By Steve Osuji
APC’S Extended Insomnia:
It becomes obvious each day that Mr Peter Obi is the abiding nightmare of the ruling party.
Indications are clear that the All Progressives Congress has switched into a panic mode in the last few weeks. Like a man who’s suffering acute nightmares, the party’s top echelon seems to be in severe trauma and psychological distress.
This column wagers that the Obi-Kwankwaso outing in Kano recently may have jolted the ruling crew to a near thrombosis.
Their response has been predictable. Rev up attack on Obi. Acquire more ferocious hounds and press them to work, including unlikely breeds and hybrids of canines. Activate black legs in the opposition ADC and get both the courts and INEC to ‘legalise’ it. Having wooed the Kano political kingpin to join the APC without success, he running with Peter Obi is a proposition that must never happen. One politician with an organic following is bad enough. Two such politicians coming together would spell doom for APC.
THE SOWORE’S SHADOW BOXING:
It is not by coincidence that Omoyele Sowore, the playboy-activist, presidential huckster and travel-by-night politician growled at Obi the other day.
Sowore gave his true nature away during the so-called press briefing in which he said Peter Obi’s anointing oil had expired.
Like a marionette on strings, Sowore was on an errand. After his usual ramble about coalition, he jumped into his real mission which was an attempt to deflate Obi-Kwankwaso Kano outing. He berated Obi for latching on the Kwankwasiya crowd. He belly-ached about Obi shunning Kwankwaso in 2023 and on and on. When did it become a crime for politicians to jibe at each other? When did it become wrong to align and re-align. But of course, Sowore is on activation mode. How could he tell Obi’s anointing had expired, was he a witness when God anointed Obi?
FANI-KAYODE’S AGONISTES:
Femi Fani-Kayode had this famous quote in The Sun last Friday: “I looked at someone like Obi, God forbid Obi should be president. I won’t go into why I said that.”
Of course the only reason he blurted such impulsive, inelegant sound bite is the overwhelming Kano show. It has set the clay-footed APC behemoth running amok. That unprovoked statement can only come from a place of deep angst. Of course, unstable people like FFK would loathe Obi as number one because they would never be allowed anywhere near a government office. But today, Nigeria suffers the affliction of an FFK as an ambassador. On the contrary, Obi in his magnanimity, would have offered FFK government-sponsored rehab to Germany.
INSALUBRIOUS JUSTICE SALAMI:
The serial attacks on Obi continued. Not even the infamous mandate switcher, the retired Justice Ayo Salami would be allowed to enjoy his retirement booty in peace. Remember how as Chief Justice of the Courts of Appeal, he single-handededly dashed out mandates to three governors in repudiation of INEC and in favour of then Governor Bola Tinubu. He set the infamous precedence of courts usurping the powers of INEC. He was acting like a hit-and-run driver.
That power of the appellate court which Salami abused was hurriedly changed before more havoc was done. The final word on guber election cases is now vested on the Supreme court. Now if there was any doubt about who Salami was working for, this unprovoked lash-out against Obi is proof. If Baba Salami was a statesman, he would be discussing Nigeria’s starving and traumatised populace and the shrinking of our democratic space, not a virulent attack an innocent citizen Obi who’s crime was to contest election as a citizen of Nigeria.
Unfortunately, Baba Salami got his facts spectacularly wrong. This column hopes that Baba would muster the grace and honour to apologise to Obi soon enough.
To blurt that Obi should never have contested in the last election in 2023 suggests that the pain of Obi’s triumph still sits deep among the APC top hierarchy of which Baba Salami is probably one.
If Baba Salami is so peeved about Obi’s eligibility what does he have to say about Godswill Akpabio’s and Ahmed Lawan’s eligibility? Men who contested and lost in the APC’s presidential election. Salami should be telling us what judicial magic allowed Akpabio to return to contest the senate election and sit as Senate president today?
ASARI DOKUBO’S SALVO:
Savaging Peter Obi must be the key to Aso Rock and the password for accessing APC’s bounties. This much can be discerned from Asari Dukubo’s interview last weekend. Apparently, he had visited Aso Rock but was fenced from seeing Baba.
Embittered as he shambled away in disappointment, it must have been whispered to him that the only thing that catches Baba’s attention is Obi- bashing.
After lamenting how Presidential aides were keeping Number One in the dark; about how insecurity is on the rise and how the condition of his people in the Niger Delta worsens, he segued into Obi- flogging: how his vote and that of his people is for Tinubu and never for Obi. Ah, he almost forgot to reinforce his Obi thrashing! For APC goons, no interview is complete without a mention of Obi.
AZU: THE BIG FISH, THE REDUX:
One would be hard put to believe that Azubuike Isiekwene, a brother, friend and a most respected professional colleague would succumb to APC’s frenzied pressure. But the loaded ruling party’s gravy train is chugging on furiously, picking partakers. The admission ticket code is: shred_obi.
Boarding this grimy train would be beneath the Azu one knows. But his last output on his column seems to give the lie to my conversations about him. If he has been sucked in by the rampaging ruling party bent on worsting all opposition before election day, then he’s indeed a big catch. His outing too is probably the best Obi_shred by anyone.
But the obverse of it is that Azu may have ended up shredding himself to bits and leaving himself naked. Beautiful as the piece is, it has turned out the ultimate Azu redux. If there was an instrument, say, an imageometer for gauging personality rating, one wagers Azu’s would have surged south now, hovering just above zero.
First, the Azu we know should never be found in the sordid company of Reno, Bwala, FFK and Asari.
These are people this column is too decent to describe by their proper appellation. Suffice to say that these are long-pouted foragers – oink, oink, gruff, gruff insatiable, oink, oink!
First, to suggest that Obi has transitioned from a serious contender to a mascot is akin to the famous position of APC’s media ‘strategists’ who insisted that the overwhelming OBiDIENTS were mere four persons in a room tweeting. The 2023 election results put the lie to this position.
But all the APC big guns always want to hear is that Obi is no threat. So Azu starts by positing that Obi is now a mascot. Where’s the survey driving this weighty assertion? None. He’s selling deception in place of data.
He feeds in the same fallacy by asserting yet again that Obi’s social media based troops have no voters card. How did Azu know this? Again where’s the survey? Does he know something APC is doing that we don’t know.
He digs with a surprisingly uncharacteristic illogic that one takes liberty to say is “unAzu”! That Obi claims to have won the election in 2023 though his Labour Party could only muster agents in 50 per cent of polling centres nationwide. And the question is: are agents the deciding factors in winning elections? If an entire party like the giant PDP, ADC and even LP can be railroaded by the ruling APC, What’s the fate of a common agent in a remote polling unit? When shall we trust INEC to conduct our elections (as obtains in decent climes) without the abiding rogue tactics that have become our norm. This agent business in Nigeria’s election is akin to asking football clubs to acquire their own VAR!
Azu’s maladroit in this piece is a low in his long, and one dares say, exemplary career in penmanship.
He says Obi wasted energy and resources in litigation without suggesting options available, but litigation is part of the process.
That Obi watched the unraveling of his platform, the LP. But before our eyes, APC has destroyed PDP using a certain Nyesom Wike as a battering ram.
Azu says so much in his article that are untenable, tendentious and self-annihilatory.
There’s no point reeling them all out. Let’s sum it up that Azu has harmed himself with that singular write-up more than Obi. He may have tainted years, even decades of a glorious public engagement. Pity.
LAST LINE: NIGERIA’S FUEL CONUNDRUM:
Why is petrol cheaper in Egypt, for instance, than in Nigeria. Subsidy.
Egypt is not a major crude oil producing country. But government still subsidises petrol for her people .
Why is the NNPCL still importing petrol from foreign refineries? Why is Dangote Refinery importing crude oil?
Why hasn’t the National Assembly investigated the so-called forward sales arrangement of Nigeria’s crude oil which it is claimed, has been sold for indeterminate years ahead?
Why is there so much opacity in Nigeria’s energy sector. Oil and gas are the most open businesses in the world safe for in Nigeria. In other oil producing countries, information is available on every bit of the business, including refining margins and forward deals. Not so in Nigeria. To think that President Bola Tinubu is also the Petroleum Minister… Nigeria’s oil industry seems like underground business now. Meanwhile, Nigerians suffer in a time of supposed oil boom!
