HOW PETER OBI CAN BE PRESIDENT IN 2027

Basil Okoh

MaTaZ ArIsInG
Dallas, Texas

Peter Obi is the luckiest Nigerian alive today. He is loved by millions of his compatriots across the nation, whose belief and trust in him has remained largely undefeated for four years of his bid for the presidency.

The 2023 presidential election which he clearly won was stolen from him. The theft was successful because he had implicit trust in the system and the capacity of the establishment to be just and fair. In 2023 he was too willing to accept the good faith of the operators and actors in the system. This unquestioning trust belied the evidence of fear of Obi and bad faith among the governing elite. His knowledge of the deeply corrupt system and the easy fallibility of the guardians of the system, particularly INEC and the judicial establishment was fatally ignored. The heist was so easily covered and forgotten because there was no guardrails protecting the system from abuse and internal violations and no consequences, political or criminal.

Peter Obi is a successful businessman but he is not a member of the rogue Nigerian establishment and will never be admitted into it now because he has so exhaustively shown that his presidential bid represents a mortal threat to the survival of the corrupt system.

And that brings in the intrigues surrounding the talk of Peter Obi’s alliance with Atiku Abubakar, Nasir el-Rufai and others, to mount a strong challenge to the return of Ahmed Bola Tinubu in the 2027 presidential election. That lure to a coalition represents for Peter Obi, an invitation to a death that is evident but unspoken. Any political alliance with Atiku and el-Rufai has a built-in capacity to end Peter Obi’s political career. Such an alliance will so work against Obi as to create a vortex of public odium, leading to rejections that will show Peter Obi’s gullibility and political naïveté. It will end in resounding failure for Obi and sound the death knell for his political career.

Nasir el-Rufai is a vicious Fulani revanchist and irredeemable ethnic jingoist, a Fulani ethnic supremacist. His capacity for conspiracy and endless trouble is truly deep and boundless. el-Rufai is a hornet in his own nest and his sting and viciousness is worse than a lions bite and the pain lasts a lifetime. el-Rufai never concedes, never forgives and never forgets.

El-Rufai on his own planned the removal of Goodluck Jonathan, recruiting Mahmoud Jega, then INEC Chairman and Modibo Sannusi, then governor of Central Bank, along the way, finally seeking the endorsement and help of Barack Obama’s White House and the rest was history. Obama till today does not realize that his government was used to reinforce Fulani rule in Nigeria by making Jonathan lose that presidential election. But this time, Nasir el-Rufai has met a rattlesnake of America, a vicious snake in Bola Tinubu, who both the CIA and FBI have acknowledged as their principal “asset” in Nigeria.

Atiku Abubakar remains the principal operator after the Sultan of Sokoto, of the innermost stronghold of the Fulani cabal in Nigeria as the de facto head of the powerful Fulani political wing, a position Muhammadu Buhari couldn’t take from him even as president of Nigeria.

Atiku Abubakar is the Lamido of Adamawa, the oldest Fulani settler group in Nigeria and the foremost protector of ethnic Fulani interests in Nigeria, not only as the leading Fulani politician in Nigeria but also as the biggest investor in Fulani business. Atiku Abubakar is the biggest owner of Cattle in West Africa. So every crime committed in the course of Fulani rearing cattle, is done to advance the business of Atiku Abubakar.

El-Rufai and Atiku Abubakar and many other northerners are determined to play Peter Obi six for half a dozen, cajole him to take the offer of Vice Presidency and leverage on his popularity to win and play second fiddle to Atiku as running mate in a landmark presidential challenge against Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The reason for the desperation of the Fulani to get back to power is evident in the deadly pressure they are piling on Peter Obi to concede the presidential ticket.

Atiku Abubakar is not popular in the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria but these areas are where Obi has his greater strength. The Fulani revanchists have sworn and gone even to self mortification to assure Obi that Atiku will do one single term and then power will be handed over to him. So the plan is for the Fula to use Obi to win the votes and give power and the presidency back to Fulani Atiku Abubakar, after the wasted years of Muhammadu Buhari. But then the Fulani have a culture of never keeping promises. Keeping promises is considered a weakness among the Fulani.

Atiku Abubakar has lived his entire life as the pampered protégé of Fulani aristocracy in Nigeria; as an officer of the Customs, in business enjoying the patronage of government and in Politics. For more than thirty years, Atiku was given the exclusive privilege to collect revenue in the Eastern Ports for government. He refused to make the required payments to the Federal Government in that period and nobody or law could touch him. He ran the ports as personal property to the detriment of the economies of the South-South and South-East regions. Nobody could challenge Atiku until he himself challenged Muhammadu Buhari in a failed presidential contest, before his plunder at the ports could be brought to public reckoning.

So these two foremost Fulani irredentists are now in collaboration to leverage Peter Obi’s popularity for Fulani gain and to get Fulani back to political power using Peter Obi. The north knows that Atiku has no popularity to win any presidential election. So the Fulani establishment are recruiting Peter Obi as proxy to help them win it.

The recruitment of Obi is not because they like him or his politics but because he stands the best chance to get the Fulani back to power in the face of Fulani enduring unpopularity in Nigeria. Peter Obi will win the presidential election of 2027 on his own and without an alliance as he demonstrably did in 2023. He can again marshal the organizational capacity to make him win as he has not lost the endearment of the voters.

Obi’s obstacle to ascending the presidency is not arising from his inability to win the presidential election. It comes from his inability to overcome the establishment barriers erected against him and the Igbo by the orthodoxy formed by the Yoruba and the North following the Civil War.

The Nigerian establishments perception that Peter Obi will ascend the presidency and upset the elite entitlement systems to the north and the West that serves their lazy elite so well, is so overwhelmingly strong among their privileged class. These elite do not want to let go of ethnic and political privileges that arose out of the Civil War.

Peter Obi is Igbo, an ethnic group hated and feared for their excessively competitive culture. Secondly, Obi’s presidential bid does not carry the usual baggage of ethnic, religious or regional affiliations which characterize political practices in Nigeria. Obi is therefore not passing through the typical routes to political power in Nigeria and so does not enjoy the patronage of the established ethnic and religious power contenders.

As the Nigerian Labour Congress has expressed, Peter Obi does not need alliances to win the presidential election in 2027. He proved that fact in 2023. In 2023, Peter Obi won the election itself but the power establishment using the organs and control structures prevented him from taking power.

So what Peter Obi needs is not only the popularity to win elections but also the power to confront and pacify the apparatus of state, not only to validate his victory but also to endorse and accept him to assume the office of president. So Obi must prepare, not only to win the election but also to enforce his victory by every means possible. He must demonstrate to his teeming supporters that he is willing and committed to enforce his victory and signal strongly, his preparedness to rule in 2027.

@basilokoh.

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