyond elbows to ‘gba gbo’. Throughout the idealistic struggles and melees that attended the annulment and court’s restoration of the Oshiomhole’s mandate, the critical resistance alternative offered by the LP’s LASCO had besieged Edo streets, and also became eye opener for AC or ACN (as APC was then called). APC also boasted of having structures, but chickened and scampered away when it mattered the most. APC had featured Oshiomhole on a joint-ticket with LP.

Along the line, Edo LP’s thrust became audacious specimen for all on public-spirited political struggles, especially the once liver-lily, but emboldened LP ensemble that later won the then Ondo State governorship election on LP, for Olusegun Mimiko.

Unfortunately, the labour and civil society deeds is no more to emancipate the mass of the people. Instead of embracing LP that ordinarily cares for hapless workers and the ordinary people, election handlers, particularly professors, who are all workers, had mostly turned election riggers for the politicians and their anti-public parties, who turned around to misrule them. Indeed, the public has succumbed to the politicians’ blackmail, making them a cow herd, whose enormous strength is so undermined. Otherwise, how come the cow herd allows even underage son of the herdsman order it around, whereas all he need is a mere sidekick of a cow?

Nonetheless, Charly Boy, veteran artiste and nationalist expressed his concern as to whether Obi and LP, would go to the ‘gutters’ in the quest to become Nigeria’s president, knowing that it is politics of anything goes?

Already, Godwin Obaseki, Babatunde Fashola and others had expressed their fears about what the 2023 presidential election foretells. And if the street’s rule that pervaded the aforementioned Edo and Ondo LP governorship elections are not sufficient indices, perhaps the EndSAR’s national revolt and the rages with which armies of youth currently demand for their Personal Voter’s Cards (PVCs) and standing firm with Obi and LP, may suggest an omen of ‘fights dirtier than the gutters’.

Obi and LP are epithets and mediums of public expression of rage and despondency. And it is more of a national enthusiasm. By the way, I am quite unsure if Peter Obi, himself, knows the magnitudes of the people’s mandate he wields!